Trends to Watch Reshaping the Future of Cities and Urban Living

Zoning is losing its power. New ventures are able to reach a meaningful scale before regulators (and competitors) react. The boundaries between different uses are blurring, with people lodging in apartment buildings, living in hotels, working in restaurants and retail malls, and sleeping or socializing at the office.

To be able to move about easily and confidently, to be able to linger in cities and residential areas, to be able to take pleasure in spaces, buildings, and city life, and to be able to meet and get together with other people – informally or in more organized fashion – these are fundamental to good cities and good building projects today, as in the

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Neuropolis: Our relationship with cities from Mumbai to Manhattan. As our cities change, they inspire a change in us: "A new generation of explorers, cyclists and psychogeographers are remapping urban landscapes through non-places. In this expanding urban maze, waymarks — as ever — are key to community cohesion ." Cities are described as "an immens... See more

For a growing number of retail, office, lodging, and industrial customers, access is no longer about a single location but about being able to move freely within a network of spaces.

Street life is drastically reduced when small, active units are superseded by large units. In many places it is possible to see how life in the streets has dwindled drastically as gas stations, car dealerships, and parking lots have created holes and voids in the city fabric, or when passive units such as offices and banks move in. In contrast, exa

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If you are asked to imagine a future city, you are bound to think of its transport, its buildings or its public spaces, not the invisible patterns that may explain much more about its character. The discipline of imagining physical things can be extremely creative, and today’s architects are at the forefront of thinking through how to live entwined

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Cities are not about efficiency, and never have been. The most meaningful urban experiences are generally the most inefficient. But this lack of efficiency is also why they are naturally resilient, if their design patterns follow the purposeful redundancy described above.