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The cities of the future will be huge and super-dense — but will they also be alive? Could the increasingly complex systems needed to manage the next generation of megacities become our first true artificial intelligence? More »
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Before he invented the safety razor, King Camp Gillette was a futurist. In 1894, he published plans for a porcelain, hexagonal city with transparent sidewalks. Why do so many innovators dream of building the perfect city?

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The next generation of concept artists is paying tribute to the master, Syd Mead, who reinvented cars and city living in his work on Blade Runner, Tron and other films. Here are our favorite entries from CGSociety's Syd Mead contest. More »
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Cisco is a Silicon Valley company that makes routers, and famously helped generate the "great firewall of China" to aid that country's government with internet censorship. Now they're creating an instant, high tech city in Korea, controlled entirely via internet. More »
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Over at WebUrbanist, there's a great post about building cities on Mars, looking at the history of the idea and images of those cities as they might look in the future. [via WebUrbanist, image via Tim Landry] More »
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In 2011, construction will begin on Forwarding Dallas, a hilltop-inspired community that combines renewable energy and rooftop greenery with practical and cost-effective design. Could we be looking at the model for sustainable urban architecture? More »
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The architecture of science fiction has profoundly changed urban design. When building cities of the future, our best guides may be places like comic book megalopolises Mega-City-1 or Transmet. More »
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San Francisco's Bay Bridge is getting a makeover that will leave a large portion of the old bridge unused, but still standing strong. Now two architects are proposing that the city build a neighborhood on it. More »
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Amsterdam is the future - if you think that cities devoted to bicycle transportation are the next step in urban evolution. More »
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Mega-nerd Protohiro compared screenshots of the exact same view of San Francisco from the Star Trek and Terminator Salvation trailers. Here's Trek's super-bright, super-big Frisco. Click through to see Terminator's gloomy, Skynet-infested version. More »
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Shanghai in the year 2027 glimmers with life, setting the Huangpu river ablaze with reflections, in this image from Eidos' long-awaited game Deus Ex 3. Are video games the cutting edge of imagining future cities? More »
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Many countries like Germany (pictured) and Switzerland are now mandating that all new buildings with flat roofs must plant a garden on them. What will cities look like when this practice becomes the norm? More »
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Kibera, a dense, 2.5 square km shantytown outside Nairobi, is the largest slum in Kenya. It's estimated that possibly a million people live its maze of houses and outdoor markets. Now a group there has figured out a fast, efficient way to convert piles of trash into compost — and to convert areas that were once trash heaps into instant organic farms using just recycled PVC piping and other easily-accessible materials. One farm, which now feeds 30 people, was operational in just 3 months. This low-tech form of land reclamation could be a model for rapidly-growing urban populations. More »
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If you have too many cars on the freeway, the best thing to do is go vertical and build a skyscraper road system. Here is one possible way to do that, layering roads on top of each other until the traffic thins out. Perfect for Los Angeles, where it often takes three hours to cross town on the freeways. [Core Form-ula via Next Nature] More »
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Dionisio Gonzalez makes photo mashups of urban spaces, converting every kind of city architecture into twisted, brokedown shanties that look a bit like a Brazilian favela and a bit like chunks of mirrored highrises. Marginal II, above, is a great example of his work. It's a sharp rejoinder to designs that portray future cities as all gleaming towers and green parks. Some of his stuff is so realistic you'll think it's an actual favela . . . until you look carefully. Check it out after the jump. More »
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