The Future of the World in 100 Cities
Vienna 2121: In the future, all of the buildings of Vienna are veneered with algae cladding that not only capture solar energy but also feed on carbon dioxide and fix it into the building walls, rendering the city "carbon negative" and ecofriendly.
Wellington 2121: After a cataclysmic earthquake, and a massive sea level rise, New Zealand's capital emerges like a tranquil agrarian shire from Middle Earth.
Chepstow 2121: Chesptow becomes the guardian gateway of the River Wye, acting to clean up a long abused British river.
Tokyo 2121: after nuclear catastrophe, a ‘moonbase’ architectural form becomes fashionable.
London 2121
Chihuahua City 2121: An urban restoration program of desert willows slowly 'Greenifies' one of Mexico's most polluted cities; whilst an Agave craft economy grows to build sustainable rustic eco homes.
Como 2121: In this ancient alpine city of the Italian Alps, a 2000 year old planning blunder by Julius Caesar is reversed whereby the city's swampland is regenerated to act as a natural filter for Como’s sewage, and the town is resurrected -- as it once was in pre-Caesar times -- on the alpine hills nearby.
Abu Dhabi 2121: After drastic climate change runs amok around Arabia, there's a reinvention of the city in a post-oil and post-automobile fashion with a new urban plan comprising interconnected communal dwellings, partly inspired by old-time domestic houses of the deserts of India, constructed from local sands and muds mixed with native Arabian palm leaves and treated camel dung.
Springfield 2121: After decades of neglect, the highways to and from Springfield fall into a state of dysfunction. Instead of investing in highway repair, though, the citizens decide to invest their resources into more valuable city projects, like outdoors education, public parks and music festivals. They then sing aloud their philosophy of highways: "Let the roads outta here slowly disappear. Who really needs 'em? It's so nice here!"
London 2121: Pensioners, schoolkids and environmentalists band together to protest against government neglect of social and environmental welfare. Together they occupy and reconstruct the Tower of London to enclose a massive inner city ecovillage, transforming unused offices into residential buildings, sowing gardens on street-corners to grow food, and setting up small sustainable businesses to trade among each other.
Vila Gaia de Nova 2121: A city known for its 'Port Wine' transforms into the 'Greeno Vino' eco spiritual capital of Europe, exuding sustainable godliness and a fervid quirky celebration of Mother Earth.
Salto del Guairá 2121: The cascading waterfalls of Salto del Guairá were blown away by the Paraguayan military government in the 1980s to build a dam. By 2121, though, both the falls and the town have re-emerged in splendid style as the dam has collapsed through neglect and local native people regain control of their ancient land.
Puno 2121: To lessen their impact on the sacred but eco-challenged lake Titicaca, the native Uros of Peru build ‘light as air' homes, made from alpaca hair, which can glide within the clouds in the realm of the revered condor.
Zakynthos 2121: the citizens of the capital of the Greek island of Zakynthos resurrect the 'direct democracy principles' of ancient times before voting for decentralized community run renewable energy projects and a conservation program aimed at preserving the island's much adored wildflowers.
Wolverhampton 2121: a center of the industrial revolution during the Victorian Age, Queen Victoria herself once characterized Wolverhampton as a 'large & dirty town'. By 2121, though, Wolverhampton has transformed into an iconic sweet-scented 'clean and green' city through the whole-scale adoption of 'Green manufacturing'.
Karachi 2121: Karachi’s informal settlers, long accused of exacerbating the silting up of the city’s waterways, band together to dig-up and concentrate dredged silt into island mounds upon which they build their own mini-cities.
New Orenburg 2121: The melting polar ice caps make it possible to set up new 'energy cities' in the Antarctic.
Sochi 2121: Sochi was once the capital of the Circassian people before it became a Russian domain in the 1860s. In Sochi 2121 though, the Circassians reclaim their city as a home; conspiring with local Russians to kick out all the obnoxious eco-cidal industry in the process.
Budapest 2121: Roadway horticulture, self-help solar energy, and the community spirit of immigrant communities transforms the city into a forested green utopia.
San Gimignano: This historical hilltop Tuscan town preserves a unique heritage and landscape by keeping it's organic saffron fields and unpolluted ecofriendly vineyards away from all forms of pesticide and genetically modified organisms.
Sharjah 2121: a collapsed megalithic monument lies decaying in the Arabian Gulf -- becoming home to a rehabilitated marine ecosystem.
Shanghai 2121: China's largest city develops the art and science of professional pedestrianism as a sustainable pathway to a crimeless compact ecofriendly city.
Stuttgart 2121: The city that invented the automobile decides to close down all its car factories -- transforming the landscape into a green wine making utopia.
Toronto 2121: cargo trucks are swapped for 'eco drones', which, unencumbered by the weight of humans, are supposed to fly around speedily without using much energy. The ground level streets and roads can then be repurposed for pedestrianism, playgrounds and parties.
Graz 2121: a super-clean technotopia in Austria's south where messy machines and messy people are banished forever.
Wuppertal 2121 The original monorail city builds more and more sky-trains and flying trains of various styles -- all in aerial space. With so much commuting going on ten, twenty, fifty feet above street level, there’s less demand for ground transportation and more space opens up for citizens to walk about freely and to develop lanes and lanes of pretty urban gardens.
Yiyang 2121: Yiyang's now polluted waterways are rescued from all-out toxic death via a mixture of public protest and the establishment of a Green Party that sweeps into government in a new democratic China of the mid 21st century.
Taipei 2121: The ecological knowledge of Taiwan's indigenous tribes, such as the Atayal and Amis, is resurrected to help construct a new sustainable capital.
Lanzhou 2121: In the 2050s, the Chinese industry so destroys the nearby mountain landscape of the city of Lanzhou that it becomes all but uninhabitable. This allows the restoration of the city to the indigenous Qiang people who reoccupy the landscape and work to make the mountains ecologically sustainable once more.
Perth 2121: Through a combination of massive climate change and a myriad of uranium mining mishaps, the Western Australian city of Perth becomes a disaster zone. However, using ancient aboriginal knowledge, a multi-ethnic group of survivors are able to eek out an existence and then resurrect a prosperous arid zone utopia using appropriate-level desert technologies.
Sinaia 2121: The marginalized Roma community refurbish a decaying set of abandoned hydropower stations to create a recycled Utopian city in the Transylvanian Alps of Romania.
Malé 2121: Throughout the capital of the Maldives in 2121, there are extensive ecology zones where wastewater can be processed through plant-based recycling systems.
Timbuktu 2121: The ancient university city of Timbuktu is re-devoted to combatting desertification in the African Sahel.
San Diego 2121: A submerged suburb of San Diego is resurrected within the sea by recycling the US Navy submarine fleet.
Rome 2121: the Italian capital is inspired by an ecofriendly Pope Francis II to lead the Catholic world into a new Green century.
Varna 2121: the citizens of the Bulgarian "sea capital" stage an occupation of the old grounds of the privatized sea garden, demanding that it be returned to the public and the hotels transformed into public 'environmental grant' schools.
Florence 2121: utilizing the power of germs, an ingenious young techno-preneur transforms Florence back into a magical artistic city.
Nador 2121: corporate bosses are made culpable for any fatal environmental pollution their firm produces. And the punishment is public execution. The bodies of the convicted bosses are then reprocessed into biofuels. Through these measures, the importance of a clean and Green environment is conveyed to all Nador’s industrial leaders.
Thimphu 2121: The capital of Bhutan introduces "The Tree Laws" to promote urban and peri-urban forests.
