Now City

Now City is a line of inquiry focused on long-term urbanism with a mixture of speculative design and a concern for future generations. It is an exploration of urban futures, grounded in the belief that the cities we build today must be designed with a multi-generational perspective. It is a response to the challenges and opportunities of our time: climate change, technological acceleration, and the shifting nature of community. Now City is not about predicting the future, but about creating the conditions for a flourishing one, guided by responsibility for the generations who will inhabit the world we leave behind.

Topics

These topics are roughly ordered by higher level goal setting to more applied practical matters.

• Max entropy: Framework for thinking about long-term goals
• A world to design for: Broad vision for community development
• Max SLR: Urban design for the maximum extent of sea level rise
• Organized migration: Moving billions of people away from extreme heat at the equator to newly arable land
• Post place-based solutions: What happens to cities when place is replaced by movement
• Smart urbanism: City-technology interfaces, privacy, trust, and ecology
• FAR 3: A pattern language for resource efficient-walkable urbanism
• Robodistricts: What is a robot district and how can it make human districts even better
• Permacity: Permaculture ethos applies to urbanism