The Circular City

Planet Earth is long overdue for a comprehensive re-thinking of the traditional city. Virtually every urban area on this planet came into being randomly, over hundreds of years, with little in the way of coherent design or planning. Paris and London and New York and Hong Kong are wonderful, but what if we could start from scratch? What would we do differently?

Cities of the Future: what will they look like?

How will the cities of the future serve their citizens? What will these cities look like? How will they be built? How will they handle things like energy, waste, economics, governance,  law enforcement? These are all fascinating questions. However, in order to have cities of the future, first we must actually have a future. No future, no cities of the future!

If we as a species destroy our planet’s ecosystem, if we continue to contaminate the oceans and the atmosphere, if we continue to destroy tropical rain-forests in order to raise beef for wealthy people in other countries, if we continue to make war on one another, there will be no future, at least not for us. Planet Earth will go on, but it will be unlivable. It will be Hell! Literally.

Fortunately, our species has made it through some challenging times in the past. By collaborating on an unprecedented and international level, by deploying our collective intelligence, by pooling our resources, by changing our behavior, there is a chance that we will make it through these challenging times. In order to do that, we have to wake up.

Imagine if we were to wake up and realize that we are in trouble. Imagine that we were so shocked by this realization that we stopped making war. Imagine what we would do if we took the military budgets of every country on Earth, and actually did something useful with the money. Something like ending global warming? Imagine!

We could then spend the next hundred years figuring out the answers to the questions in the first paragraph of this post.