5 visions of cities of the future

Cities around the world are looking for ways to increase their sustainability. Everything from how we live to how we work and play is being re-evaluated and re-energised to make our cities cleaner, greener and more relevant to the times.

It's always helpful to see new ideas in action in other places, and we've taken a look at five cities of the future. These places are incorporating sustainability into their energy, transport, food, architecture and economy in new ways from which we can all learn.

Helsingborg is a city of 112,000 residents in the south of Sweden. It's aiming to become one of the most innovative cities in Europe while inspiring residents and local businesses, as well as global partners, to engage in creating a more sustainable city.

Working with innovators, businesses, and academia, the city launched the first municipal innovation hub in Sweden, using the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide their actions.

Some of the projects it has focused on so far include¹:

• An energy-smart hospital to help manage power demand more efficiently through load balancing, sharing energy between buildings, and making better use of energy in day-to-day operations.
• The development of a more circular economy with an app to enable resources to be easily shared and swapped between different city departments.
• A smart food project using artificial intelligence, which has resulted in the city's schools cutting food waste by 49% since 2017. It has also helped to reduce its menus' carbon footprint by using more plants and less meat.

Berlin TXL - aka the Urban Tech Republic - is transforming the former Tegel airport, which operated as the city’s international air transport hub from 1948 to 2020, turning the 1,200 hectare site into an innovation and research park to develop future urban technologies. The park will be surrounded by a smart residential sector to test the innovations developed there. This will contain 5,000 homes with another 4,000 being built in two other districts nearby. E.ON and Berliner Stadtwerke will supply heat and cooling to TXL using a pioneering low-temperature network called LowEx².

Industry, businesses and scientists are being brought together in TXL to develop innovative solutions around six urban tech themes:

• Net zero energy systems and efficient use of energy
• Environmentally friendly transportation
• Clean water
• Recycling
• Use of new materials for applications such as sustainable construction
• Networked control of systems

The Urban Tech Republic will cover 1,236 acres and the first stage of the building project starts in autumn 2021 and is due to be completed by 2040. It will be home to up to 1,000 businesses and 10,000 residents who will be able to trade energy in the integrated heating and cooling energy marketplace³.

Toyota is building a prototype ‘city’ of the future in a manufacturing site it closed down in 2020. The 175-acre Woven City will be a fully connected ecosystem powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

Located around 70 miles southwest of Tokyo, the city will start out with around 360 residents but will grow to become a home to more than 2,000 full-time residents and researchers. The city will be a living test ground to develop technologies such as autonomy, robotics, personal mobility, smart homes and artificial intelligence in a real-world environment.

Only fully autonomous, zero-emission vehicles will be allowed to travel on the city's main thoroughfares and all of the buildings’ rooftops will be covered in solar photovoltaic panels to supplement the power generated by hydrogen fuel cells. Native vegetation will be planted indoors and out, and hydroponics used for food supplies.

The initial phase of the construction project kicked off in February 2021 and is run by the Bjarke Ingels Group⁴. It's expected the first residents will be on site in late 2023.

Cryptocurrency millionaire Jeffrey Berns is developing a large swathe of land in the Nevada desert into a smart city powered by blockchain technology.

Originally announced in 2018, ground will break on the site in 2022. The city will run on blockchains' database technology, cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence and the goal is to create a decentralised smart city where up to 36,000 residents will have more control of their digital data, energy creation and consumption.

How this will look reality, and the tech that will enable it is yet to be revealed, but Berns has said that the idea is driven by the need to provide alternative, more sustainable ways of living and protect democracy⁵.

A proposal document submitted to the Nevada State Government shows that the Innovation Park's research will be focused on developing AI, 3D printing and nanotechnologies and it expects to provide employment, directly and indirectly, for more than 100,000 people.

The Venus Project's first phase included the construction of a 21-acre centre in Venus, Florida, housing ten experimental buildings. Next on the agenda is the construction of a research city to test out the technologies and ideologies that are driving it.

The vision is based on the idea of a ‘Resource Based Economy’⁶  in which all goods and services are available to everyone. It aims to build circular cities that are powered entirely by renewables, such as solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and more. Modular buildings will provide fire and earthquake-proof homes and public buildings will have their own thermal generators and heat concentrators.

The developers explain that the buildings and windows would have photovoltaic arrays built in, which will be able to supply enough energy for each household. Food would be grown organically and hydroponically in the agricultural belt, and each city would have parks, schools, cultural, exercise and leisure spaces.

It is a grand vision but one that its founder, Jaques Fresno, believes could be achieved and be pivotal in helping humanity address the pressing sustainability concerns it is facing.

^{1 Helsingborg 22: Projects
2 Berlin TXL: Energy concept
3 Berlin TXL: Energy concept
4 Bjarke Ingels Group: Projects - TWC
5 Bloomberg: In Nevada, a Utopian Vision Gets a Blockchain Twist
6 The Venus Project: Resource based economy}