The village is located in the heart of Vancouver.

Here are some of the green features built into the Village, which will hold Olympic competitors and visitors during the 2010 Olympics, but then be converted into a sustainable community afterwards:

* Neighbourhood energy system an environmentally-friendly community energy system that will provide space heating and domestic hot water to all buildings in the Southeast False Creek re-development area.
* Urban agriculture
* Rainwater management systems with 50% reduction in water consumption through harvesting and re-use of rainwater
* Green roofs
* Island and inter-tidal fish habitat
* Seaside greenway and bikeway

Planners say that the area, called Southeast False Creek, will be home to 12,000 to 16,000 people by 2020. They will live in 5,000 high-density, high-efficiency homes.

via Olympic Village Site

Photo by Stephanie Lamy/AFP/Getty Images

Local pro-bike blog Copenhagenize reports that the city is planning a series of super bicycle routes from the suburbs, for people who bike more than 10K to get to work. The idea is to create roads where people can ride their bicycles steadily at over 20 km per hour, without worrying that they'll have to deal with too much car traffic or with passing other bikes on narrow roads.

Copenhagenize writes:

The routes will be developed on the existing bike lanes but they will have a number of improved features, according to the City's vision:

- Smooth, even surfaces free of leaves, ice and snow.
- As direct as possible with no detours.
- Homogenous visual expression, for example, with signage and the trademark blue bike lanes through larger intersections.
- 'Service stations' with air and tools along the routes.
- Possibility to maintain a high speed and with sufficient width to overtake other cyclists.
- Safe and quick crossing priority for cyclists when they approach cross streets.
- Green Wave for cyclists through sections with frequent stop lights. [The Green Wave is in place on three main routes into Copenhagen already. Cycle 20 km/h and you hit green lights all the way.]

If the future of urban transport is the bicycle, and many city planners as well as energy experts argue that it is, then surely this kind of road represents the future of commuting. A similar plan is underway in the Danish city of Aarhus too.

via Copenhagenize

Bruce Sterling, interviewed by Slashdot's readers in 1999, says that what we think of as community in meatspace is actually a collection of complex infrastructure, and we tend to understimate how vital that stuff is:

Q: It seems that many modern science fiction authors see the future as a time when society gives up on "physical" community in favor of technology. (i.e ruined govt, city states, corporate martial powers, etc..) Do you see this as an amplification of the state of community in today's world, or is it simply a convenient literary device?

A: I think the physical community was a "technology." Irrigation canals, harbors, army barracks, police stations, cathedrals, factories, clocks, forks, running water, that's all "technology."

There are a lot more ruined governments right now than there are sound ones. That's not a literary device. Go try living under a ruined government. Moscow right now — it's about the most William-Gibsonian landscape you are ever likely to see.

And more recently in 2006, BLDGBLOG talked to Jeff VanderMeer about the biggest mistake that science-fiction writers tend to make in thinking about cities and their infrastructure:

BLDGBLOG: How do you achieve – or hope to achieve – believability in an urban setting, giving readers something that (they think) might actually exist?

VanderMeer: As a novelist who is uninterested in replicating "reality" but who is interested in plausibility and verisimilitude, I look for the organizing principles of real cities and for the kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that occur within them. Then I take what I need to be consistent with whatever fantastical city I'm creating. For example, there is a layering effect in many great cities. You don't just see one style or period of architecture. You might also see planning in one section of a city and utter chaos in another. The lesson behind seeing a modern skyscraper next to a 17th-century cathedral is one that many fabulists do not internalize and, as a result, their settings are too homogenous.

Somehow these two quotes, juxtaposed, feel like fruitful ground for some urban world-building. Don't understimate the weight of the past — and don't forget just how much complex technology has gone into building a physical community. Any city, especially a future one, will be littered with the debris of past community-building, and will most likely be broken in some fascinating ways. In other words: don't make your fictional cities too tidy, or you'll be left with a sterile planned community.

