How will our future cities look?

How will our future cities look?

1. Imagine a city of the future. Do you see clean streets, flying cars, and robots doing all the work?

   • Or perhaps your vision is more dystopian, with a Big Brother-style authoritarian regime, dark alleys full of crime, and people forced to live in hermetically sealed pods because war or some other disaster has rendered whole swathes of the city unliveable.
   • Almost half of the world's population currently lives in cities, and by 2050 that is projected to increase to 75%

2. And the robots?

   • Humanoid robotic during the last years made giant steps and it is easy to assume that in the next future they will be a constant presence.
   • The robots could be in all the houses and they could represent a vital resource. We will have robots that will cook, others that will take care of us or the children.
   • Furthermore, it cannot be excluded that in the future they could represent a resource even for the public transport or for the services.

3. big corporations are becoming so heavily involved in designing city infrastructure has led critics to question how quickly such a city may, like the computer systems they are relying on, become obsolete.

4. Saskia Sassen, co-chair of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University and a leading expert on smart cities draws parallels with the office buildings of the sixties, which she describes as "low-ceiling places now standing sad and empty as advanced technologies render them useless".

5. The majority quickly changed habits and saved water when confronted with the data. Interestingly those also given access to their neighbors' information were twice as likely to make changes.

6. and in Brazil, how will it be?

   • how will companies be?
   • How will our environment be?
   • How will our policy be?