Signals of the Future: from Virtual Worlds to Cities Without Children
Belatedly posting April’s clutch of future signals of how our cities — and how we design and live in them — might change. These include immersive ‘virtual twins’, families fleeing expensive cities, cultured meat, and the blurring of boundaries between work and play.
Virtual Worlds
I have been teaching digital twins and augmented reality to my planning students this term. This week I had a chance to see some of the breath-taking work Squint/Opera are doing on ‘virtual twins’.
From their canal-side offices, I was transported to Japan, the Middle East, and the US. I could soar above — and more importantly — walk through the places and see what they felt like on a human scale. At a touch of a button, I could experience day and night, rain and shine, crowded or empty.
I was struck at how fast the technology (built on gaming engines) is developing, how quickly it can be deployed, and how realistic the results — individual leaves being rustled by the wind.
These immersive worlds give a sense of the possible. Some were almost dreamlike, stretching the imagination. They can be used to communicate about a future place with non-technical audiences. They can be a tool for collaboration. And, of course, they can allow testing and experimentation before anything is actually built.
I was worried about how these models represent factors that are difficult to measure — like nature and biodiversity — and how they overcome what Juhani Pallasmaa called ‘ocularcentrism’ and enable design for all the senses. There is more to do here, but some of the models did include a soundscape and I found them incredibly atmospheric.
These ‘virtual twins’ are going to become an everyday part of how we engage with the physical world. They tell compelling stories about the future of place. I look forward to when they are being used as a participatory tool to engage wider communities in dreaming about and designing their futures.
Cities Without Children
I saw on the BBC this week that primary schools in London are closing because the high cost of living is driving families out. Many just cannot afford to have children in the capital.
Rental costs in London are at a record high (averaging £2,500 a month in February) and the total fertility rate in the UK dropped to 1.6 in 2022. In the capital, the birth-rate has dropped by 17% over the last decade.
Classrooms are being left empty.
Families are moving to the outer suburbs and cheaper areas. Many will just decide not to have kids.
What will fewer children mean for London? While we are a long way from the depiction in the movie ‘Children of Men’, this will change the city. I think families civilise neighbourhoods and children bring life to our streets and parks. The anchors of urban neighbourhoods will move from schools and community halls to gyms and bars. And the trend will probably be self-reinforcing, with fewer parents to agitate for services they need and a dominant culture of childless adults intolerant of children’s behaviours.
Does this even matter? I’ve spent a lot of time in San Francisco — one of the US cities with fewest children — and invariably had a good time. Central Manchester is buzzing. The urban ‘creative class’ favour cuisine, clubbing, and culture, and bring vibrancy to metropolitan areas.
But does this build community? Do we want to see the centres of cities such as London become playgrounds for the rich while the playgrounds for children lie empty?
Work, Stay and Play
How far can the boundaries between working hours and free time be blurred? I was lecturing this week on the future of work and exploring with students how drivers such as digital connectivity, flexible working, virtualisation, and the gig economy are changing employment geographies. We looked at AirBnB partnering with 20 destinations around the world to promote remote-work and lure ‘digital nomads’.
Then I saw that a new lifestyle co-working hotel, Birch, was opening outside London. (And I learned a new word — ‘Bleisure’ — courtesy of the The Future Laboratory.)
Birch offers the chance to “take a call, write some emails or do some reading” before swimming some lengths, playing some Padlet or making some pottery. The offer to “Stay, work, and play in nature” is another response to the trend to work anywhere, any time.
Only certain segments of the workforce get to enjoy this flexibility. But it is increasingly clear that the lure of working — not just at home or at the local café — but out of a private members club, an art gallery, or a boutique hotel, will force those offering traditional offices to up their game if they want to attract talent and lure employees back in.
Me? I like working from a variety of interesting locations and I value the flexibility to juggle work with childcare and leisure and choose when I complete a task. But I do worry about the relentless blurring of boundaries of time and space and the pressure some people will be under to be ‘always on’.
Mammoth Meatballs
An Australian company has created a meatball mixing mammoth genes with
elephant DNA and sheep muscle. Vow, a cultivated meat company, did it to raise awareness of the potential of growing meat from cells rather than raising livestock. Given the adverse animal welfare and environmental impacts of standard agricultural practices, the company wants to promote cultured meat and accelerate the regulatory approval process.
The mammoth meatball signals a number of future drivers: the appetite for climate-friendly protein; the growth in lab-grown meat; the resurrection and mixing of genes; the creation of novel foods; and the potential re-emergence of dormant organisms from melting permafrost.
What does it mean for cities and the built environment? There will be risks around the re-appearance of old viruses or the mixing of new genetic cocktails. But the biggest medium-term impact is likely to be on land use. Less land would be needed for extensive and intensive livestock rearing in the countryside with potential benefits for biodiversity. More land would be required for factory facilities to cultivate meat. Many of these sheds might be on the edge of town, jostling for space with ghost kitchens, vertical farming, last-mile delivery, and storage for autonomous vehicles.
Today, only people living in Singapore can tuck-in-to cultured meat, but expect it to come to a restaurant near you before too long.
