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Speculative Architecture and Future Cities

Five unbuilt architectural proposals that show us new narratives for our world in the future.

The term “future cities” may evoke images of vertical cities, megalopolis, celluloid buildings, and gleaming steel-and-glass towers seen in works of art and fiction.

Although these worlds appear to be faraway fiction so removed from our daily lives, visions of cities in the future are inspired by real-world problems that seem too large to solve. By combining ideas from technology and the arts, architects and urbanists have long been pushing the boundaries of what is possible to speculate about cities designed for a more liveable world.

These are five unbuilt architectural proposals, ranging from the attainable to the wildly fantastical, that radically reimagine how cities in the future will meet the challenges of environmental threats, population growth and resource scarcity.

The ‘Plug-in City’ / Peter Cook and Archigram
A forerunner of neo-futuristic architecture, Archigram was an avant-garde architectural group founded in the early 1960s. Inspired by technocratic ideas and pop art, the group focused solely on creating hypothetical projects.

One of Archigram’s most well-known projects is Peter Cook's ‘Plug-in City’, a fantasy city in which urban spaces are imagined as modular units that can be plugged into a central infrastructural machine that provides everything needed for modern living. Every unit is transportable and highly adaptable to the growth of a rapidly changing urban environment.

Solarpunk
Solarpunk, which is more of an environmental art movement than an architectural project, envisions a future in which humanity has successfully overcome its environmental challenges in order to coexist with the environment. Solarpunk cities are colourful and vibrant nature-filled places that embrace both high-tech advances and sustainable, low-tech ways of life.

The movement was founded on utopian ideas from the speculative fiction genre, which makes it diametrically opposed to Cyberpunk’s dark and grimy dystopian built environment. Perhaps the most well-known Solarpunk-inspired civilisation is Wakanda from Marvel Studios’ Black Panther.

Planet City / Liam Young
Planet City is a wild and unrealistic imaginary metropolis that has been described as “not a proposition” but “a thought experiment”. The concept’s goal is to get us thinking about how ideas for a more regenerative world that we so often encounter in science fiction is entirely possible with the right use of technology.

Planet City envisions how architecture and technology can take on climate change and its impacts by housing 10 billion people — the entire world’s population — in a city that takes up only a fraction of the earth's surface. That would then free up the rest of the world’s land for nature to regenerate.

Aeroponic 2100 Flying Farms / Mcheileh Studio
Aeroponic 2100, from the Dezeen ‘Redesign the World’ competition, proposes aeroponic farms in massive airships that sail through the sky and distribute food to communities all over the world. The aeroponic airships are “climate-controlled, self-sufficient, powered by solar and wind energy, and designed to travel anywhere in the world”, including inaccessible areas.

The scheme explores the possibilities of drigible architecture for a future in which buildings and amenities are more mobile. This not only addresses food insecurity in many parts of the world, but it also optimises agricultural space through vertical farms and eliminates inefficient transportation in food supply chains.

The Word for World is Forest / Angelo Renna and Oleksandr Nenenko
The Word for World is Forest, also from the Dezeen ‘Redesign the World’ competition, proposes covering the entire planet with giant ‘superorganism’ trees that are genetically engineered to use less water, grow more resiliently, and absorb 50 percent more carbon dioxide than naturally grown trees.

Inspired by Ursula K Le Guin’s novel of the same name about a planet completely covered in forest, this proposal imagines how humans all over the world live in symbiosis with giant trees that ensure our survival. Although the concept of engineered ‘super trees’ is not new, the idea that they can one day be found everywhere in our daily lives is provocative.

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