The perfect urban space was invented thousands of years ago
THE CITY OF THE FUTURE already exists. It’s not Masdar City, the walled “cleantech” hub being built in Abu Dhabi, where sheikhs, workers, and technocrats will commute to corporate offices in solar- powered personal transport pods. Nor is it Chengdu’s Great City, a low-carbon eco-district to be completed by 2020, which will house 80,000 city dwellers in “supertall” towers.
The city of the future is contained in the cities we already inhabit. As Italian author Italo Calvino observed in his classic novel Invisible Cities, any one city can harbour a multitude of others. Sprawling Calgary will soon incorporate swaths of Manhattan-style density near its core, Tokyo’s public parks shelter homeless villages straight out of Mumbai, and the outskirts of Guangzhou are dotted with McMansions that evoke the exurbs of Houston.
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