What will the city of the future look like: 5 key trends

Since ancient times, thinkers have been trying to imagine what the cities of the future will look like, and often pin their hopes on the fact that not only the environment will change, but also the social structure and the person himself.

If you draw a line from the past through the present to the future, you can try to imagine what the urban environment will look like in decades to come. Because it really is changing, and we, society, are changing along with it.

1. Speeding up life

A distinctive feature of the cities of the present (which is also true for the settlements of the future) is the speed and the innate desire of all living things to increase it. This applies not only to transport, but also to all the surrounding reality that is already so familiar to us. Convenience foods, fast food restaurants, sharing items instead of buying and serving your own—the dream of speed is driving everything these days. Business, like sports, is also, in many ways, about who is faster.

2. Growth of the city in breadth

Any settlement strives for evolution and growth. The village wants to become a village, the village wants to become a small town, and the city wants to become a capital. Previously, cities developed according to the principle of annexation, attaching themselves to the fortress and then growing. The fashionable quarters of modern world capitals a couple of hundred years ago were the outskirts and slums. For example, in the largest cities of Ancient Rus’ outside the fortress walls there were trade and craft suburbs – a settlement or a hem. Now this area is often the most that neither is the center of the city.

3. Underground cities

People have lived and worked underground since ancient times. Over the next 100 years, the need for underground cities may arise due to climate change – both towards warming and towards cooling.

The construction of underground structures is already developing rapidly: underground railways, subway sections, underground garages and parking lots, shopping centers, museum spaces are being built. What is noteworthy here is this: if agreements on the construction and use of underground cities are reached in the future, the transport structure for them will already be laid down – this is the metro, all that remains is to build underground residential areas.

4. Smart city

In the future, we expect even closer interaction of the urban environment with artificial intelligence (AI). The development of AI will transfer many routine operations to machines and will robotize most processes. The field for the application of these technologies will expand. True, it is not yet entirely clear how humanity will develop, freed from the routine struggle for survival.

5. Personalization of the environment

The city will be personalized in the same way as we change the interior of the apartment, clothes, even our circle of friends to suit ourselves and our needs. The city is not a spot or a dot, but rather a set of lines along which we move: from home to work, to friends and relatives, even to the dacha. In the future, these routes can be customized for us, optimized according to our requests.

Any city will be the way we make it ourselves. A good cafe with nice people, the most comfortable bench in the park found by experience, stories connected with familiar places turn the city space into a starting point for building our own beautiful and comfortable world.