Future of Future Cities

While the whole 2010 EXPO is discussing about Better City Better Life, during the holding on, many countries organized forums of urban issues, such as urban planning, transportation, architecture etc., to seek a better city modal for the world. 

On 26^th of Oct., the Swedish Pavilion organized a whole day symposium of Future of Future Cities, invited entrepreneurs and professors from Sweden to give different research outputs from different aspects of future cities. 

Expo’s colorful garden provides visitors an opportunity to feel the image of future cities, which is colorful, alternative, green and balanced. The interesting view is, if you take a picture through the Expo garden until the downtown as background, then you may get confused whether the colorful Expo would be the really future, because the real city has only gray at all. 

The symposium ranges from construction, transportation to food production and even mental therapy, using theoretic strategy research and case study methods, to illuminate how the future cities look like. For instance, doctors will use information technologies to diagnosis and treat mental problems (e.g. exhaustion, tiring, no concentration) and in the future. By these promising guessing, a creative urban profile within concrete implementations are already displaying in audiences’ mind.

 About future topics, we usually have a stereotype that there should be one direction for future development; but driven and obstacles, macro and micro problems are everywhere, each can change the future to another direction. Therefore, we shall draw a broader-view map for choosing a way. Sort of scenarios made by researchers can help readers to understand different possibilities to prepare for uncertainties in the future.  

While almost every pavilion uses green concept as the better city purpose, the visitors are wondering when and how these can be realized especially in China. These pragmatic questions were also issued during the speech, when Chinese case is more complicated than Swedish case, which means it’s further from the ideal modal and hard to implement. 

During the break, attendants also discussed about future urban transportation modals, especially took Shanghai as the case. 1) Private Car; 2) Public and private mix; 3) Public transport dominant are three of the most possible futures for Shanghai. Especially, because of the new energy vehicle technology bottle-neck, it can be the wild card to change the direction totally. With these multiple modals, the future of future cities can be a resource for everyone’s thinking.


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Channels:
 

• Expo 2010 - Shanghai
• Creative.Quarters