One of humanity's biggest obsessions is trying to figure out
how cities are going to look like in the future by the year 2050.
68% of the world's population is projected to live in urban areas,
but most cities are not prepared for this.
We have congestion, crime, a housing crisis,
and just an endless array of problems that come up when you try
to pack a massive amount of people in a small footprint.
Science fiction envisions
a world that's adapted to these conditions through technology.
These problems have either been eradicated or worsened,
and some sci fi has been way off, but someone's been kind of spot on.
But either way, they've pushed the boundaries in our thinking and
they've given us a glimpse into the future and how we could be living,
how we could be interacting with our environments and with each other.
So today
I want to look at three sci fi movies with really interesting city concepts
and break them down from a design and urban planning point of view.
This video is sponsored and brainstormed with Milanote
More on them later in this video.
The movie is based on a future world
Crime level has gotten so bad that it's gone into a perpetual state
of martial law.
The police have dual function as judges so they can
give you a sentence on the spot, including the death penalty.
The setting mega-city one is a giant megalopolis
that spans most of eastern U.S.
and some of Canada, which, by the way, is really close to the East Coast.
Mega region in real life and the architecture of the city
actually acts as a form of surveillance in controlling the people.
People live in these really dense residential towers with these
nice big atriums,
but when there's a crime in the building, it automatically triggers
a system that locks you in and keeps you contained in the building.
The real building, Ponte Tower, which is a residential tower near Johannesburg.
That tower has eerie parallels to the one in the movie
when it was first built in the seventies.
It was a really desirable address, but very quickly turned into a slum.
It was hijacked by gangs at some point, and now
it's like a symbol for crime and urban decay in the city.
The decline was largely due to the social and political conditions
at the time, but architecturally speaking, it's brutalist.
You know, there's a lot of similarities with the Panopticon concept,
which is the universal design concept for prisons.
And I think it's this imposing architecture
that turned this building into a symbol of decay.
You know, architecture is not just for living in or working in.
It's also a symbol.
And the movie actually uses these towers as a symbol of order and surveillance.
Like a lot of real city designs, one of the best examples would be this guy.
His ideas for cities inspired a lot of developments throughout
the world, and it's had a huge impact on how cities are designed today.
In 1920s, Le Corbusier created several city plans
to heal Paris from its problems.
It was Congest it.
It was dirty, it was deteriorating.
And his solution was to erase the entire city and replace it with this.
He believed this would create order and harmony by separating
all of the different functions within a city like industrial,
commercial, residential, recreational, and all the different traffic arteries.
They would all be set up in different zones.
Open space was a priority for air circulation
because it was so lacking in Paris.
So he designed these blocks to have tons of open space and circulation space
by packing more density into a smaller footprint.
This was never really implemented in Paris.
Thank God, but many housing projects throughout the world took this approach
and they actually became kind of awful places to live.
If you separate all of these functions, you get dead zones throughout the day.
You go to work during the day.
You come back home during the evening.
And if you have to work late, walking in this office area
becomes kind of dangerous because the streets are dead.
Same with the residential areas.
During certain hours, there's like nobody on the streets.
All the activity, like restaurants or bar hours
that would be open late are in a separate zone.
And that's why well-designed cities.
There's a mixture of different uses.
There's shops, restaurants, offices and apartments.
So you can get a constant flow of activity and eyes on the streets.
Cities and neighborhoods become a lot safer and more lively.
When you have this kind of organic surveillance.
But in Corbusier's designs,
this was never really considered, which created really unsafe areas.
And the need for constant surveillance.
So in a future where crime rate is through the roof, it's
not really an accident that they use this type of city design in this movie.
Whenever I make a video like this, it takes up a lot of research
and brainstorming and up until recently we used to collect
all the research in a document, but it started to get kind of limited.
So when Milanote
reached out, to be honest, I hadn't heard of them before.
So I wanted to make sure I tried it out for a bit before I shared it
with you guys.
So we tried brainstorming on this idea board, and we actually used this to guide
the entire research for this video, and we really liked it.
Just having a visual board makes everything super clear and
it kind of allowed us to make connections that we didn't really see before.
They have really nice templates for different types
of work from research, moodboard and storyboard.
And once we had a rough idea of which movies we wanted to talk about,
we could drag and drop different notes and links.
And the best thing is that it actually converts the links into thumbnails.
So you don't need to download anything to put it on your board.
All of this is on the cloud and you can share it with other people.
Milanote. is free with no time limit, so you can sign up
using the link in the description and start your next creative project.
I'm actually really curious how you guys use Milano,
so if you liked it, just let me know in the comments.
The movie The Fifth Element depicts
a megacity that solved the population crisis by building vertically.
These towers go on for miles and miles and miles and they use flying
cars and public transit, navigating in three dimensions to get around.
Natural light and ventilation is an issue, and the further you go down,
it gets worse and worse.
Even above, it's not really the nicest conditions.
People live in these little pods with like little to no personalization.
Building vertically makes a lot of sense, especially if it's a city
with a clear perimeter.
There's a lot of efficiencies when your infrastructure can serve
more people in a smaller footprint.
There's a couple of technologies
that would often evolve to make this scenario plausible.
You would need flying cars or some sort of vertical transportation,
which is actually not that far fetched.
They're already testing these automated taxi drones.
We would also need new materials and new construction technology.
Like, for example, there's this new type of bio concrete.
I can heal its own cracks.
There's also been a lot of development and heavy timber construction, for example.
We have the tallest wood tower being built in Japan,
which is obviously huge because you can offset a lot of the carbon footprint.
I think more than the material strength, it's the construct ability
that's going to be a bigger issue.
How do you get materials that high?
It's fine when it's like 30 or 40 storeys, but when it goes up to
like 100 storeys, the concrete starts to harden.