Moscow decay image via Seriykotik1970 on Flickr.

One of the most haunting images from recent science fiction is the garbage city where trash-compacting robot Wall-E has lived for hundreds of years. Abandoned by the humans who polluted it, the Earth has become a planet of skyscrapers made of compact blocks of garbage created by Wall-E and his cohort. But now even Wall-E's fellow robots have become garbage, their bodies good for nothing but scavenging spare parts.

The garbage cities of Wall-E represent a classic fear expressed in both fiction and public discussion about human civilization. Put simply, we fear that the good parts of our cities - the culture and science and progress - will be unable to outrun the waste, crime, and greed spawned by urban decay.

But the city is also utopian, representing the very best that human civilization has to offer. Cities tease us with the possibility of living in a place where clean energy and scientific progress have released humans from the realm of necessity. No longer forced to squabble over scarce resources to survive, the humans in these cities are free to explore ideas, creating new technologies and art.

The density of human life in cities breeds what Fritz Lieber dubbed "megalopolisomancy," or city magic. With so many lives interconnected by time and space in one small area, you're bound to start seeing ghosts. There's something dark and mystical about urban life, where possibility shades into probability without much warning. Spasms of weath generate surreal structures and events; vast communities of artists build imaginary worlds in the middle of the street. If mirrored buildings can disappear into clouds, and shop windows promise perfect bodies draped in gold, why can't vampires lurk in alleys and mutants live in storm drains?

All week long, io9 will take you into the breathtaking, bizarre, and mysterious world of the city. We'll cover everything from great science fictional cities, to cities of the future that already exist today. In art and in stories, we'll explore urban fantasy, urban reality, and urban science. Cities are humanity at its highest concentration. As they stand or fall, so does humanity.

Images, from top to bottom, via:
Viktor Antonov
Wall-E
Tomorrow's Thoughts Today
Audic at Deviant Art

Over the past two days I've been exploring Amsterdam, a city known for its unconventional transportation network. People get around scooters, motorized bicycles, cars, and even on canal boats, using canals mostly built during the city's great expansion in the 17th century. But most of all, they ride bicycles.

In fact Amsterdam is truly a bicycle city, with every road containing bike lines – and even some with traffic lights aimed only at bicycle riders. Amsterdam has become a bike city for a couple of reasons: First, it's almost entirely flat; and second, many of the brick-paved roads and bridges are so narrow that they seem uniquely suited to bike and scooter traffic (though cars still zoom down most of them too).

Amsterdam bike riders do not fetishize their rides. Bikes are cheap, heavy, and practical, with wide, comfortable seats. Chains are surrounded by metal guards so that you can ride in pants or skirts, and you'll often see people riding one-handed, cigarettes or umbrellas held in their free hands. There are no fixies here, and no ultra-expensive made-to-orders. People hack their bikes together, adding saddlebags to the back or baby chairs and carts to the front. Every intersection rings with the sounds of bells, the bicycle equivalent of honking. And every wall, pole, and bikerack is a crazy jumble of handlebars, wheels, and seats.

Perhaps the most amazing bicycle structure in the city is the free bike parking lot outside the central train station, on the harbor in the old city. This is a touristy area, but most of the bikes belong to local commuters. From a distance, the three-story structure looks almost furry because so many small pieces of metal are sticking out all over it. Though built to hold about 1700 bikes, the place regularly packs in 7000-8000 bikes, according to a bike lot attendant I spoke to.

Outside the bike lot, a white truck with an open bed lies in wait. It belongs to a group that enforces bike parking laws, cutting chains and confiscating bikes parked in illegal spots (chained to signs, for example) and putting warning stickers on bikes that have been parked for more than a few days in the parking lot. Impounded bikes are taken to an area at the edge of the city, and are released to their owners for 10 euros.

For many of us, a bicycle parking lot like this is an unprecedented sight. We're used to multi-layer car parking lots which cost a tremendous amount per day. But a free parking lot packed with bikes? For people who dream of a bicycle-dominated future, this is like a glimpse of the future, or an alternate world.

