Future cities.
Eight billion people, more than half of them already in cities. By 2050, two-thirds. The shape of urbanism in the next century is the largest physical project our species will undertake. This is what it might look like.
The urban century, in numbers
Carlos Moreno's small idea
Carlos Moreno (Sorbonne, 2016) proposed the ville du quart d'heure: a city where work, school, healthcare, groceries, parks, and culture are within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Anne Hidalgo's Paris adopted it as policy in 2020. Melbourne (20-minute), Portland, Bogotá, Milan have analogous frames.
Why it works
- Reduces car dependency without banning cars
- Higher street life → lower retail vacancy
- Climate co-benefit: ~30% reduction in transport emissions in implementing arrondissements
- Counter-intuitive equity gain — when paired with rent stabilization
forecast Most North American downtowns will adopt some 15-minute-city language by 2030; whether the zoning follows is the open question.
What is reachable in 15 minutes
What "smart" actually delivers
The 2010s smart-city wave (Songdo, Masdar, Toronto Quayside) made big promises and delivered modest results. Toronto Quayside collapsed in 2020 under privacy concerns; Masdar built only ~5% of plan; Songdo's occupancy stagnated. The 2020s lesson: digital twins and IoT are infrastructure, not outcomes.
| Project | Locale | Status · 2026 | Lesson |
|---|---|---|---|
| Songdo IBD | South Korea | Built; ~70% occupied | You can't build culture top-down |
| Masdar City | UAE | ~5% built; pivoted to test-bed | Climate goals, scale missed |
| Sidewalk Toronto | Canada | Cancelled 2020 | Data governance is a city problem |
| The Line · NEOM | Saudi Arabia | Massively descoped (2024) | Linear cities don't pencil |
| Telosa | USA · proposed | Concept renderings only | Renderings are not housing |
| Helsinki / Amsterdam open data | EU | Boring, working | Quiet wins compound |
Where the population goes
The next thirty years of urbanization happen in Africa and South Asia. Lagos will pass 30 million; Dhaka, Karachi, Kinshasa close behind. Western megacities (Tokyo, NY, LA) plateau or shrink. The infrastructure question is not "how do we build a smart city in Stockholm" — it is "how does Lagos house 10 million more people while running on a 70-year-old grid".
Build up, build green
Vertical farms (AeroFarms, Plenty, Infarm), green facades (Bosco Verticale, Milan, 2014), and mixed-use towers continue to evolve. The economics of vertical farming have struggled — Plenty filed Chapter 11 in 2025 — but specific crops (leafy greens, soft fruit, pharmaceutical botanicals) remain viable. The bigger urban bet is mass-timber towers (Mjøstårnet, Norway, 85.4 m, 2019; Ascent, Milwaukee, 86.6 m, 2022).
Mass timber by the numbers
- ~25% lower embodied carbon than reinforced concrete (forest-managed, conservative LCA)
- 4–6× faster construction at mid-rise scale
- Code allows 18 storeys in IBC 2021 (US); higher in Norway, Austria, Canada
- Insurance & lender resistance softening 2023–25
Working with water
Yu Kongjian's sponge city framework (Chinese MOHURD, 2014) treats stormwater as an asset, not waste. Permeable pavement, bioswales, green roofs, restored wetlands. Pilots in 30 Chinese cities; New York's Bluebelt, Copenhagen's cloudburst plan, Rotterdam's water plazas, Singapore's PUB ABC Waters parallel.
Why it matters
- Climate-adaptive: handles intensifying precipitation
- Heat-island reduction (vegetation cools 2–4 °C locally)
- Biodiversity uplift; mental-health co-benefits
- Cheaper retrofit than gray-infrastructure expansion
Beyond cars
| Mode | 2026 status | Promise | Caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| E-bikes | ~50M sold/yr globally | Quiet revolution; replaces 30%+ of urban car trips in EU | Battery fires; theft |
| Robotaxis | Waymo 250k+ paid trips/wk · May 2025 | Geofenced, scaling slowly | Long-tail edge cases; politics |
| BRT | Bogotá TransMilenio + ~200 cities | Subway-like service at 1/10 cost | Right-of-way politics |
| High-speed rail | 43k km in China | Decarbonizes 500–1000 km trips | US lags structurally |
| eVTOL | Joby, Archer, Vertical · cert phase | Nice for executives | Not a mass-transit solution |
| Hyperloop | HyperloopOne shut 2023 | — | Mostly vapour |
Energy and matter, in & out
| Carlos Moreno | 15-minute city; chrono-urbanism |
| Janette Sadik-Khan | NYC DOT 2007–13; tactical urbanism, plazas, bike lanes |
| Yu Kongjian | Sponge cities; landscape ecology, Peking U. |
| Edward Glaeser | Triumph of the City; agglomeration economics |
| Jane Jacobs | Death and Life (1961); the founding text |
| Saskia Sassen | Global City; financialization & expulsions |
| Lloyd Alter / Brent Toderian | Walkable-city advocacy; the "life-sized city" |
| Solarpunk movement | Becky Chambers, Kim Stanley Robinson · imagined optimisms |
Recommended source
Not Just Bikes · "The Future We Could Have"
Toronto-to-Amsterdam ex-pat's channel on Dutch urbanism; the most efficient way to internalize what cities can be. Pair with Strong Towns' video archive.
youtube.com/@NotJustBikes →Kurzgesagt · "The Solarpunk Future"
10-minute primer on the optimist-pragmatist aesthetic that has eaten urban-planning Twitter.
youtube.com/@kurzgesagt →Three urban futures
Indicators · 2026–2030
- Paris & Bogotá implementation outcomes — modal shift, retail, displacement
- Nusantara (Indonesia's new capital) build-out vs Jakarta subsidence
- Mass-timber tower record (likely > 100 m by 2027)
- Robotaxi rides per week trajectory · Waymo, Zoox, Pony
- African secondary cities receiving > $1B climate-adaptation finance
- YIMBY zoning reform in US states (CA, OR, MT, MN, CT)