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Will the cities of the future be like those we see in sci-fi films because the scriptwriters were true visionaries, or simply because we copy what we see at the cinema?

I will not turn philosophical on you (at least not in this life), but it is clear that our minds obtain food for thought from science fiction with its visionary images of potential future cities. It’s hard to contemplate a future without drawing references from one film or another. From dream cities, saved by science and technology, like we see in the film Gattaca, through to Goth towns like the city in Blade Runner, where we see the other side of the technology coin, a future in which people are alienated (and in which it rains every day!). Or series like Futurama, in which the worth of a human being is reduced to the 25 US cents it costs to use one of the suicide booths you find on all street corners. When we look at today’s town planning projects and utopian architecture, we realise just how similar they are to what we’ve been shown in sci-fi films.

The architecture studio MAD, based in Beijing, stands as a reference in the area of futuristic projects. Just take a look at their “mobile Chinatown”. It’s amazing. The idea is no more and no less than to create a whole mobile Chinese city to replace the traditional Chinatowns found in most cities around the world.

Proyecto “A mobile Chinatown” by MAD

This star shaped mobile city, which would travel around the world recycling its own waste and producing its own energy, would provide homes for up to 15,000 members of the Chinese Community. Now, just how it is meant to do all this is not exactly clear! It’s bound to look like something you’d expect to find in an episode of Star Trek.

Another utopian concept is the hO2+ Scraper, a kind of floating city which was presented at the Skyscraper Competition 2010. The idea is a city built on floating surfaces with its buildings growing out of the water. Its designers believe it a good option with a view to the devastating effects of global warming and the thawing of the polar caps. All sounds a bit familiar doesn’t it? Remember the Kevin Costner film Waterworld?

Such futuristic town planning projects owe a debt to the utopian architecture of the nineteen sixties, with architects such as Archizoom or Archigram designing projects that were as impossible as they were provocative, more in line with the work of the conceptual artist than anything else. Projects that could only exist in one’s head, projects impossible to realise. With its ‘Continuos Monument’ project the Italian Superstudio, for example, suggested a kind of superstructure which would permit us to stroll above the city roofs, a kind of platform inspired by catwalks or disco stages (ah, the sixties, those were the days..)

Superstudio’s ‘Continuos Monument’ project

Archigram went even further and designed walking cities!, cities that could move themselves from one place to the other..

And although MIT’s  experts don’t foresee any great change in appearance, our mind’s eye will continue to see, be it through the cinema, literature or town planning, all sorts of possible cities of the future. Dreaming is, after all, free!

What about you? Tell us in the comments how will be your dreamed future city!