The SharedWorlds project sends teens on a two-week camp focusing on science fiction and fantasy, at Wofford College in South Carolina. Assistant director and instructor (and io9 contributor) Jeff VanderMeer curated the discussion, asking the authors, "What's your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"

Those four authors listed above, plus Elizabeth Hand, weighed in, and the evocative descriptions will make you want to dust off your passport and go traveling. The five chosen cities couldn't be more different from each other — some (like London) are shiny and high-tech, others (like Venice) are ancient and crabby.

In the process, you learn a lot about what each author considers fascinating about cities. Le Guin and Moorcock both seem to find the weight of history, settling onto a city or driving it into the ground, compelling and fecund with storytelling possibilities. Miéville seems to find London's lack of planning, its crazed ad-hoc development, exciting. Nalo Hopkinson finds Kingstown's mix of high and low technology, cobbled together, to be futuristic in a William Gibson-esque way. And then there's Hand's forceful argument that Reykyavik is like an outpost on an alien world.

Most fascinating of all? No cities in the United States — and none in Asia, either. I would have expected somebody to reach for Shanghai or Mumbai, which are being touted as the most "futuristic" cities by many observers. My personal pick? Hong Kong. I lived there for many years, and its crazily shifting landscape (buildings constantly being torn down, put up, torn down again, and tons of bizarre business schemes blossoming all over) felt like a future megacity at times.

The full list, with each author's comments, is well worth checking out. [Shared Worlds]

Here's the bleak post-Judgment Day version:

It's pretty striking to see the exact same shot as portrayed in two very different movies, and it underscores how different the two films' views of the future (and of technology) really are. And just for good measure, Protohiro also posted almost the same view, as it looks today:

[Protohiro on Flickr]

[SFIst]

These concept designs are by TROPICOOL @ KL, and emulate the several layers of a tropical forest, with the canopy flying high over the rest of the damp flora and fauna. The idea is that cities of the future might create mini-ecosystems based on ones found in nature. According to Inhabitat:

The structure's circular tops are composed of miniature solar panels that provide a power source while mimicking the process of photosynthesis that takes place in rainforest canopies. Scattered throughout the branches of the mushroom tops are dwellings modeled after the Malaysian [style].

These energy-generating skyscraper neighborhoods look like high-density housing for a future world of high performance buildings that generate their own power - and their own food supplies too.

via Inhabitat

It seems like every day, we come across about the "city car of the future." It's usually lightweight and next-gen, with an electric battery, solar panels, and lots of nano-carbon-fibres everywhere. To be honest, a lot of these designs look like kids' toys. Stuff like this. Or this. Not to mention this. Or hey, how about this foldable city car? These super-future cars always look teeny and clown-sized, plus they'll probably cost a fortune and fall apart the moment someone even looks at them harshly. Plus they're almost always one- or two-person vehicles.

Slightly more believable are some of the fancy public transportation ideas people come up with, like light rail or maglev trains. Or this crazy (but sorta cool) London bus:

But really, the more we think about it, the more we feel like the future of urban transportation in the first world will look the way it does now in the third world. That is, the boundaries between personal cars, buses and taxis will get blurred, and transport will have to be cheaper and more flexible.

A 2007 paper by the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions agreed — the Institute suggested a "Smart Jitney" system could be pressed into service quickly, and could reduce gasoline consumption and greenhouse gases by 50 to 75 percent. (Those numbers seem awfully optimistic to me. But you never know.)

As the Institute's report says, most U.S. cities don't have the density to make real mass transit (light rail, etc.) feasible. And electric batteries and hydrogen fuel cells aren't yet at the point where they're feasible for mass consumption. Blame our individualistic, car-centered culture — the Institute does — but we've created a system where only cars can serve our needs.

