One of humanity's biggest obsessions
is trying to figure out how cities are going to look like
in the future by the year 2050. 68% of the world's population is projected
to live in urban areas, but most cities are not prepared for this. We have congestion, crime,
a housing crisis, and just an endless array of problems
that come up when you try to pack a massive amount of people
in a small footprint. Science fiction envisions a world that's adapted to these conditions
through technology. These problems have either been eradicated
or worsened, and some sci fi has been way off,
but someone's been kind of spot on. But either way, they've
pushed the boundaries in our thinking and they've given us a glimpse into the future
and how we could be living, how we could be interacting
with our environments and with each other. So today I want to look at three sci fi movies
with really interesting city concepts and break them down from a design
and urban planning point of view. This video is sponsored
and brainstormed with Milanote More on them later in this video. The movie is based on a future world Crime level has gotten so bad
that it's gone into a perpetual state of martial law. The police have dual function as judges
so they can give you a sentence on the spot,
including the death penalty. The setting mega-city
one is a giant megalopolis that spans most of eastern U.S. and some of Canada, which, by the way,
is really close to the East Coast. Mega region in real life
and the architecture of the city actually acts as a form of surveillance
in controlling the people. People live in these really dense
residential towers with these nice big atriums, but when there's a crime in the building,
it automatically triggers a system that locks you in and keeps
you contained in the building. The real building, Ponte Tower, which is a residential tower near Johannesburg. That tower has eerie parallels
to the one in the movie when it was first built in the seventies. It was a really desirable address,
but very quickly turned into a slum. It was hijacked by gangs at some point,
and now it's like a symbol for crime and urban
decay in the city. The decline was largely due to the social
and political conditions at the time, but architecturally
speaking, it's brutalist. You know, there's a lot of similarities
with the Panopticon concept, which is the universal design
concept for prisons. And I think it's this
imposing architecture that turned this building
into a symbol of decay. You know, architecture
is not just for living in or working in. It's also a symbol. And the movie actually uses these towers
as a symbol of order and surveillance. Like a lot of real city designs, one
of the best examples would be this guy. His ideas for cities
inspired a lot of developments throughout the world, and it's had a huge impact
on how cities are designed today. In 1920s,
Le Corbusier created several city plans to heal Paris from its problems. It was Congest it. It was dirty, it was deteriorating. And his solution was to erase
the entire city and replace it with this. He believed this would create
order and harmony by separating all of the different functions
within a city like industrial, commercial, residential, recreational,
and all the different traffic arteries. They would all be set up in different
zones. Open space was a priority
for air circulation because it was so lacking in Paris. So he designed these blocks to have tons
of open space and circulation space by packing more density
into a smaller footprint. This was never really implemented
in Paris. Thank God, but many housing projects
throughout the world took this approach and they actually became
kind of awful places to live. If you separate all of these functions,
you get dead zones throughout the day. You go to work during the day. You come back home during the evening. And if you have to work late,
walking in this office area becomes kind of dangerous
because the streets are dead. Same with the residential areas. During certain hours,
there's like nobody on the streets. All the activity, like restaurants
or bar hours that would be open
late are in a separate zone. And that's why well-designed cities. There's a mixture of different uses. There's shops,
restaurants, offices and apartments. So you can get a constant flow of activity
and eyes on the streets. Cities and neighborhoods
become a lot safer and more lively. When you have
this kind of organic surveillance. But in Corbusier's designs, this was never really considered,
which created really unsafe areas. And the need for constant surveillance. So in a future where crime rate is through
the roof, it's not really an accident that they use
this type of city design in this movie. Whenever I make a video like this,
it takes up a lot of research and brainstorming
and up until recently we used to collect all the research in a document,
but it started to get kind of limited. So when Milanote reached out, to be honest,
I hadn't heard of them before. So I wanted to make sure I tried it out
for a bit before I shared it with you guys. So we tried brainstorming on this idea
board, and we actually used this to guide the entire research for this video,
and we really liked it. Just having a visual board
makes everything super clear and it kind of allowed us to make connections
that we didn't really see before. They have really nice templates
for different types of work
from research, moodboard and storyboard. And once we had a rough idea
of which movies we wanted to talk about, we could drag and drop
different notes and links. And the best thing is that it actually
converts the links into thumbnails. So you don't need to download anything
to put it on your board. All of this is on the cloud
and you can share it with other people. Milanote. is free with no time limit,
so you can sign up using the link in the description
and start your next creative project. I'm actually really curious
how you guys use Milano, so if you liked it,
just let me know in the comments. The movie The Fifth Element depicts a megacity that solved the population
crisis by building vertically. These towers go on for miles
and miles and miles and they use flying cars and public transit, navigating
in three dimensions to get around. Natural light and ventilation is an issue,
and the further you go down, it gets worse and worse. Even above, it's
not really the nicest conditions. People live in these little pods
with like little to no personalization. Building vertically makes a lot of sense,
especially if it's a city with a clear perimeter. There's a lot of efficiencies
when your infrastructure can serve more people in a smaller footprint. There's a couple of technologies that would often evolve
to make this scenario plausible. You would need flying cars
or some sort of vertical transportation, which is actually not that far fetched. They're already testing these automated
taxi drones. We would also need new materials
and new construction technology. Like, for example,
there's this new type of bio concrete. I can heal its own cracks. There's also been a lot of development and
heavy timber construction, for example. We have the tallest wood tower
being built in Japan, which is obviously huge because you can
offset a lot of the carbon footprint. I think more than the material strength,
it's the construct ability that's going to be a bigger issue. How do you get materials that high? It's fine when it's like 30 or 40 storeys,
but when it goes up to like 100 storeys,
