Dear kirsch,
What an interesting question! Let me tell you what I think.
If there is one thing we can say for certain about the city of the future,
it is that most of our current conceptions of it will turn out to be
wrong. In decades past, we have imagined that moving sidewalks, winged
automobiles, and robotic servants would become commonplace a few years
hence, yet how far from the truth we were. The present looks more like the
past than many of our forebears might have wanted or expected. Although
many of the innovations foreseen in the forties and fifties have indeed
been under development all these years, progress is slower than the
hype artists and future gurus would have us believe. There exist moving
sidewalks today, but mostly in airports; personal flying vehicles are
available, but only for the richest citizens; electronic helpmates have
moved into the home, but they sit on our desks delivering information
rather than mopping the floors and flipping pancakes.
There is no harm in imagining the future as long as we are aware of the
forces of sociocultural inertia and individuals' personal resistance
to change. These conservative forces may be dissolving, it is true,
and the rate of technological change has certainly increased over the
few centuries since the Renaissance, but a good estimate of future
circumstances is that they will be much like the past. This is as true
of the cityscape as it is of other domains, with the difference that
cities of the future will not only be like those of the past, they will
be more so. The challenge facing humanity in the coming centuries is
to decide whether urbanization in its present style is amenable to the
formation of a peaceful, ethical society that mitigates suffering and
offers contentment to all.
The opportunities for changing the face and function of the city
are perhaps greatest in South Asia, where vast populations, although
they have gathered in cities, have not yet confronted technological
urbanization. And urbanization must necessarily come on the heels of a
widespread economic boom, begun in recent years, which appears likely to
proceed unabated. The ideas of urban architecture developed by Western
societies in the first few decades of the early twentieth century,
then prosecuted thoroughly in the 1950, '60s, and '70s, have since been
declared aesthetically bankrupt. The Bauhaus movement, a German school
of architecture according to which all buildings should take uniformly
unadorned, geometrically severe shapes, spread widely in both Eastern
and Western Europe, as well as in the cities of North America, Australia,
and Japan.
Consequently, urban dwellers found to their dismay that wherever they went
in the course of their daily routine, whether to work, school, on shopping
expeditions or recreational adventures, every building they encountered
looked the same. Shopping centers looked like barns, universities looked
like warehouses, banking headquarters looked like workers' housing. This
was in fact one of the goals of the Bauhaus movement, to give physical
expression to the socialist principles expounded by Marx and Engels. Yet
the results of an architectural movement driven by egalitarianism are
offensive to the eye and oppressive to the human spirit. Only in recent
decades have a large number of architects come to admit that they were
engaged in aesthetic misdeeds. Just as the monolithic social policies
of Eastern Europe and China have collapsed or begun to crumble since
the late 80s, so we can expect the advent of an eclectic, variegated
urban architecture that expresses the energy of socially responsible
capitalism and the increasing ethnic diversity of urban culture.
Nowhere is there a greater disparity between the needs of a burgeoning
urban population and the presence of a concentrated infrastructure than
in India and the neighboring states. While India's population growth
has outstripped that of China, there has been comparatively little
construction to accommodate the throngs of former agricultural workers
drawn to the economic opportunities of the city. Consider the fact that
Bombay, today one of the five largest cities in the world and projected in
the not-so-distant future to become the largest, also suffers from some of
the highest real-estate prices in the world due to the discrepancy between
the demand and supply of urban living quarters. Such a circumstance
should be seen not as a drawback of increasing urban concentration,
but as an opportunity to ensure that the mistakes of the past, plainly
evident in the visually barren commercial centers of the West, are not
repeated. Not only in Bombay, but in New Delhi, Calcutta, Karachi, Dacca,
and elsewhere in South Asia, we have a blank slate on which architects
and city planners of the future can etch a bold new design.
