What Should Our Future Cities Look Like?

Even being in the year 2017, a year that represented “the future” in the past, humans continue looking forward to further improve and progress. One area that this thought process is employed in would be urban design. Architects, designers, and urban planners create plans for how our future cities should look like, taking into account the strive towards urban sustainability. ABIBOO Studio is an international design firm that focuses on innovation in architecture, urban areas, and interior spaces that allows for the integration of “arts, engineering, economics, sensorial experiences, and technology” (ABIBOO). In this article from ABIBOO’s Think Tank, Juanjo Ortega discussed the different aspects necessary to create an ideal future city, emphasizing urban sustainability as the key to the future. He presented a new strategy, hybrid urbanism, that offers programs for a city population involving projects to preserve natural landscape with architecture and urban planning that will help promote culture and the environment.

A couple of ideas and focuses presented by Ortega include buildings designed to clean the air through a series of green houses that work as filters and creation of terraces for collection of rainwater and agriculture or to bury organic residues to produce power, fertilizers and biogas. The main concept of his ideal future city is to have a “network of effective infrastructures in small areas with mainly touristic buildings where visitors and workers share the resources and the facilities” (Ortega).  The ideas he highlighted in this article involved solutions and innovations that will reform cities to make them more sustainable and more efficient for the future populations to come.