The City of the Future

What should the city become? Not a place to live, but…? What is "life"?

The city should become infrastructure for creating the institutions and technologies that drive progress. Its infrastructure should help, guide and remind of the main mission in every way: to find answers to fundamental questions and to let civilization not just survive the death of the planet, but — if other civilizations exist — become the most developed one, helping others where it can.

Today's cities are cut off from the conditions that are optimal for humans. We have very little practically applicable knowledge about the brain — knowledge that would let us design environments that raise what we need instead of stress, and lower what we don't want instead of the sense of safety and inspiration. Even the most cited papers often lack the argument and foundation needed to plan a city around how the brain responds to its environment. Lab environments are artificial and heavily simplified, we don't know the fundamental causes of many brain processes and their correlations, and some findings in animals still haven't been fully studied in humans. For now we can draw conclusions from them and scale them up to the city and its complex environment — but that would be weak research, not an understanding of how the city and our body inside it work.

For example: a uniform environment without several equally strong landmarks (silhouette, perspective, facades, light) is less tolerant of navigation errors. Its illegibility doesn't let us build a good "mental map" of the area and find alternative, more interesting routes. It's harder to remember and doesn't stimulate the brain at all. Lighting landmarks and key nodes at night helps keep the inner map accurate as the light changes (O'Keefe & Dostrovsky, 1971; Hafting et al., 2005). The brain even has a dedicated region that responds to places and scenes (Epstein & Kanwisher, 1998).

The environment physically changes the brain. Adult mice living in an enriched environment have more hippocampal neurons (Kempermann, Kuhn & Gage, 1997). London taxi drivers, who navigate a complex city every day, have a larger posterior hippocampus (Maguire et al., 2000).

What has to change

• A route should have exactly two functions: to be as fast as possible when needed, and to be as useful to the brain and as interesting to the eye as possible.
• Every space — whatever need or desire we fulfill in it — should develop new skills and knowledge, widen them, and give at every moment the chance to get whatever is needed to practice or acquire them.
• Technology will inevitably be tied to every part of the city. It should not get in the way — it should help us understand the environment better and interact with it and with other people.
• Commerce visible from the sidewalk should give way to work that matters for humanity, and to creative teams. Instead of temptations — clothing boutiques, grocery and candy stores, electronics, accessories — ground floors with panoramic windows should be taken by labs, design studios and other people of ideas. This needs economic and physical conditions that make such a setup profitable and desirable. Not bans and restrictions, but opportunities and incentives that naturally reduce (not eliminate) everything about consumption. Streets have to stay diverse to stay alive and support different forms of human interaction, so commerce and entertainment can't be pushed out entirely. The main thing is to show that the city is relentlessly working on something global — and that people genuinely burn for it.
• Infrastructure should be even more diverse. If we want everyone to find a place for their passion, we need more libraries, coworkings and other places that provide space and tools for it — 24/7, which matters.
• We must not lose the randomness of connections the city creates.
• The city is under constant external shock, so it survives only if it can adapt fast enough.
• We can't optimize one part of the infrastructure at the expense of another.
• Norms should allow incremental building and small plots. Instead of demolishing settlements and moving people into high-rises they can't afford, it's smarter to give plots with basic infrastructure and the right to build up. (What matters more: the look of the city or the affordability of building? Can they be combined?)
• The most useful housing innovation for the poor is not trendy materials, but a cheap and safe floor slab.
• What's needed are small loans for the next stage of construction, not a mortgage on a finished apartment.

Neither I nor anyone else knows what cities should be — otherwise they would already have been built. But I'm going to find out.

Many manifestos and attempts to reinvent the city failed. For obvious reasons: no economic and labor base, no client, resistance of the system, the separation of functional zones, the end of the era when people believed in ideas of this kind. And for a rather curious one: they designed the final picture, not the process of growth.

Another reason manifestos and ideas left together with their authors: there was no institute behind them to test hypotheses and keep carrying and developing the idea. And knowledge about cities is dispersed among their residents — in billions of heads and decisions. We rely on simplified methods of quantitative data collection and make decisions from them: restrictions, rules, opportunities. But real, useful, qualitative data is hard to count. Right now we simply don't have the tools and methods to understand how citizens create the city.

There are many attempts to reinvent the city, and many ideas of what it could be. But without dispersed knowledge we can't:

• understand the city's current structure and deal with it;
• develop optimal methods of rebuilding it;
• predict how it will react to change.

So, to lead cities into a particular process of growth, Step 1 is not inventing new models and systems. It's understanding from the bottom up what works now and why, and what doesn't. We need to monitor — the key word, since data from the past, papers and the like are of little use — current problems and needs, with sensors, cameras and other safe methods of collecting information (privacy is an open question). We need a lot of data that would actually explain how the city works — but we don't know yet how to get it or how to use it.