Although the seeds of a movement toward architectural eclecticism have
been sown in the West, population growth there has slowed to a rate that
does not give full play to the new urban energies. This is not true of
the Asian subcontinent. Furthermore, the cities of the future will be
marked by an utterly diverse ethnic composition if present trends hold
true. Whereas urban development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
was mostly confined to monocultural societies, the twenty-first century is
already seeing, and should increasingly see, the development of societies
without any majority culture. We can look forward to cities where the
entire metropolis and not just certain neighborhoods are ethnically
heterogeneous, while the number of languages flowing through the cultural
arteries of a city will multiply from the present standards of one, two,
or three to perhaps dozens.
For these two reasons -- firstly, the repudiation of past mistakes in
urban planning and architecture; secondly, the movement away from cultural
uniformity toward diversity -- we expect to see a rampant eclecticism in
the cities of the future. Recent postmodern designs have only dabbled in
the waters of multicultural design, but in the future we can expect to see
a deluge. This is not to say that the sleek glass-and-steel constructions
of North American downtowns and the spiky, severe centerpieces of European
cities will not find their counterparts in the new urban construction of
South Asia. However, we can expect them on the one hand to be supplemented
with buildings that spring from a different cultural imagination, and
on the other to incorporate design elements suited to the Asian palate.
What are at present rather formal experiments in employing multicultural
design cues, such as skyscrapers topped with pagoda eaves and civic
architecture patterned after the Eastern dome rather than the Western
steeple, will likely become the norm within two or three centuries, if not
sooner. In keeping with the dictum that future cities will resemble those
of the past except more so, we can expect that in addition to acquiring a
distinctly Asian flavor, future building designs will acquire in greater
numbers and to a greater degree the current trends in architecture. What
are isolated examples of innovation in Western cities will become in
South Asia, by force of the high rate of construction, a matter of
course. The present preoccupations with transparency, disjunction,
and curvilinearity will manifest themselves on a spectacular scale.
The glass wraparound facades of the recently built Conde Nast headquarters
and of the recently drafted New York Times headquarters are only hints
of what is to come. Indeed, architects' drawing boards already show
buildings that are transparent not merely in a decorative or trompe
l'oeuil fashion, but literally so. We will be able to see through walls
in the future because they will be made of glass, yet this will not
bother us. As societies open up, so does the human imagination. From
medieval fortresses and Victorian brick walls to twentieth-century
chained-link fencing, we see the advent of superficially porous and flimsy
barriers. This does not mean that private property is less respected than
it once was; on the contrary. Rather, the means of protecting it are
in transition from the bulky and the confrontational to the persuasive
and the technological. A strip of bright yellow tape marked "Police"
is today as effective a barrier as a steel-reinforced wooden barricade
was in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the preoccupation with privacy
is shifting from the physical sphere to the virtual one. Less important
than bank vaults and hardened locks are cryptographically protected
transactions and hacker-proof software. Thus, the future South Asian
city will be to a large extent a see-through affair, at least as far as
the tangible realm is considered.
Facades and rooflines will become much curvier and more liable to
disruption than those of present-day buildings. We have seen the
beginnings of this trend in the work of Frank Gehry, whose recent
works -- the Bilbao branch of the Guggenheim Museum; the Disney
Theater in Los Angeles -- are paragons of the daringly swooping,
seemingly precarious constructions that modern engineering practice and
computer-aided precision architecture make possible. When calculating
the static forces in a building becomes less a matter of estimation and
conservative speculation than one of exact calculation and simulation,
architects are at liberty to make more expansive artistic gestures. We
can expect to see arches without visible cantilevers, and glass cubes
suspended in space seemingly without means of support.
Yet the architecture of tomorrow will not be one of absence, but of
strong visual presence. There will be pavilions that resemble not merely
a swan spreading its wings, like Eero Saarinen's airport designs, but
like mallards taking off, like eagles in flight. Thin metallic skins with
matte technological textures will replace the exposed concrete and harshly
glaring surfaces of today. The eye when gazing at the facade of a Bombay
skyscraper in 2250 will meet not a bland expanse of glass from which
it can turn easily away, but a surface pockmarked with concave designs
that draw the attention inward, and sheets of perfectly transparent,
non-reflective glass disrupted by inset ceramic motifs of Hindu, Muslim,
Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, and Christian inspiration.