So we have to look to the jitney instead. Says the Institute:

A jitney is defined as a small bus that carries passengers over a regular route on a flexible schedule. Another definition of a jitney is basically an unlicensed taxicab. Basically, a jitney is a form of mass transit using cars and vans, not passenger buses. Jitneys typically are not required to travel specific routes on a specific schedule as are trains, buses and streetcars. They are both ancient and contemporary.

A friend of mine from Kenya said there are tons of van services there, which compete partly based on the type of music they play. There's the reggae bus, the hip-hop bus, etc. With private operators running their own van services, you could have whatever type of atmosphere, from professional to party bus, you wanted.

Best of all, the "smart jitney" system could use existing vehicles — all those soccer-mom SUVs and minivans are just crying out to be pressed into service.

The "smart" part of "smart jitney" involves using high tech to provide an extra margin of safety. Like, each jitney could have an Auto Event Recorder to make sure the driver is being safe and observing speed limits. You could have an online "reservation tracking system" which you could access via cellphone or internet.

Already, some cities are experimenting with a smart carpooling system, where drivers pick up random strangers. For example, in Oakland, CA, you can wait near a supermarket parking lot, at a smart carpooling stop, and drivers will come looking for people who need rides into San Francisco. Passengers share the price of gas.

These ideas are nothing new. As far back as 1968, the Johnson administration issued a 100-page report to Congress on the future of urban transportation, which hailed super-futuristic ideas such as the dial-a-bus, "a hybrid between an ordinary bus and a taxi." It would use the miracle of computers to keep track of people's transportation orders, and pick up passengers at or near their homes as required. Other ideas in the report included Personal Rapid Transit, a kind of light rail system with individual cars that your family could ride in, and "dualmode" systems that could be cars or rail cars, depending on the situation.

More recently, syndicated columnist George Will has written about the injustice of urban transit regulations. Cities hoard taxi "medallions," carefully regulating the number of cabdrivers and making it nigh impossible for new entrants to come into the system. Even worse, most cities ban "jitney" services, which are often the only way low-income people can get around. (A jitney is basically like a taxi service, except that it picks up as many people as will fit in the car, and then takes them, in turn, to their destinations.) I remember reading Will's columns on the subject a few times, but the most recent one I can find right now is a 2003 column in which he commented that Houston had "emancipated the providers of jitney services."

It's a perfect instance of well-meaning regulations holding back services that could actually help the most vulnerable people. Limits on taxi licenses might help keep taxi companies viable and allow for safety inspections, but they also help to leave tons of low-income people stranded.

The city was located in a region of the Amazon known as Upper Xingu (today in Brazil), which is currently inhabited by people of the Kuikoro tribe. Members of the Kuikoro helped identify the remains of the towns to scientists. In this satellite photo (below), the red lines are raised berms that would have served to elevate roads and plazas, while black lines show ditches that were used for defensive purposes.

Scientists have found about 28 ancient town sites in the region, each of which they estimate probably contained about 800-1000 in the "inner city" area, and about 1500 more in outlying farm areas. So each town probably had about 2500 people, making the region really quite dense and populous.

According to MSNBC:

Each village had a central plaza, the team reports. Larger communities could cover 150 acres (60 hectares) and included gates and secondary plazas. And each settlement had a formal road connected to the central plaza and oriented northeast to southwest, the direction of the summer solstice . . . . [Anthropology professor Mike] Heckenberger and his colleagues said the findings suggest future solutions for supporting the modern-day indigenous populations in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso and other regions of the Amazon — and demonstrate that the area can return to a "pristine" state even after centuries of human activity.

"Some of the practices that these folks hammered out may provide alternative forms of understanding how to do low-level sustainable development today," Heckenberg said.

No one knows for sure what happened to the city, but one of the more common theories is that its population was wiped out by diseases brought by European colonists about 500 years ago.

How the Amazon's Cities Worked [MSNBC]

Here's the streamlined Venus airport where you'll arrive in your super-spaceage plane.
Check out the main meeting center, where the vast digital library filled with artificial intelligences will be housed.
This just makes me think of Disney World, which makes sense because The Venus Institute is located in Florida (where Disney World lives too).
More awesome housing, above, and some beautiful sea-going cities below.