Only by observing how people behave in this spontaneous order can we develop infrastructure that lets the city work. The city consists of the people in it, with their own priorities, producing unpredictable compromises.

Step 2: once dispersed knowledge is collected and systematized, we need research to build fundamental knowledge — about the human brain and body, about the physical and geographic properties of the planet (in the future, not only ours). And, of course, bring in history, economics, anthropology, engineering.

Step 3: build simulations from dispersed and fundamental knowledge, and find cause-and-effect relationships in them. Based on these, introduce changes and watch the response: trial periods, experimental zones, tactical urbanism (any cheap temporary changes) and simulations. With AI we'll be able to simulate large environments — press a button and simulate ours or any other.

Only then set the goal of developing principles for three big tasks: revitalizing existing cities, creating a concept of the City of the future, and going beyond Earth.

Every discipline today has its own institute, with infrastructure built for testing and passing on knowledge. Urbanism, besides being young, is scattered across many disciplines whose experts and enthusiasts rarely meet to create and optimize cities. So the priority is to create something that will cultivate itself — not die with its author.

A lot of decisions are made from bullshit. We create "cities for people" with almost no idea how our body and brain react to the environment.

• City for cars. Fuel subsidies make transport artificially cheap, push up land prices in the center and make the city sprawl. Traffic rules (say, cars with certain plate numbers banned on certain days) come from an unrealistic, simplified calculation: travel time on a free road versus at rush hour, with the difference counted as a loss. The time of those who switched to public transport, went at another time or gave up the trip isn't counted.
• Public transport = less road space per passenger. "Bus passengers take up 50 times less road space." But road space also includes the space a vehicle needs to brake and stop. Buses run at intervals of minutes and stand at stops — so space per passenger, even in a full bus, comes out the same as or more than per person in a car.
• Zoning = ecology and safety. Zoning for the sake of ecology and quiet kills the healthy, living fabric of the city: it lowers its economic viability, pushes out commerce and makes streets less safe.
• Safety = police. Safety is created not by police and more lighting, but by people, commerce, mixed-use places and windows facing the sidewalk.
• Bans and restrictions. Building norms against poverty and density — height limits, lower plot coverage, minimum living area — end up increasing crowding and pushing informal construction.
• Rationality and regularity = efficiency. "A regular grid is a rational city." But the brain is trained by three properties of the street network: turns that aren't at right angles, more different streets on a route, and more neighborhoods crossed.
• Residential complexes = holistic experience. Density and diversity instead of mindless modern development: protect old buildings (cheap rent for startups and creators) and high population density.

• The city is infrastructure for creating Inventions that drive progress — any means that moves progress forward: an institute, a technology, a social structure, an ideology.
• Its foundation lies not in economics and geopolitics, but in knowledge and collaboration — and the city should encourage both.
• The city develops the breadth and depth of each person's knowledge and skills, and the drive to find answers to fundamental questions.
• Cities should be created and grown by teams of talented interdisciplinary people, not by patchworks of political factions.
• Speed / interest of a route > accessibility. Time decides, not distance. Every point should be reachable either by a very interesting (complex) route or a very fast one (up to 5 minutes).
• A team of ideas gives the city a "pattern" and basic rules; residents create the urban fabric. Politics only provides a pool of problems to solve (unemployment, density, etc.), but officials, councils and governors don't intervene in any other process of shaping and changing the urban environment. Their job is budget, data, indicators, strategies with measurable results, and revising the rules — with economists on staff. The city is created entirely by its citizens; city hall sets the rules of good neighborliness and maintains shared infrastructure.
• Not a master plan, but quarterly indicators: price, rent, floor area per person, travel time.
• Design a strategy from impact to outcomes, outputs and inputs — and measure in reverse order. Design bottom-up, measure top-down.
  • Inputs — what we invest: money, people, time. (What inputs does this output need?)
  • Outputs — what we produced: buses, lanes. (What output will give this outcome?)
  • Outcomes — what changed for people thanks to the outputs: shorter trips, faster routes. (What outcome will lead to this impact?)
  • Impact — the final goal it was all for: unemployment fell, incomes grew. (What impact do we want?)
• A goal answers "what do we want?" It's a choice of values, and they differ: some value quiet, others cheapness. It's made by whoever people elected (but can this work honestly in the current system?). A strategy answers "how do we get there?" This takes knowledge of how the labor, housing and transport markets work. That's for specialists, and the arguments here are about facts and mechanisms.