Where the Grass is Greener: How Recent Innovations Will Shape Our Urban Futures

The world’s cities are long overdue for a makeover.?Loneliness?runs rampant through our ironically busy streets.?Shelter,?food, and?energy?shortages are being felt on every corner of the urbanized world. Billions of people are stuffed into disorganized metropolises with little regard for their well-being or quality of life. This is the disappointing reality for?more than half?of the human race. It’s time for a change.

Think tanks of sociologists, urban designers, and environmental scientists across the world are teaming together to brainstorm the solutions to our urban problems and lead us to imagine a future many may have once considered Utopian.

The Urban Village

One such group is?SPACE10, a leading team of urban innovators and designers who have inspired our next generation of urban thinkers with their landmark proposal,?The Urban Village Project. With their model of a future city dedicated to the principles of livability, affordability, and sustainability, SPACE10 hopes to reshape what we believe to be our next urban life.

The Urban Village is designed to serve the personal and social wellbeing of its inhabitants. By maximizing land use through stacking green spaces, residences, and public services, SPACE10 has made shared fitness studios, public parks (more on this later), farms (and this, too), and co-working areas to be within walking distance of your entire community.?

(The image in the header is what they imagine it to look like.)

Overcrowded cities, which ironically are found to increase loneliness by?38%, are designed for individuality. Outside of work and close social circles, citizens often find themselves surrounded by people with very few informal opportunities for meaningful social interactions. This is a problem that has grown after people have readjusted their work and personal lives to convenience since lockdowns (i.e. remote working, not expanding social circles), but had been a quietly growing concern long before.

To reverse this long-time trend, the Urban Village is designed to provide public spaces to “work alone together” for everyday activities. Co-working spaces, which already reduce loneliness and heighten feelings of belonging and community in?83%?of members, is something Urban Villages plan to integrate into everyone’s daily lives by making individual tasks (like cooking, eating, shopping, working out, spending time with your children) occur in spaces shared with neighbours. Exposing citizens to informal opportunities to interact with those around them is the key ingredient to building a community, thus creating a sense of belonging among everyone in it. Two prized birds, one very subtle stone.

????????????Most urban residential districts are designed to hold 1-2 people per unit, a leading force driving families away into suburbs. Urban Villages, on the other hand, are designed to be malleable, letting rooms expand into adjacent ones to cater to occupancy. Designing housing blocks to stand the test of population change makes for a much more sustainable and affordable city, and sets the stage for community bonds that can last.

Push Up The Daisies

Green-spaces, like parks and green walkways, are among the most prized for city-dwellers, offering pleasant spaces for spending time with friends and family, providing shade,?cooling?the surrounding area, reducing?noise pollution, creating fresh air, and generally make us?happier. With a keen eye on densification, current cities often opt for using land for zoning or parking, hence this explains why green-spaces can only be found in?13%?of Toronto.?

Admittedly, finding new places to build parks in cities isn’t easy, as most land is already occupied. This requires innovative thinking, like what can be found in Denver, Colorado where high-pedestrian streets into ‘pedestrian spaces’, offering outdoor seating and greenery for local life.?

Luckily, another solution may be right ‘over’ our noses.

Representing up to a quarter of our cities’ land area, rooftops offer an untapped and exciting avenue of urban innovation and development. “Beyond penthouses and private extensions, urban roofs have already entered the conversation surrounding both urban densification and climate resiliency,” wrote Andreea Cutieru in her?Archdaily article?on the topic. Offering public access to rooftop parks, walkways, and other green communal spaces produce a much more interactive, three-dimensional topography for our next urban generations?without?sacrificing land use.

Living roofs hold a diverse array of benefits from improving air quality, mitigating the urban heat-island effect[i], and contributing to biodiversity preservation by providing habitats for birds and bees. Contributing to climate resiliency, densification, and quality of life, rooftop greenery is the future of our most bustling cities.

Everyone Deserves a Slice

Rocketing from 746 million in 1950 to more than half of the total human population today, cities are expected to be home to two-thirds of all humans?by 2050. With distances growing from farm to plate, rising food prices for urbanites globally, concerns grow for how we will (or whether we can) support the looming urban-population boom. This is spurring interest in closing the gap between where food is produced and where it is needed.

Urban Farms?(aka vertical farming, hydroponic farming), is a method of food production, providing high-yield, street-corner accessible crops for locals in a low-waste, low-carbon facility. Many are sprinkled around the world, already representing?20%?of all the food we make.?

In addition to encouraging (and in time, perhaps requiring) citizens to grow food at home, urban agriculture will not completely replace rural agriculture. Although, with it comes a tremendous release of pressure on our already quaking global food-supply chains. The ripple-effects of our transition to ‘home-grown’ will be felt in global biodiversity and ecosystem recovery, and in the fight against world hunger. In other ways, the effect can be felt at home.

“When urban agriculture flourishes, our children are healthier and smarter about what they eat, fewer people are hungry, more local jobs are created, local economies are stronger, our neighbourhoods are greener and safer, and our communities are more inclusive,” says?former counsellor?of Vancouver, Peter Ladner.

The changes we make to our cities will be felt across the world, from our rural barnhouses to our burning forests. A better future must be demanded and can be created by riling up public support for these adoptions, and even by running for your city’s public office to be the maker of change.

[i]?Concrete absorbs and releases heat extremely well. With limited green-space, cities are hotter than any other human-made landscape.