This is stuff the U.S. Army pays people to think about.
And one thing they think about is the urban landscape.
Here are a couple of the scenarios, from the blog of the U.S. Army's Mad Scientist Laboratory, January 19, 2019:
[Editor’s Note: Mad Scientist welcomes back returning guest blogger Dr. Nir Buras
with today’s post. We’ve found crowdsourcing (i.e., the gathering of
ideas, thoughts, and concepts from a widespread variety of interested
individuals) to be a very effective tool in enabling us to diversify our
thoughts and challenge our assumptions. Dr. Buras’ post takes the
results from one such crowdsourcing exercise and extrapolates three
future urban scenarios. Given The Army Vision‘s clarion call to “Focus training on high-intensity conflict, with emphasis on operating in dense urban terrain,” our readers would do well to consider how the Army would operate in each of Dr. Buras’ posited future scenarios…]
Thechallenges
of the 21st century have been forecast and are well-known. In many ways
we are already experiencing the future now. But predictions are hard to
validate. A way around that is turning to slightly older predictions to
illuminate the magnitude of the issues and the reality of their
propositions.1Futurists William E. Halal and Michael Marien’s predictions of 2011 have aged enough to be useful. In an improved version of theDelphi method,
they iteratively built consensus among participants. Halal and Marien
balanced the individual sense of over sixty well-qualified experts and
thinkers representing a range of technologies with facilitated feedback
from the others. They translated their implicit or tacit know how to
make qualified quantitative empirical predictions.2
From their research we can transpose three future urban scenarios: TheHigh-Tech City, The Feral City, and Muddling Through.
The High-Tech City
The High-Tech City scenario is based primarily on futurist Jim Dator’s
high-tech predictions. It envisions the continued growth of a
technologically progressive, upwardly mobile, internationally dominant,
science-guided, rich, leisure-filled, abundant, and liberal society.
Widespread understanding of what works largely avoids energy shortages,
climate change, and global conflict.3
The
high-tech, digital megacity is envisaged as a Dubai on steroids. It is
hyper-connected and energy-efficient, powered by self-sustaining,
renewable resources and nuclear energy.4
Connected by subways and skyways, with skyscraping vertical gardens,
the cities are ringed by elaborately managed green spaces and
ecosystems. The city’s 50 to 150-story megastructures,
“cities-in-buildings,” incorporate apartments, offices, schools and
grocery stores, hospitals and shopping centers, sports facilities and
cultural centers, gardens, and running tracks. Alongside them rise
vertical farms housing animals and crops. The rooftop garden of the 2015
filmHigh Rise depicts how aerial terraces up high provide a sense of suburban living in the high-tech city.5
On
land, zero-emission driverless traffic zips about on intelligent
highways. High-speed trains glide silently by. After dark, spider bots
and snake drones automatically inspect and repair buildings and
infrastructure.6
In the air, helicopters, drones, and flying cars zoom around. Small
drones, mimicking insects and birds, and programmable nano-chips, some
as small as “smart” dust, swarm over the city into any object or shape
on command. To avoid surface traffic, inconvenience, and crime,
wealthier residents fly everywhere.7
Dominated by centralized government and private sector bureaucracies wielding AI, these self-constructing robotic “cyburgs”
have massive technology, robotics, and nanotechnology embedded in every
aspect of their life, powered by mammoth fusion energy plants.8
Every unit of every component is embedded with at least one flea-size chip. Connected into a single worldwide digital network,trillions of sensors monitor countless parameters for the cityand
everything in it. The ruling AI, commanded directly by individual
minds, autonomously creates, edits, and implements software,
simultaneously processing feedback from a global network of sensors.9
Metropolis by Fritz Lang was the first film to show a city of the future as a modernist dystopia. / Produced by Ufa.The High-Tech City is not a new concept. It goes back to Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Fritz Lang, who most inspired its urban look in the 1927 film Metropolis.
The extrapolated growth of technology has long been the basis for
predictions. But professional futurists surprisingly agree that a
High-Tech Jetsons scenario has only a 0%-5% probability of being realized.10
Poignantly, the early predictors transmitted a message that the
stressful lifestyle of the
High-Tech City contradicts the intention of
freedom from drudge. Moreover, the High-Tech megacities’ appetite for
minerals may lay waste to whole ecosystems. Much of the earth may become
a feral wilderness. Massive, centralized AI Internet clouds and
distribution systems give a false sense of cultural robustness. People
become redundant and democracy meaningless. The world may fail to react
to accelerated global crises, with disastrous consequences. The
paradoxical obsolescence of high-tech could slide humanity into a new
Dark Age.11
The Feral City
Futurists disturbingly describe a Decline to Disaster scenario as five times more likely to happen than the high-tech one. From Tainter’s theory of collapse and Jane Jacobs’s Dark Age Ahead we
learn that the cycles of urban problem-solving lead to more problems
and ultimately failures. If Murphy’s Law kicks in, futurists predict a
60% chance that large parts of the world may be plunged into an
Armageddon-type techno-dystopian scenario, typified by the films Mad Max (1979) and Blade Runner (1982).12
Apocalyptic feral cities, once vital components in national
economies, are routinely imagined as vast, sprawling urban environments
defined by blighted buildings. An immense petri dish of both ancient and
new diseases, rule of law has long been replaced by gang anarchy and
the only security available in them is attained through brute power.13
Neat suburban areas were long ago stripped for their raw materials.
Daily life in feral cities is characterized by a ubiquitous specter of
murder, bloodshed, and war, of the militarization of young men, and the
constant threat of rape to females. Urban enclaves are separated by wild
zones, fragmented habitats consisting
of wild nature and subsistence agriculture. With minimal or no
sanitation facilities, a complete absence of environmental controls, and
massive populations, feral cities suffer from extreme air pollution
from vehicles and the use of open fires and coal for cooking and
heating. In effect toxic-waste dumps, these cities pollute vast
stretches of land, poisoning coastal waters, watersheds, and river
systems throughout their hinterlands.14
Pollution is exported outside the enclaves, where the practices of
the desperately poor, and the extraction of resources for the wealthy,
induce extreme environmental deterioration. Rivers flow with human waste
and leached chemicals from mining, contaminating much of the soil on
their banks.15
Globally connected, a feral city might possess a modicum of
commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants might have access to
advanced communication and computing. In some areas, agriculture might
forcefully cultivate high-yield, GMO, and biomass crops. But secure
long-distance travel nearly disappears, undertaken mostly by the
super-rich and otherwise powerful.16
Futurists backcasting from 2050 say that the current urbanization of
violence and war are harbingers of the feral city scenario. But feral
cities have long been present. The Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two was
among them, as were the Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood in the 1960s and
1990s; Mogadishu in 2003, and Gaza repeatedly.17
Conflict and crime changed once charming, peaceful Aleppo, Bamako,
Caracas, Erbil, Mosul, Tripoli, and Salvador into feral cities. Medieval
San Gimignano was one. Spectacularly, from 1889 to 1994 the ghastly
spaces of Hong Kong’s singular urban phenomenon, theWalled City of Kowloon, provided a living example.18
