Future cities:
visions & countervisions of urban tomorrows
Project |
Cities, by nature, are forever "in the making" – never quite reaching the utopic visions and scenarios that we may dare to imagine for the world around us. Despite this reality, humanity's visions for an urban future (have and will) provide the basis for the cities that we create. At the same time, these visions mirror the hopes and fears, doubts, and foresight of today’s society.
URBAN TOMORROWS is a research project whose goal is to collect ideas and visions on future cities. The aim is to create a compendium of these visions and ideas in order to discuss their social, environmental, economic, and political consequences for future urban design while exploring the implications for the cities we inhabit today. Your ideas – as crowdsourced primary empirical data collected via this website – provide a layer of insight and understanding through which future visions are collected and analyzed. The collected visions will be triangulated with those of a select number of experts we are interviewing from the diverse fields related to the future of cities. While these experts provide profound insights into different visions, foreseen trends or strategies, and various stakeholders in the cities of tomorrow from unique industrial, academic, and political standpoints, we believe that contributions gathered from the public at large widen the scope of possible futures and visions brought into the discussion. Through this collection, analysis, and comparison of the myriad of (alternative) visions of our uncertain urban futures, we seek to portray and understand the ambivalence of the heterotopias perceived and/or envisioned today in respect to future cities. |
Team |
The Future Cities: Visions & Countervisions of Urban Tomorrows project is being conducted by Andreas Brück – researcher and lecturer at Technische Universität Berlin – as a dissertation project within the interdisciplinary graduate program “Advanced Research in Urban Systems” (ARUS) at University Duisburg-Essen’s Main Research Area Urban Systems. The project receives the support of TU Berlin’s Chair of Urban Design & Development (Prof. Dr.-Ing. Angela Million), the Institute of City Planning and Urban Design (ISS) at University Duisburg-Essen (Prof. Dr.Ing. Alexander Schmidt), as well as the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Kaitlyn Dietz and Adelya Fatykhova have assisted the project as DAAD-RISE scholars.
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