Sep 29, 2006 11:54:05 PM cite

The city, if the trend watchers are correct, will be the living space for 85 – 90% of the world’s population by 2050. It is therefore incumbent on us all to make the future of the cities as livable as possible.

by RedSevenOne

Sep 20, 2006 9:32:09 AM cite

more and more people want to live in a city. The citys are getting bigger by every day. But today some people don´t have to go out of the house to live. They get everything that they need for life by a mail-service. So I think there will develop citys under to "normal citys" next to the supply-lines, without any physical contact. There will be a stand-alone city.

by schmidtlukas

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Antoschka - Ekaterina Moshaeva: I think, there could not be so many large cities. Surely, some large metrpolises and big cities would remain. But I consider that it would be better for people and for the entire civilization to return into the natural world and get back to nature. Because people who have contact with nature and who see how the grass grows and the animals live..... There are a lot of children in our country who don´t know that the cow gives us milk. They don´t know it. How could the human feels responsibility for all creatures on the earth if he doesn´t understand their functions, if he doesn´t know .... In Germany there are farms for little children where they could come to and see geese, ducks, dogs and horses. If human is alienated from nature ... , and in big cities our children grow up playing on computer or playing tamogotchi (degital pet) how it was 20 years ago. But they feel nothing if this degital pet die. Its death leaves them cold. If children don´t learn and undrestand that hurting an animal is bad and it could be painful... How could we get fully-fledged adults? How could we get persons who are thinking of their connection with nature? I think that the most cities would have village´s character bringing people back to nature. It would be ideal. It would be optimal because people could produce standard and healthy food and be close to nature. It would be wonderful, because the urbanization process couldn´t continue eternally, it´s just impossible.

by Antoschka - Ekaterina Moshaeva

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Abbas Beydoun: After all the sequent questions we come to this question. I can say that the future of the city will be black if the current situation remains as it is. We can not improvisatory predict our future, but we can at least say that the unemployment problem will be bigger, the weather will be more polluted, the power will be less than before, the violence will spread in the suburbs, the minorities will be more aggressive and feel isolated, the social integration will face so many problems and the community will not care for politics and election so the government will dominate everything, which means that the globalized capital will create just one culture and one direction, consequently the people intimacy will be removed, the city will look like garage of cars or depositor of machines, the society will become gradually without memory and just concentrated on the daily concerns and the people will live as slaves for their small needs and they will also become less intelligent, more superficial and more isolated from what is going on in the world

by Abbas Beydoun

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Alvaro Restrepo: Well, the future of the city depends a lot from our ability to solve the car problem. In my opinion the fact, that more and more cars and car drivers deprive in a city living people from the public space, is a big problem. It is interesting how car drivers forget that they too are persons, that they too are pedestrians, that they too are able to think and not cars think for them. It is unbelievable, that as soon as a person enters a car, it becomes machine and thinks like machine, not like human being. In my opinion, cars are currently the biggest city problem and it sould be resolved in first place. Another problem is the question of space. People need public space in order to be able to meet, to have where to discuss their problems, to meet new people. The problem is that a city becomes a territory that belongs to nobody. Very seldom citizens have a feeling of belonging to urban environment. City is foreign territory. I think, cultural and communal centres serve as places for reflection, for meeting people, and should make people feel and understand the meaning of a life in a community.

by Alvaro Restrepo

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Ana Lucy Bengochea:

by Ana Lucy Bengochea

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Andries Botha: Nick, the city is an inevitability, given the fact that were are overpopulated. Not only is it an inevitability, it’s perhaps a desirability in many cases, because it presents a wonderful kind of urban crucible. The idol, or the romantic idol of the rural landscape, I regret to say, given the kind of encroachment, is in fact, something of the past. The city presents for all of us, most of us, I should say, a kind of an imaginable place where all sorts of contemporary innovative things take place. It’s the place where we live. You know that is something that’s irreversible. What we should be looking at is how to turn our cities into more sustainable, living organisms. And I think that presents a very interesting challenge for planners and thinkers. We are not and I don’t think we are ever going to - the city is where it’s all at. The city is the future, and we’re not going to be able to escape that. Nor should we.

