Michael Batty's agenda for future cities (pdf).
The key issues on the agenda involve: automating cities which is an inevitable consequence of networking and the decentralisation of all aspects of computation across the globe; the dominance of migration as a force for local change; globalisation where everyone who uses the net is in some way part of a world city of sorts (with the implication that every city, no matter what size, has elements of ‘world city’ within it); the consequences of aging which will change the way we physically move around the city combined with the automation of transit and the private automobile; the rise of health care as a basic urban function; the demise of physical retailing and the ‘high street’, as much through online activity as through physical decentralisation; and, of course, the general automation of all sectors of the economy. Many problems confound this agenda and it is worth noting these as they are likely to dominate the extent to which we are able to build resilient and sustainable cities that are smart enough to enable them to function better than any of those we have created in the past.
