Dream scapes: How cities of the future are shaping up around the world

Dream scapes: How cities of the future are shaping up around the world
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Somewhere in north-western Saudi Arabia, plans for an ambitious new city are taking shape. Neom, being constructed at the cost of $500 billion, is hoping to be “the most sustainable urban complex in the world”, according to the government’s publicity material. There are no high-rises, no commuter helicopters, no vertical farms or elevated Metro systems. Instead, Neom lies close to the ground, and under it, stretching out along a straight line.

Think of it as a utopia 43 times the size of Mumbai, meant for only 1 million people, drafted using a very long ruler. The 26,000-sq-km city is being laid out, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, along a 170 km strip. Pedestrian areas are on the car-free ground level, service areas lie in the basements, and connecting them all, one level lower, are high-speed trains.

The city aims to depend largely on solar and wind power. The world’s largest green-hydrogen and green-ammonia plants are being built to generate fuel. Gigantic mirrored domes will use the sun’s heat to distil fresh water from the sea. Its 48-sq-km economic and industrial zone will be the largest floating structure in the world. And the dream is to be done as early as 2030.

A projection of what Telosa, an upcoming city in the US, might look like.
A projection of what Telosa, an upcoming city in the US, might look like.

Last year, American billionaire Marc Lore announced the building of another futuristic utopia, Telosa, at an as-yet-undecided spot in the deserts of the western US. The proposed city aims to house 5 million people by 2050. Only electric cars and clean fuels will be permitted. A network of walkways, e-scooters and mass transit promises to put everything — school, work, mall, park — within 15 minutes of everything else.

But look closely and you’ll find that these are hardly futures to look forward to. The cutting-edge tech is mostly experimental, living green costs more, control is centralised, management is driven by algorithms. Cameras, drones and facial-recognition AI will abound. Even in the projected images, the neighbourhoods seem generic, characterless, dislocated from their surroundings.

“It’s the most arrogant way of saying that you know what’s best for people just because you have the money to build,” says architect Dikshu Kukreja, of this style of urban planning. “That’s not a marker of progress.”

A cluster of homes in Arcosanti, a largely abandoned US town. (Wikimedia Commons)
A cluster of homes in Arcosanti, a largely abandoned US town. (Wikimedia Commons)

Kukreja designed the award-winning India pavilion at the recently concluded Dubai Expo. He also authored the 2021 book, CPKA: Five Decades of India’s Built Environment, chronicling the work of his 53-year-old family firm CP Kukreja Architects.

“Historically, cities have grown organically, through interactions between their people, and between the human and the built and natural environments,” he says. “Any good urban planning must include space for every inhabitant, down to the sparrow. Most high-tech plans for new cities tend to see anything that is not an economically productive human as a pest to keep at bay.”

Even with the best intentions, building a new city from scratch is a risk. Poland tried it in 1949 with Nowa Huta, a planned socialist-realist settlement near the capital Krakow. Planned on the lines of Paris and London, it allowed its 2 lakh residents, mostly steel workers, access to parks and social areas. The dream didn’t last. As Communism weakened by the 1990s, the area became a hub for drugs, crime and poverty. It is now a tourism attraction, offering people a chance to tour a failed utopia.

In Arizona, Arcosanti has been a utopia in the making since 1970. Areas and structures are designed as a blend of architecture and ecology. Buildings use concrete panels with embedded art, many face south for maximum sunlight. Residences are arranged in clusters, offering privacy amid shared social areas. But the town offers no economic opportunities – there’s just nothing to do. So the area meant to house 5,000 rarely has more than 150 residents at a time, most of them architecture students.

Commuter cable cars in packed Medellin, Colombia. (Wikimedia Commons)
Commuter cable cars in packed Medellin, Colombia. (Wikimedia Commons)

Closer home, the township of Auroville, built in 1968, is a centre for experimentation in urban living. Homes and neighbourhoods are built using cost-effective, climate-responsive design that blends into the landscape. Of its 3,300 residents who also run small businesses here, long-timers admit that Auroville’s experiments are difficult to execute on a larger scale.

Could we strike a balance between the two? Cities around the world are making creative tweaks. “The 20th-century fascination with the car is over, we’re realising that we lived without cars before and we can do it again,” Kukreja says.

Berlin is planning to turn almost the whole city centre, an area the size of Manhattan, into a car-free zone, with better mass-transit and pedestrian routes. In Medellin, Colombia, public transport includes cable cars that float over dense neighbourhoods, to avoid traffic.

“Indore’s Metro has been planned to connect its oldest areas; New Town, just outside Kolkata, has planned healthcare, waste-management and traffic management alongside its residential projects,” Kukreja says. They’re proof that a future city be born from the cities of today.

Urban planners around the world are closely watching Neom and Telosa as urban experiments to emulate, adapt, or avoid. Ultimately, Kukreja says, the test of any city will be: “Can it stay relevant to its people?”

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