And that's problematic.
You know, Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.
They created a special mixture that can travel in liquid form
over a long distance.
And they're going to keep coming up
with these new solutions for these new challenges.
But maybe the construction doesn't even happen at ground level.
Maybe it starts at an intermediate level that acts as another ground plane.
In fact, you can see a lot of bridges connecting different buildings.
If you want to go from here to here, it doesn't really make sense for you
to have to go all the way down to get to another building.
And we actually do have cities, mostly colder,
windy cities like Minneapolis or Calgary that have smaller
versions of these bridges, and they're called skyways.
People park their cars, they go to work,
they go shopping, and they can do all of this without going outside.
One of the reasons I moved away from Toronto was because of the cold.
So I really, truly appreciate these internal pathways, but
it's kind of a problem because not everyone gets to use them.
These skyways are privately owned because they connect private buildings.
So the developers don't really have an incentive to make them more welcoming.
In fact, when the city of Minneapolis hired architectural consultants
to improve the accessibility to the skyways,
most of the developers response was
that they don't really want to attract the wrong kind
of people in an entire city that's connected with skyways.
It really makes me wonder where is the line between public and private?
Let's talk about the constructability again for a sec.
A lot of people think that the problem with tall
buildings is the weight of the building,
but actually the bigger issue is the force of the wind on the building.
We call this the lateral force.
Basically, the higher you go, the stronger the wind force
is going to be on the building.
Like if you have a wind force of ten kilometers
an hour at the bottom of a building, it can go up to like 70 or 80 on top.
And apparently at the top of the Burj Khalifa, it's like 200 kilometers an hour.
And it's also really unpredictable.
A common concept when it comes to tall buildings is torquing,
not twerking, torquing.
It's like twisting.
One of the solutions is exterior bracing.
It holds the building in place and it stops it from twisting.
A lot of these buildings will probably look more like this.
Another solution is
the original concept is from Frank Lloyd Wright in his mile high tower.
It's dense at the bottom and it tapers at the top.
When it was built, it was pretty revolutionary.
But now you have the Burj Khalifa and other skyscrapers using the same concept.
But the problem with this
is that you need to make the bottom so fat to get a smaller top,
and it's just not really economical to drop off so much mass at the top.
So one of the new solutions is by Calatrava in Dubai,
and it's going to be the tallest tower in the world.
And I think it's kind of genius.
Instead of bracing it or bundling it, they've got cables
attached throughout the building to hold it when it sways.
So, for example, when the building wants to sway this
way, it'll have cables pulling from this side.
And if the building wants to sway this way, it'll have cables
pulling from the side.
By the way, if you guys want more information
on these structural kits, I'll leave the link in the description.
I mean, just a couple hundred years ago, people would have never thought
of skyscrapers.
You know, we only started getting these since the invention of elevators.
So probably in the future, with new materials and new technology,
we're probably going to be able to get like 500 stories or a thousand stories.
I think the bigger problem is going to be how can we create equitable
spaces throughout?
You know, like I said, there's this blurring of the private
and public spaces, but also having this height naturally
creates the really desirable spaces at the top
and the really undesirable section at the bottom.
We would need artificial lighting that really closely mimics daylight
and also a way to provide fresh air for the lower areas.
But also just making sure that we have the right policies in place
to not create these social divides between these sections.
It doesn't really matter how tall you can build
if there isn't a way to move around efficiently.
Minority Report has a much more comprehensive vision of how a city
could completely reshape itself based on this new transportation system.
Instead of flying cars, they have these maglev pods
that travel on these dedicated lanes which are integrated into the urban fabric.
And they even become a part of the building's facade.
The design of these is actually really cool.
It's got an internal gyroscope so that you can stay upright,
whether you're traveling horizontally or vertically.
It's self-driving.
It's controlled by a centralized A.I..
So if you trust the government, you just hop
in, put in your destination, and boom, you're there.
It takes out the human error factor so there's less chances of collisions,
and they can maneuver in a way that can solve a lot of these congestion issues.
Now, this type of infrastructure is kind of
a similar idea to the one in fifth element.
But the biggest difference is that you can go straight
from your destination to your apartment and you don't need to go outside at all.
And I think that would change the social dynamics in so many ways.
There's a kind of forced social interaction
that happens just by the fact that you live close to someone
and you run into each other in lobbies or in the elevators.
And if these lobbies or amenity spaces are designed in a way
that encourages social interaction, then you get to know your neighbors.
So even if you don't have any friends or family,
at least you have the people around you that you can interact with.
That's the traditional idea of a community
and having neighbors with more and more towers being built.
This idea of community has been slowly and slowly
disintegrating, which adds to the social isolation.
But maybe a system like this could actually democratize buildings.
These days we have a lot of sky gardens and amenity spaces within buildings,
but they can only be used through the building.
So by having the ability to access the building from different points.
Maybe some of these spaces
could be made accessible to the public or to paid members through an app.
All of this is really exciting, but who knows?
Maybe in the future our built environments are just going to be secondary
and we're going to be spending more time in the virtual reality.
Or maybe cities become cool organisms
to protect against natural disasters or a threat of war.
Or maybe we just stop trying to improve the city altogether.
Mark Wigley once said architecture never derived its force
from stability of culture, but rather from the expression
of those moments when the sense of stability slipped.
If we can agree on one thing, I think it's that we're living
in really uncertain times, and this is the breeding ground
for a lot of the changes in the environment.
There's a lot to unpack here,
so let me know what you think in the comments.
And if you want to know more about architecture,
I'm going to leave a playlist at the end of this.
And if you like sci fi or dystopian architecture,
you should probably have a look at my Neom and Burning Man videos.
Don't forget to like and subscribe and I'll see you guys in
the next video.