Issue 94: Future Cities
In this week’s issue:
- Emerging trends in modern cities
- Unknown sights at a terraforming site
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Feature Story: Future Cities
Contradictions in cities are more common than LinkedIn posts beginning with “I’m excited to announce.” Cities are bastions of progress yet rife with inequity, guided by public transport but always congested, and are seen as sustainable despite their large outputs of pollution. In cities, as is elsewhere, there’s always more than meets the eye. Beneath the skyline’s glitz and glamor is its grittier underbelly. For growth doesn’t exist in a vacuum; everything built is something taken away.
We’re excited to announce a new series on the future of various industries, landscapes, and technologies. Like any hipster trend, this too will begin in a city. But the attention paid to these hubs is not undue. The book of urbanization began in Afro-Eurasia millennia ago, had its plot thicken during the Industrial Revolution, and is now entering its newest chapter of techno-development. Whether this is the story’s conclusion or the beginning of a fresh section is unknown. Its corners are dog-eared with warnings from past mistakes and its upcoming pages remain blank.
Coal turns to diamonds under pressure, but oil becomes a mirrored modern metropolis. Saudi Arabia’s The Line puts other proposed tech-utopias to shame. The fully renewable, car-less, street-less, sci-fi city is firmly grabbing urban sprawl by its sides and squeezing it into a 200-meter-wide and 169-km-long city stretching from the Red Sea to Tabuk. Somewhat incredibly, the project was announced in January 2021 and is already well under way. It’s financed by the country’s massive oil fortunes and The Line’s floor plan is already taking shape, a segment of which can be seen here.
Cities are primarily habitats for humans. Yet over the past century design has skewed towards accommodating cars, especially in the United States. But a growing number of people and city planners are vilifying the car-oriented designs in favor of more walkable spaces. The global pandemic saw pedestrians take back blocks designated for cars, and the appeals for keeping the streets this way make sense when viewed from above.
It’s unlikely that cars will be eliminated outright and immediately, but there are some clever solutions to implement during this transition. Parking lots are an eyesore and an inefficient use of space. Solar panels provide abundant clean energy and need a lot of land. So some clever folks figured out the win-win design of putting solar canopies over parking lots. Disneyland Paris is completing theirs this year, with 67,500 solar panels covering 9,000 parking spots to generate enough electricity for 14,500 people per year. Seems pretty magical to us.
While some cities are pushing the limits of what science can achieve, others are pushing right against their physical limits and are trying to stay afloat, literally. The Maldives government has begun building a floating city in a nearby lagoon to create extra space for the 150,000 people living on Malé’s 3 sq mi (7.8 sq km) of land and to bolster the country’s population against sea level rise.
Group some tens of millions of people together in a relatively small area, add a pinch of climate change, and what you get is a city threatened from both outside and within. Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, is sinking from draining aquifers and slowly being swallowed by rising tides. So the fourth most populous country in the world is moving their capital 1,400-km (870 miles) northeast to Nusantara, a planned carbon-neutral, biomimetic, and walkable smart city four times larger than Jakarta.
Encoded in the term “developed country” is the idea that national growth is measured in economic and infrastructural development. Which is why so-called “undeveloped countries” are heavily investing in infrastructure projects as they grow. India is a prime example, with around $120 billion allocated towards roads, railways, and buildings — like the recently-completed New Parliament building constructed next to its old colonial-era predecessor.
Starting from scratch is apparently a popular urban planning tactic, especially as cities reach their ecological and physical limits. A new city is taking shape in the desert just outside of Cairo. It has all the makings of a mirage but is incredibly real, a $59 billion megacity built to house Egypt’s new capital. It comes with enough bells and whistles to drown out a symphony, but that’s little comfort to the project’s opponents who criticize the grand expenditures amid the country’s economic hardships.
Rome wasn’t built in a day for a reason: cities require enormous effort. Indeed, the road to high-tech modern cities is littered with failed attempts. Politics, international tensions, poor planning, and tightening budgets have all but destroyed the prospects of Malaysia’s Forest City, a $100 billion development built on reclaimed land.
It’s hard to say whether the cities of the future will look like the dark and polluted worlds of Blade Runner or the eco-utopias favored by architectural renderings. A gambler would bet on something in between. Cities will have to adapt to more than walkable streets and solar canopies over parking lots. With inequality rampant, sea level rising, and temperatures getting so hot that some major cities may become unlivable, the question stands: what good is a shiny utopia if you can’t step outside?
What in the World: Terraforming
Put a shell from the beaches of Abu Dhabi to your ear and you’ll hear not the sound of the sea but the pangs of construction. The city is currently terraforming an area of 51 sq km into a huge development project on Hudayriyat Island. It even includes the world’s largest human-made wave pool, to be opened later this year.
We’re not well-versed in the mechanisms of terraforming, but we’re intrigued by its sights. While exploring the island’s constructions we came across two features we’re struggling to identify: these curious lines of circles beneath the water and whatever these tethered-ships are up to. If you have an idea about either, hit us up!
All imagery Ⓒ 2023 Planet Labs PBC
Editor: Ryder Kimball | Images: Ryder Kimball, Max Borrmann, Julian Peschel, and Maarten Lambrechts