the concrete starts to harden. And that's problematic. You know, Burj Khalifa,
the tallest building in the world. They created a special mixture
that can travel in liquid form over a long distance. And they're going to keep coming up with these new solutions
for these new challenges. But maybe the construction doesn't
even happen at ground level. Maybe it starts at an intermediate level
that acts as another ground plane. In fact, you can see a lot of bridges
connecting different buildings. If you want to go from here to here,
it doesn't really make sense for you to have to go all the way down
to get to another building. And we actually do have cities,
mostly colder, windy cities like Minneapolis or Calgary
that have smaller versions of these bridges,
and they're called skyways. People park their cars, they go to work, they go shopping, and they can do
all of this without going outside. One of the reasons I moved away from
Toronto was because of the cold. So I really, truly
appreciate these internal pathways, but it's kind of a problem
because not everyone gets to use them. These skyways are privately owned
because they connect private buildings. So the developers don't really have
an incentive to make them more welcoming. In fact, when the city of Minneapolis
hired architectural consultants to improve the accessibility
to the skyways, most of the developers response was that they don't really want to attract
the wrong kind of people in an entire city
that's connected with skyways. It really makes me wonder where
is the line between public and private? Let's talk about the constructability
again for a sec. A lot of people think that the problem
with tall buildings is the weight of the building, but actually the bigger issue
is the force of the wind on the building. We call this the lateral force. Basically, the higher you go, the stronger
the wind force is going to be on the building. Like if you have a wind force
of ten kilometers an hour at the bottom of a building,
it can go up to like 70 or 80 on top. And apparently at the top of the Burj
Khalifa, it's like 200 kilometers an hour. And it's also really unpredictable. A common concept when it comes to tall
buildings is torquing, not twerking, torquing. It's like twisting. One of the solutions is exterior bracing. It holds the building in place
and it stops it from twisting. A lot of these buildings
will probably look more like this. Another solution is the original concept is from Frank Lloyd
Wright in his mile high tower. It's dense at the bottom
and it tapers at the top. When it was built,
it was pretty revolutionary. But now you have the Burj Khalifa and
other skyscrapers using the same concept. But the problem with this is that you need to make the bottom
so fat to get a smaller top, and it's just not really economical
to drop off so much mass at the top. So one of the new solutions
is by Calatrava in Dubai, and it's going to be
the tallest tower in the world. And I think it's kind of genius. Instead of bracing it or bundling it,
they've got cables attached throughout the building
to hold it when it sways. So, for example,
when the building wants to sway this way, it'll have cables
pulling from this side. And if the building wants to sway
this way, it'll have cables pulling from the side. By the way,
if you guys want more information on these structural kits,
I'll leave the link in the description. I mean, just a couple hundred years ago,
people would have never thought of skyscrapers. You know, we only started getting these
since the invention of elevators. So probably in the future,
with new materials and new technology, we're probably going to be able to get
like 500 stories or a thousand stories. I think the bigger problem is going to be
how can we create equitable spaces throughout? You know, like I said, there's
this blurring of the private and public spaces,
but also having this height naturally creates
the really desirable spaces at the top and the really undesirable section
at the bottom. We would need artificial lighting
that really closely mimics daylight and also a way to provide
fresh air for the lower areas. But also just making sure
that we have the right policies in place to not create these social divides
between these sections. It doesn't
really matter how tall you can build if there isn't a way to move around
efficiently. Minority Report has a much
more comprehensive vision of how a city could completely reshape itself
based on this new transportation system. Instead of flying cars,
they have these maglev pods that travel on these dedicated lanes which
are integrated into the urban fabric. And they even become
a part of the building's facade. The design of these is actually really
cool. It's got an internal gyroscope
so that you can stay upright, whether you're traveling
horizontally or vertically. It's self-driving. It's controlled by a centralized A.I.. So if you trust the government,
you just hop in, put in your destination, and boom,
you're there. It takes out the human error factor
so there's less chances of collisions, and they can maneuver in a way that can
solve a lot of these congestion issues. Now, this type of infrastructure
is kind of a similar idea
to the one in fifth element. But the biggest difference
is that you can go straight from your destination to your apartment
and you don't need to go outside at all. And I think that would change
the social dynamics in so many ways. There's
a kind of forced social interaction that happens just by the fact
that you live close to someone and you run into each other in lobbies
or in the elevators. And if these lobbies or amenity
spaces are designed in a way that encourages social interaction,
then you get to know your neighbors. So even if you don't have any friends
or family, at least you have the people around you
that you can interact with. That's the traditional idea of a community and having neighbors
with more and more towers being built. This idea of community has been slowly
and slowly disintegrating,
which adds to the social isolation. But maybe a system like this
could actually democratize buildings. These days we have a lot of sky gardens
and amenity spaces within buildings, but they can only be used
through the building. So by having the ability to access
the building from different points. Maybe some of these spaces could be made accessible to the public
or to paid members through an app. All of this is really exciting,
but who knows? Maybe in the future our built environments
are just going to be secondary and we're going to be spending more time
in the virtual reality. Or maybe cities become cool organisms to protect against natural disasters
or a threat of war. Or maybe we just stop trying
to improve the city altogether. Mark Wigley once said architecture
never derived its force from stability of culture,
but rather from the expression of those moments
when the sense of stability slipped. If we can agree on one thing,
I think it's that we're living in really uncertain times,
and this is the breeding ground for a lot of the changes
in the environment. There's a lot to unpack here, so let me know what you think
in the comments. And if you want to know more
about architecture, I'm going to leave a playlist
at the end of this. And if you like sci fi
or dystopian architecture, you should probably have a look at my Neom
and Burning Man videos. Don't forget to like and subscribe
and I'll see you guys in the next video.
