City: 2050

What will your city look like in 2050?

Peering into the future is a favorite exercise for planners and designers. From the Chicago 1893 Columbian Exhibition to New York City’s two Worlds Fairs (1939 and 1965) and beyond, the future was optimistic and filled with cool technology and architecture. But not all views of the future were so hopeful. George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (published in 1949) looked 35 years forward and painted a not-so-rosy vision of the future.

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Roadblocks to an EV Centric World

Image: Pexels.

Today, designers, developers and city planners who struggle to predict and prepare for an autonomous vehicle future – especially with an EV centric component – are overlooking the most obvious constricting factor: the accessibility of power itself. This fragile and archaic infrastructure’s life has been extended through building code modifications and public sector incentives to strike a more environmental way of living, but the result is simply treating the symptoms without curing the illness.

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How Will Mobility's Future Impact Our Cities?

Image © Gensler

This blog piece is based on a Q+A discussion held with Gensler designers Richard Jacob, Michaela Winter-Taylor and Kenneth Allan. It is the first in a series of blog posts that charts the teams’ research and findings as they delve deeper into the future of mobility.

Transportation and mobility are the lifeblood of our cities that form the very real and physical backbone of our increasingly digital economies, but they also come with a downside; noise, congestion, pollution and safety issues. In our pursuit for the holy grail of sustainable, clean, reliable, safe and affordable mobility, will the reality of what’s available ever match our dreams and aspirations?

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Carpe Noctem – Seize the Night: London’s Night Tube Launches

Image courtesy of Pedro Szekely.

On Friday, Aug. 19, London launches its first Night Tube service, which will provide night-time services to travellers on Friday and Saturday nights. With this highly anticipated addition to the city’s transportation network, London will finally be able to contend with Berlin, New York and Tokyo to call itself a 24-hour city.

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Unleashing the #PowerOfUs

Image © Gensler

On June 11, I had the privilege of giving a TEDx talk, at TEDxBrum, sharing a platform with Birmingham’s most pioneering thinkers from across every discipline, background and culture. I came away not just with a wealth of inspiration and ideas, but also a heightened curiosity of what, collectively, could be achieved by this heterogeneous metropolis if we unleashed the #PowerOfUs.

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