How would you design the city of the future?

I feel like this question is asking a lot of us. There are so many professional fields required to design a city and make it WORK. Water, power, construction, all kinds of engineering is required to do justice for a functional city.

Putting some of that aside, I’d also like to point out that something important to consider is geographic location. What is the typical weather like in each season? What about geological or environmental disasters that have any sort of frequency in the area? Oh, and what about the kinds of technology that would be available? Am I designing it strictly on current standards and trends or can I try to design it to be future proof in the event we somehow get flying cars?

Alright, enough preemptive questions. I’ll just start sharing my actual vision and some logic behind my decisions.

The first thing I would try to solve for is transportation and logistics. Currently, we treat things almost entirely 2-dimensionally. Flat. Sure, we have the overlapping of roads via overpasses and underpasses, or stacked tram/train setups, and a limited capacity for external vertical travel through aircraft and internally through elevators/escalators. There is also the factor of capacity and efficiency. In the USA we have a LOT of personal transportation, which can be highly inefficient and congestive. So, bolstering public/high capacity transportation is necessary. I would also add more layers. I’ll get into that in a bit after I solve private housing.

Again, covering the idea of a mostly flat spread of area, private housing is typically just ground level homes, though we do have condos, apartments, highrises, etc. and I wouldn’t want to just arbitrarily dot the landscape with these flat communities and rob the environment of viable land for other uses or just leaving it as natural. We COULD build more skyscrapers, depending on the geography and environmental concerns, which would solve the urban sprawl issue a little. Then we get back to transportation. Interconnecting the buildings every so often would create interesting layouts and routes of travel for people. Skywalks, aerial trams, things like that could then make a difference.

Then there is the matter of business. In lots of major cities across the USA, businesses are ground level. So, next would be to find a way to blend the businesses into the new “vertical neighborhoods” so that markets and other goods-focused businesses are still easily accessible.

Let’s not forget about schools either. They’ll have to have places that make sense. Schools could probably stay ground level for the most part, and I say this because I’m taking sports and activities into consideration. We don’t currently have anything like Blitz Ball from Final Fantasy X which would have more 3-Dimensional movement. (Granted, when you played Blitz Ball in the game you still moved characters across a flat plane within the giant floating orb of water, and the only time you saw vertical movement was one of Titus’ special moves.)

Alright, I’m realizing this is getting a bit longer than I originally intended, so I’ll cut it off there and just summarize: less horizontal spread, more vertical (but not unrealistically or extreme), and more transportation options that don’t require cars. That’s all, with my limited experience and knowledge in civil engineering and city planning, I can think of when looking at a “city of the future” without flying cars (for now.)