The second machine age, gender-based violence, global south, developing cities, poor infrastructure, influx, digitization, sustainability, Afro-futurism? We keep hearing the buzzwords over and over again but what does it all mean? How do these notions intersect spatially in response to the needs of future city developments? Cities are like ecosystems, collectively dependent on the surrounding environment. The larger and more complex they become, the greater the pressures and repercussions, namely: population growth, urban expansion, and physical resource scarcity.
Cities represent a specialization of human functions that have evolved from settlements to villages, villages to towns, towns to cities, and now cities to megacities. It can be said that this exponential trend of large scale communal living has discouraged social coherence amongst urban stakeholders, palpable in governance crises. The success of a city depends on its inhabitants, its government and the priority both give to maintaining a considerate urban environment. Better quality of life and civic harmony is defined by the quality of the urban landscape (Rogers, 1997). The supposed founders of architectural and urban thinking - Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, Ebenezer Howard, le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and others - have already proposed static architectural visions of ideal cities, hoping to create a utopia.
