A world to design for

Long trends

This attempts to ground the high level goals expressed in Max entropy. As the starting point for Now City, it is helpful to set the stage by establishing a vision for community development. The context is that I’m writing in 2025 and looking ahead some number of decades.

Strongly held views on urban trends

• Home as increasingly important, requiring more area per person, and being more central in life.
• Continued automation in the home and in cities (see Robodistricts).
• Competition between cities to attract investment and talent.
• Focus on healthy places and wellness imbued in cities.

Slightly less strongly held trends

• Low-carbon investment driven by self-sufficiency, efficiency, and resilience rather than the goal of low-carbon itself. The cost of subsidizing green solutions to achieve low-carbon trajectories is increasingly out of reach. However, the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, and so the fossil fuel age hopefully doesn’t end because we run out of fossil fuel, but because we find more attractive alternative technologies that perform better.
• Technology-native population but not necessarily more democratic or connected due to a simultaneously monopolized and fragmented landscape (see Smart urbanism)

Status quo likely to remain

• Construction with wood and masonry.
• Communities organized around proximity and shared interests, with different scales of intimacy aren’t going anywhere.
• Physical schools for children 2-18 will remain.
• Some amount of shopping for daily needs and specialty goods, and increasingly repair, is needed.
• People will also continue to want to frequent eating and drinking establishments and some other forms of group entertainment.
• Personal vehicles (cars) will remain as an organizing force, especially in less sparsely populated areas.
• Capitalism because central planning for something as fluid as the economy is usually a mistake.

Unknowns

When pricing in the amount of effort to spend on a long term project like city making, it is important to consider the probability of some potentially large scale risks, and what that would do to the project.

• Artificial super intelligence (ASI) has the potential to be disruptive, but it could also entrench us in the status quo.
• Fusion energy could unlock unlimited free energy, which would release some of the constraints factored into the vision.
• Runaway climate change and biosphere collapse. At this point, global warming and SLR are locked in. Boston, for instance, will certainly have Virginia’s climate before long, but an extreme runaway scenario would look a lot worse.

2025-2040: Housing shortage due to underbuilding and demographic changes

This wave of population and demographic change has the United States back millions of housing units, so for most places the result of a housing needs assessment is a resounding “yes”. But, there is a time horizon on this growth, and for many places this phase of expansion may be one of the last rounds development that is seen, resulting in a more or less stable built environment (see, Europe, Japan). This period could also cannibalize a lot of the “posts” from the last 100 years, including industrial land, malls, big box stores, and offices as those functions continue to evolve.

2040-2100: Population plateau, but start of climate migration

After the population has plateaued, subsequent growth will come from migration, much of which may be driven by the inevitable climate change (see Max SLR). Temperate places with fresh water will be poised to receive in-migration, as well as places that were previously nigh uninhabitable (northern Canada, Siberia) as they become suitable for agriculture – and the extreme heat around the equator and sea level rise displaces an estimated 1 billion people per degree of global warming (see Organized migration).