URBAN TOMORROWS 2030

Urban Tomorrows is a research about future cities - visions and counter-visions; today's dreams, expectations, fears and disbeliefs, and potentials for urban design and gestalt of conurbations. It is about imaginaries, ideas and concepts of urbanization and built environments; about the associations we make to and engender in the places we live in. It critically reflects on contemporary visions, opportunities, problems, agendas and actors propagating those. It asserts that even with thorough analysis and articulate projection tools the future will remain uncertain, and hence argues that urban tomorrows need to embrace their plurality and that of their makers. Mundane struggles, contestations and the grafting of the urban - not only visions, theories, philosophies and agendas - is what in the end determines the design and gestalt of our cities. It agrees that visions are of paramount significance as references, goals and communication tools in a rapidly changing urban world; and therein, that we need a practice that is less fearful of a presupposed chaos of questioning codes, regulations and hierarchies, and more daring in regards to socializing the joy of envisioning the future and discussing its potentials. Reflecting on five years of teaching urban design, it also discusses the need for a new kind of urban professionals that are able to incorporate historically walled disciplines into holistic approaches to tackle urban complexities and orient the city of the future. Advocating for an open and democratic production (not only consumption) of future cities, it calls for a new urban science that incorporates both research and design, that is anticipatory rather than reactive, and one that employs imagination as tool in maneuvering through forthcoming local and global needs and crises of cities and life within them.