Citits In The Future

Cities in the Future

No-one really knows what the future holds, but the reality now is that our urban spaces are overcrowded and polluted.

In 15 years, 60 percent of the world's population will be living in urban centers. What will make big a city in the future? It will not be its size, but its ability to change. By 2030, it is estimated that at least 5 billion people will live in cities, compared with 3,600 million today. The opportunity and challenge that this increase mean, represents a division in the economic and social development of these cities, which lead to a better quality of life for its inhabitants.

The time has come, say experts, to start designing smarter urban environments. The new cities needed to sustain an ever-growing population, and on the ones that we are living now, need to be modernize.

If the cities of the past were shaped by people, the cities of the future are likely to be shaped by ideas, and there are a lot of competing ones about how such a futuristic urban space should look like.

Some of these revolve around the idea that the smarter city is the most greener. Sustainability experts predict carbon-neutral cities, full of electric vehicles and bike-sharing schemes, with air quality so much improved that office workers can actually open their windows for the first time.

Visions of a green city often include skyscrapers, where living and office spaces will be getting along with floating greenhouses or high-rise vegetable patches and green roofs, as if we were trying to combine urbanisation with a return to our pastoral past.

Technology companies such as Siemens, IBM, Intel and Cisco, believe that the cleverest cities will be those that are connected to the network.

IBM currently has 2,000 projects ongoing in cities around the world, from analysis of crime prevention in Portland, Oregon, to water databases in California, or smarter public transport systems in Zhenjiang, China.

Its flagship project is in Rio de Janeiro, where it has built an operations centre, which it describes as the "nerve centre" of the city. It will be built initially to help deal with the floods that regularly threatened the city.

Other Project that IBM will be doing, is a mixture of predictive applications, ubiquitous surveillance sensors and automation. In a short time, a camera will capture a suspicious image, a computer will analyze it and it will transmit the signal with positioning coordinates to the smartphone of the nearest police. All in seconds. The probability of preventing a crime or saving a life multiplies. That´s how cities will operate in the future.

One of the two winning projects, of the americans Rychiee Espinosa and Seth McDowell, proposes an even more dangerous pattern:

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