I launched a new blog today: City of Tomorrow designed to help capture ideas for the development of cities in the near future.
What is City of Tomorrow?
City of Tomorrow is a Civil Imagineering (as opposed to Civil Engineering) project to have individuals imagine the city of tomorrow and then explain this from the point of view of an observer in the future. We want to think of, and describe, features of our future cities and hopefully imagineer dates by which these things will be achieved.
What do we hope to achieve?
We’re at the Imagineering stage so we’re just looking for ideas. As we get closer to the dates mentioned, then we’re going to look for ways to implement these things.
When?
For the purposes of this web site, the date is now 2025 AD or later. We all live in magnificent cities which have witnessed more than a decade of revolution in architecture and design, in transportation planning, in social re-engineering and a complete re-write of the planning laws.
The writers here will provide a retrospective look at what happened in the past to get to where we are (in the metaphorical) today. We’ll provide important dates of when things happened, attempt to give links and credit to people who made the greatest changes and at some point in the future (in real time) review how much we got right, how much we got wrong.
Part of this comes from attending a CityCampLDN (CityCamp London) in February and meeting some of the “civil entrepreneurs” who attended.
CityCamp LDN brings together city leaders at all levels from government, business and community organisations to reimagine the way in which technology can help to reshape the future of London.
I know we have more folk who are interested in this – and this is definitely not a Belfast-centric piece of work – but we have to think about our cities first just due to the population. I hope that progressive town and borough councils will steal these ideas – I hope even more to get them engaged.
Later in 2011, I’d like to hold a City of Tomorrow event in Belfast and/or Derry-Londonderry to see if there are others interested but for now I’d appreciate any comments or tweets you have.