It is not enough that the buildings of the future look attractive. The
city itself must strike the visitor as a welcoming presence and offer
to its inhabitants a sustaining cradle. The advantages of urban density
are clear in terms of economic concentration and cultural diversity,
but the strictly zoned patterns along which cities have been laid
out so far have wrought unwelcome consequences. City planners and
architects have lately come to see that the segregation of residential,
commercial, and industrial functions in the city center is responsible
for a vicious cycle in which the wealthier citizens are driven away
from the core of the metropolis, leading to suburban sprawl and the
attendant logistical-environmental nightmares of automobile traffic.
That is not to mention the dehumanizing psychological effects and the
resultant cultural impoverishment. As the socioeconomic standard of
the inner city drops, commercial zones are ever more segregated from
the residential neighborhoods. Industrial zones become increasingly
depopulated, leading to higher crime rates, further urban flight,
broader suburban sprawl, deeper poverty, and so on.
The metropolitan areas of South Asia, while they have not enjoyed much
development until very recent years, have also had the good fortune not
to settle into any such pernicious trend. They are ideally positioned,
in a way that the already over-developed Western cities are not, to
fully exploit the tenets of the movement called New Urbanism. According
to the New Urbanist philosophy, we can promote social harmony and a
prosperous urban lifestyle within the confines of the city, and not in
the hinterlands beyond it, by laying out cities in neighborhood-centered
parcels like the towns of yore. Under this scheme, which we hope to see
firmly established in the Calcutta of 2250, a neighorhood is planned
not as a purely residential adjunct to a commercial/industrial area,
but as a self-contained microcosm in which all social opportunities and
services are available in close proximity. With corporate buildings and
the smaller, cleaner industrial workshops of the future nestled side
by side with shopping centers and residential neighborhoods, all within
walking distance (or easily reached by public transit), we should see a
far greater variety of socieconomic strata within each neighborhood. With
social classes mingling in work, at play, and on the street as never
before, future generations will enjoy living on a more human scale and
in an ecologically friendlier manner than in the cities of today.
But the more liveable, more diverse cities of the future bring with
them their own set of challenges. The past metropolis, and in a rapidly
diminishing measure the present one, has been brought about by industrial
forces that cause problems of an industrial nature. Among the foremost
concerns of today's city planner are traffic congestion, chemical
pollution, and street crime. We cannot expect that these problems will
go away. It may even be foolish to predict that their importance will
substantially diminish. Nonetheless, as global civilization makes its
transition from the industrial age to the information age, city planning
must in the future be carried out with a greater emphasis on the flow
of information and with a sharper eye toward its difficulties.
Rather than traffic jams, the future ubiquity of mobile devices and
the advent of wireless broadband will lead to congestion in the radio
spectrum. Where wireless transmission is most heavily concentrated, namely
in the city, various channels of communication will contend frantically
for bandwidth. Within each frequency, time-spliced services will jockey
for airtime, and adjacent corporate wireless networks will interfere
with each other. In a fantastic reversal of the goals of vehicular
traffic management, the objective of wireless bandwidth control will be
to erect barriers between parallel pathways. Tomorrow's city must be
designed in such a way as to prevent interference between neighboring
local networks while facilitating their access to the information
thoroughfares and expressways of the Internet. At the same time that
buildings in the Karachi of 2025 are optically transparent, they will
be electromagnetically shielded from probing devices and inadvertent
interference from the outside. Instead of iron curtains to separate the
hoi polloi from the unwashed, we will see digital barriers separating
secure information from the insecure.