by Andries Botha

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Angaangaq Lyberth: Answertext will be available soon.

by Angaangaq Lyberth

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Anthony Arnove: I think this question has been very powerfully answered recently by Mike Davis in his book “Planet of Slums”, where he discusses the growth of mega cities, the growth of cities that involve dispossession on a scale that really rivals the period of enclosures in the early stages of development of capitalism in terms of the degree of transformation in people’s circumstances, as millions upon millions of people are being forced to move into cities to seek employment because the basis of their lives in agricultural society, agricultural economies has been shattered by the process of globalization. The process is leading to huge uprootments of human populations with health and social consequences that we are only beginning to understand, but which Mike Davis very effectively describes in “Planet of Slums”. And really, what he documents is the injustice of this process, the human causes of this process and raises a specter of very serious consequences. The fact that these trends really ultimately are not sustainable and that to counter them we’ll require really ultimately revolutionary change. So, the future of the city will depend on whether or not that change is brought about, whether or not we can begin to challenge these processes of uprootment and dispossession being brought about by capitalist globalization and start rationally planning our living arrangements, our cities, our relationship to the environment, our relationship to one another, how we determine what is produced and how it is produced, and those kinds of questions will ultimately determine the future of the city.

by Anthony Arnove

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Anuradha Koirala: The future of the city lies in the hands of a caretaker in a good manner. So I think it should be in a good manner and a caretaker be chosen during the elections so that they can really make they very well [inaudible] who could manage the city.

by Anuradha Koirala

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Anuradha Mittal: I think for me if there is to be a future for the cities, cities will need to be self-sufficient. Let me give you an example. For example, instead of your private vacant parking lots, you would have urban gardens, where cities will be focused on growing food to meet the needs of the community, to be self-sufficient instead of depending on a model where the food flies in from different parts of the world. And if we don’t do things like that, instead of cities we will just have urban sprawl. We would have ecological disasters. We would have economic pitfalls. We would have not communities but fragmented societies living together.

by Anuradha Mittal

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Ashok Gangadean: Good question. When you say the future of the city, I think what is -- for me that is what is the future of culture? Because our cities reflect our cultural state, which also reflect our mentality and mode of consciousness. And if we are going to move into a sustainable culture based on global consciousness and global spirituality, what is that? That is the awakened awareness in which we recognize our deep connectivity with our entire ecology and with nature and with each other. And to humanize the sacred space in which we live. So the question in my mind that this provokes is are -- do our cities now represent this integral holistic humanized consciousness? Or are the alienated spaces, artificial spaces that interrupt and block our full human flow and capacity to relate to one another in fully humanized ways? That’s what architecture and the design of our environments and the Feng Shui of our energies around us in our furnishings and all of the settings of our life matters. Are we cut off from nature? Are we blocked off from one another? Or are they open spaces that encourage the meeting of people and the blossoming of whole human beings in integral spaces. So, to me if our sustainable culture of global consciousness must come, it will be a radical rethinking of our environment, in our physical environment. And the arrangement of our living spaces and our shared institutional spaces, all of these will have to be renovated. For example, in the present classroom we have rows of chairs facing the front. That in a way breaks the dialogue connection between people. So if you are going to enter dialogue, you need to renovate the space, so people can meet and face each other. That’s just an example of a reshaping of the space in which we live to encourage human meeting and human flourishing. So let’s imagine what a city will be like if it’s modeled in this kind of integral holistic consciousness.

by Ashok Gangadean

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Audrey Kitagawa: The city will become a huge repository of mass migrations of people coming in from the rural areas to be able to find work. As such, to the extent that the municipalities are not able to accommodate the increasing influx of people into the cities, you will find areas of growing slums and problems that that may bring, including homelessness, people living on the streets, children living on the streets, and to the extent that municipalities do not have the finances to be able to keep their cities in good condition, you will see decaying cities. But I think that the mass migrations that we have seen taking place to cities also gives these governments and municipalities notice that they should be planning now to be able to understand how they will be able to accommodate the growing influx of people. All of these global challenges will take planning, organization, and a great deal of responsibility to be able to sit down now and not defer or delay the planning that must be undertaken to the future that is already upon us.

