Building the City of the Future

Cities have always reflected the people who build them, in infrastructure both visible and not. ​“The city,” the Italian author Italo Calvino wrote in his celebrated 1972 novel Invisible Cities, ​“does not tell its past but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets.”

The past is easy to trace. The future, however, is still a draft, and kyu companies are helping to write it with innovations in design, infrastructure, and social services. Ahead of the United Nations’ annual World Cities Day on October 31, we caught up with Gehl, Sid Lee Architecture, and Public Digital about their work that will shape urban life in the years ahead. Their answers point to a future that’s more focused on connection than digitization. 

Better public space

A good city puts people first, says Gehl CEO Kjersti Lund. In the urban design consultancy’s practice, that means investing in public space, both new and existing. Gehl has long operated using the 12 Quality Criteria, a framework that founder Jan Gehl developed to evaluate how well those areas serve their communities. It organizes the criteria into three simple categories: protection, comfort, and enjoyment. A good public space should satisfy all of them, which means it should be beautiful, safe, and accommodating.

Lund points to New York City’s Washington Square Park as a prime example: it’s a public park where students, office workers, kids, performers, and athletes converge. ​“The value of public space lies partly in that openness: it allows people to use a place in ways that are meaningful to them, without prescribing exactly what those uses should be,” she says.

Beyond its physical existence, public space should provide social infrastructure: the ability to support communities and enable everyday connection. This, Lund says, is more important now and in the future, as we face a loneliness crisis and increased social fragmentation. In its recent research with New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Social Infrastructure is Essential Infrastructure, Gehl studied how different spaces serve different needs. 

It found that, when a public space has solid social infrastructure, 80 percent of survey respondents felt a sense of belonging. Yet many spaces aren’t getting the investment they need to spark socialization among their inhabitants. Gehl also noted that, at one point, recreation and programming made up one-third of the NYC Parks department budget; at the time of the report’s publication, it was just five percent. 

“Social infrastructure might be an unfamiliar term for many of us, but it’s one that I believe we all need to build into our civic vocabularies,” Lund says. ​“It isn’t an optional extra; it’s a crucial part of what makes a city liveable, resilient and capable of supporting the people who call it home.” She adds that investment in existing public spaces such as libraries and parks can make them more beautiful, accessible, and welcoming, and richer programming and recreation offerings support a strong social infrastructure. 

Community-centric architecture

Sid Lee Architecture sees renewal as an important part of a successful city: reinvesting in and renovating existing buildings helps municipalities make better use of their space while also prioritizing sustainability. It also allows cities to transform existing infrastructure to better suit its population’s evolving needs. ​“At the end of the day, we’re building for people,” says co-founder Martin Leblanc.

As such, the firm often takes an open-door approach, inviting the community to see its plans for a design before they break any ground. Getting feedback from the people who will actually occupy a building, or from those who will live near it, gives them useful data on how they can make the site more beneficial. Because the firm doesn’t start with empty lots, but rather existing buildings, it has the benefit of time: ​“You don’t have to expedite things. It’s already there, so you can take more time to reflect on what needs to be done,” says co-founder Jean Pelland.

He recalls a project that involved transforming a house that was adjacent to a hospital. In between the two buildings was a garden — which locals felt passionate about protecting. In response, the architects created a design that preserved that beloved public space.

The firm is taking the same approach with its ongoing renovation of Montréal’s Molson brewery site into a mixed-use neighborhood with about 6,000 residences. An ongoing dialogue with the city’s inhabitants has led Sid Lee Architecture to prioritize green space in the design. 

The architects, after all, envision the city of the future as a place where people can experience nature, move around without cars, and commune with other people. ​“The main purpose of a city should be to create human connections,” Pelland says. ​“Without that, cities will become these soulless environments.”

In Maipú, Chile, a city of about 600,000, residents felt unsafe despite years of spending on infrastructure and patrols. Public Digital helped municipal teams research what residents needed. The result was a public portal showing safety data and investment by neighborhood, so people could see what was going on in their communities.

Technology can help cities spot patterns and make services more accessible, Smith says, but it cannot substitute for trust: ​“Just because we can automate something doesn’t mean we always should. And just because we can collect or connect data doesn’t mean we’ve earned the trust to do so.” As AI begins to mediate residents’ interactions with their government, cities will need to ask whose voices are being left out.

“What I’m hopeful for in the future,” Smith says, ​“is that cities don’t feel futuristic, they actually feel human.”