Indeed, today's efforts to combat street crime will seem as nothing
compared to the energies expended tomorrow to safeguard against
cybercrime. To assist in policing the information sphere and at the
same time to mitigitate interference, we will see a transition from
high-powered wireless transmitters that operate across great distances
to low-powered devices with a very short range. These small transmitters
will be tightly integrated into the fabric of each building, forming
a grid of ultrafast digital stepping stones through which mobile
devices can stay connected on a more secure and less interference-prone
basis than today. In a New Delhi office building in 2025, a wireless
waystation secreted inside a doorway will relay packets of information
to a transmitter disguised as a picture frame, which talks through the
water cooler to a series of attractive nodules affixed to the outside
of the building; these trace a path to the serpentine Asian gargoyles
on the parapet, which are, in fact, turnpikes onto the information
superhighway. The wireless Internet demands that in the architecture of
the future, the decorative become functional.
The information age has it ugly side, too, with an ever more visible
effect on city living. The current urban challenges of physical waste
management and litter control will in the future be matched, if not
exceeded, by the problem of digital trash. The surfeit of useless fliers
and illegal posters cluttering today's cityscape is trivial next to the
torrents of unsolicited e-mail and the profusion of advertising, both
legitimate and illicit, swamping the Internet. Again, it will be like
this in the future, but more so. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous in
the physical world, manifesting itself in mobile devices and finding
expression in finance, retail, and entertainment, the phenomenon of
spam will come to life in bolder and louder ways to blight the urban
scenery. In the Dacca of 2025, digital cleanup crews will scour guerrilla
advertising from high-resolution street-level plasma displays. To the
pedestrian, it will seem as if every surface, outgrowth, and ledge is
crowded with animated, artificially intelligent, interactive, walking,
talking, singing, dancing, maddeningly flickering commercial content. A
sagacious mayor will have to enact municipal by-laws that set aside
certain quarters of the metropolis as ad-free zones where the beleaguered
populace may seek refuge from the advertising assault.
Information of a non-commercial nature will also be challenged by the
multiplicity of languages and customs thriving side by side in the
coming metropolis. Street signs and informational notices will take
on a completely new character, one that is visual and universal rather
than textual and parochial. Sentences will give way to symbols; words,
to pictures.
A feature particular to South Asia is the fervently religious nature
of much of the populace, in contrast with the strict secularism of the
West. If this trait persists into the future, the forthcoming great
cities will have to adapt to the rituals and venues of religion in a
way never before seen. Unlike the cathedral-centered towns of medieval
Europe, the religious plurality of a South Asian metropolis will lead to
an urban layout that takes special pains to accommodate temples of many
different religions throughout the city center. Each temple must seem
to its congregants as the predominant feature of the neighborhood, yet
to the by-passer of a different faith, it must not offend by thrusting
forth its creed and asserting an architectural superiority over the
temple on the next block.
Although some of the low-tech methods of transport and commerce seen in
South Asian cities today owe their prevalence to economic circumstance,
it would be a shame if they all fell by the wayside with the inexorable
surge of prosperity. It would be especially desirable for the sake of
the environment to encourage travel by bicycle and other non-motorized
means. This means incorporating bicycle paths into the urban landscape,
marking them distinctly, routing them safely, and ensuring that they
coexist with heavier transportation such as trucks and buses, as well as
with lighter transportation such as scooters, skateboards, wheelchairs,
and humble pedestrians.
It bears reiterating that the comparatively undeveloped state of
South Asian metropolitan areas offers an unparalleled opportunity to
promote ecologically sensitive urban development. If the city planners
of tomorrow learn from the mistakes of today, and we hope they will,
we can look forward to the widespread incorporation of greenery and
wildlife preserves into the city. The presence of serene nature, even in
modest patches, should serve as a welcome reminder, in the airily built
but hectic, polychromatic, information-saturated future metropolis,
of the ground we walk on and the air we breathe.
That's what I think cities of the future, especially those in South Asia,
will look like.
Regards,
leapinglizard |