by Audrey Kitagawa

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Avi Primor: A secret - so far cities grow and become larger. It seems to be that this will continue. But I am not really aware of this because I assume that humans will have better life-qualifications over the years. The richer they are, the more developed they become, the more the industry, technology and especially the high tech precede, humans will want to have more comfort and higher life qualities and by and by they will recognise that high life quality does not neccessarily mean the big cities, but small cities too. Therefore we still need a improving transport sector so that people not living in the cities or even more far away still have the chance to profit from the city. This is just a technical question because we will develop as we always want to improve our life-quality and this does not absolutely mean that we all have to live in metropoles or "carrer cities".

by Avi Primor

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Benjamin Fahrer: Which city? Australia? We’re talking about all cities, I guess? The city has its own kind of entity. You step into a city, it doesn’t matter where it is in the world, he’s in Berlin; you’re in San Francisco, you’re in Rome, Milano, you’re in Dubai. What is the future of these cities? And the future is up in the air, really, because we have an opportunity to help shift these futures of the city by those who live in the city, by all these people behind me? They have the opportunity to really shape the future of the city, by how they interact. And really, the designers of the cities, those who are currently designing and working with design have an incredible opportunity because the way that the city functions, form follows function. The way a city is designed, the way it function is dependent upon those who designed it. And if we have people who are not in tune with the natural order of things and the balance, or not taking on some ethical and practical principles, will get bad design that then will lead to destruction in some ways of the city by, and not being very functional, and not allowing for the natural flows to happen that can then be regenerative and build upon themselves. If we have a bad design that is, that doesn’t allow for the energies to flow and doesn’t allow for change to evolve and things to happen in the city that could be beneficial for it and allow for these people to be more interactive with their city. Then the city will have somewhat of a tragic fate. I don’t live in the city. I live in the country with my beautiful wife Gabriel, my goats, and my chickens. What will be the fate of the countryside, if the city collapses? If the city collapses, what will be the fate of the countryside? As those people, huge populations go out to the country.

by Benjamin Fahrer

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Benson Venegas: This is a very interesting question. The city came to stay. This is the answear. 50 years ago much more people lived in rural areas then in cities. But obviously we perceive a new organisation of the population in the world. The future tendency will be a bigger concentration of population in the cities because in the cities will be more services for the development of people, e. g. sanitary services, transport services, financial and economical services. All these services will be concentrated in the metropolis and they will advantage the development of the individuals. So the future of the cities is very amply. Perhaps it is our challenge to foresee the growth of the cities and to foresee the influence which the societies will have concerning the environment, concerning the handling of polluted water and the use of natural or material resources for construction. This should be considered in the processes of plannification in order to create cities that help to develop and that don’t limit or lead to impoverishment in rural areas or to bigger influences on the environment.

by Benson Venegas

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Bianca Jagger: Answertext will be available soon.

by Bianca Jagger

Sep 9, 2006 3:05:00 PM cite

Bill Joy: The futures of cities is that most people are going to live in them. We’ll pass very soon in this century a situation where more than half the people are living in cities. Cities offer marvelous cultural possibilities because you have people dense enough that you can create a diversity of experiences. It’s kind of boring by comparison to be in a small town. But of course being in the country is wonderful too and that’s one of the wonderful things about the internet because you can see and experience cultural activities that are going on at a distance sort of through the net and have those kinds of experiences. But there’s still nothing in my experience like being in a city, being able to walk, people in cities have smaller ecological footprints. It’s great to see that the Chinese in their industrialization are working real hard on building greener cities and reinventing the cities so that they’re more walkable, they’re more pedestrian friendly, blocking off cars, blocking off motorcycles in the center of cities. These are all really good things. One scary thing about cities is the threat of terrorism because people are more densely populated, somebody with a political agenda can obviously do more damage and more psychological and physical damage in a city. How we deal with this I don’t completely know but the cities are so valuable to our spirits that I’m very optimistic about the futures of the cities as great places to live.

by Bill Joy