Want to learn more? Visit the Venus Project.

According to Freedom Ship International, the city will have:

* 18,000 living units, with prices in the range of $180,000 to $2.5 million, including a small number of premium suites currently priced up to $44 million.
* 3,000 commercial units in a similar price range
* 2,400 time-share units
* 10,000 hotel units
* A World Class Casino
* A ferryboat transportation system that provides departures every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, to 3 or more local cities giving ship residents access to the local neighborhood and up to 30,000 land-based residents a chance to spend a day on the ship.
* A World-Class Medical Facility practicing Western and Eastern medicine as well as preventive and anti-aging medicine.
* A School System that gives the students a chance to take a field trip into a different Country each week for academic purposes or to compete with local schools in numerous sporting events. For example; The Freedom Ship High School Soccer team plays a Paris High School team this week at home and an Italian team next week in Italy, while the Freedom Ship High School Band presents a New Orleans Jazz musical at a concert hall in London.
* An International Trade Center that gives on-board companies and shops the opportunity to show and sell their products in a different Country each week.
* More than 100 acres of outdoor Park, Recreation, Exercise and Community space for the enjoyment of residents and visitors.

Freedom Ship International

Seeds that spread on the wind in cities mostly wind up dead on the concrete, while seeds that fall usually find a spot to grow in the same street plots or concrete cracks where their parents grew. (You can see the two kinds of seeds at left.) Because seeds grew up so close to home, the plants evolved super quickly — sort of an urban Galapagos Islands effect. (One of the ways that Darwin first observed natural selection was on a trip past the tiny, isolated Galapagos Islands, each of which had evolved its own unique types of finches that interbred quickly and in isolation from finches on other islands.)

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the researchers' study today, noting:

The authors took Crepis sancta seeds from several locations in the city of Montpellier, France, and grew the plants in a greenhouse, observing what fraction of seeds produced were of the light, easily dispersed type. Compared to plants from the countryside, plants from urban patches consistently produced fewer light seeds. Based on a mathematical model of breeding, the researchers estimate that the current version of urban Crepis sancta took approximately 12 years to evolve. They report that plants in a fragmented urban setting thus become doubly isolated, as reduced seed dispersal would likely lower gene flow and hence chances of species survival.

Rapid evolution of C. sancta [PNAS]

Here's a traffic jam created by checkpoints outside the city of Baghdad. And here is a great vision of future parking in a climate-changed British city.

Baghdad traffic at checkpoint by Jamesdale10.

Cars underwater in England by dubaddict.

Hyderabad traffic by Alex Graves.

One of the things that's most interesting about the Bike 2015 Plan is that it calls for the city to intervene in bike safety and maintenance. It also lays out plans for several studies showing what optimal layouts for bike-friendly city streets would be, as well as what kinds of signs work best to protect bikers from zooming cars (known among bikers as "death machines"). Possibly most interesting are the ample links to bike-friendly strategies in other cities, which gives you a sense of how common it is these days for cities to plan with bicycles in mind. Now all Chicago needs is more funding to implement its plan, which is posted online in easily-browsed chunks. Check it out.

Bike 2015 Plan [via FutureScanner]

Raymond Hood, who designed the Art Deco masterpiece at 20 Rockefeller Plaza in 1933, created a proposal in 1929 for a 1950s Manhattan joined to Brooklyn and New Jersey by a latticework of "skyscraper" bridges that could house people on the water and ease cross-water traffic, effectively eroding the boundaries between the island and its neighbors across the rivers. Needless to say, the idea was never put into effect.

Another famous plan spawned in the 1920s for New York's future came from The Regional Plan of New York and its Environs, and called for linked highrise apartment buildings along the Hudson waterfront. All images from The Skyscraper Museum.

Future City 20|21 [via Paleo-Future]