TomorrowLand
The shocking truth about how you'll be living in the Future, near and far.
It’s 2050, and 9 billion of us are packed onto planet earth. Do we long for open spaces, a rural life? Note: 70% of us will be in cities as urbanization booms and we huddle together in hive-like colonies. That will be where it all happens – the engine of our civilization: where you find work, love, families, fun, fear.
Above: Listen to a podcast about TomorrowLand.
What’s Emerging
Cocooning: The most important movement of these last forty years, named and framed in 1982, lives on robustly. It sprouted this rant of who, how and where it will be actualizing.
The Company Town Grows Glorious
The idea of a company town isn’t new: Back in the 1800s, as industry boomed, from textiles to coal to steel, companies built towns to house the influx of workers, educate their kids, and keep them grounded for as long as their gig lasted.
Ford had one: Fordlandia opened in the Brazilian jungle in 1928, where the nascent auto empire was developing a rubber resource. Henry and Co. treated their workers like slaves and their managers like kings.
Alcoa had one: In 1919, the aluminum giant incorporated a town in Tennessee to house workers.
What goes around comes back with a twist: Today we have Google’s Bay View, 42 acres in Mountain View which will be home to 4,000 ad- products workers. TikTok mega-star MrBeast bought up a North Carolina neighborhood for his staff to live closely, comfortably, and affordably in an era of hyper-high housing costs.
And Elon Musk is planning to build homes on his 6,000-acre tract outside of Austin, TX, known as Snailwood. (Seriously, Elon? That’s the least cool name ever. Where are the naming people who came up with Tesla and SpaceX? Did you fire them too?) Modular homes, a gym, and a sports arena have already sprung up. Below-market price tags will promise to keep employees sheltered without going broke.
What’s Popping: The stores in these company towns will set a new level of personalization. When your employer knows everything about you, your family, and your movements around the campus, they can deliver goods that make Amazon’s anticipatory offerings seem like kindergarten. These new hyper-curated bodegas could be a crushing blow for today’s retailers and e-tailers.
But what’s the social contract in these nascent company towns? What happens if you are laid off or fired? Does your employer get to kick you and the fam out of town? What if company-held schools teach distasteful dogma? This may not be the deal that Gen Z and Gen Alpha want to make. Freedom of choice may not have free rein when Big Corporate Brother is in control, so get set for attrition galore.
The Survivalist City
Faltering resources, hyper-crazy weather, intensifying pollution: Science tells us it’s going to be a bumpy ride into our Future. As we work to reclaim the planet or decamp to Mars, how we live will morph on steroids.
In our mega-cities, we’ll live in towering, self-sufficient, hyper-secure skyscrapers. Bomb-proof, germ-free, and engineered to enhance wellness and promote longevity. Layers of parks and farms will be sandwiched between floors of residential space, providing room for recreation, onsite food sourcing, and the lungs of the community to keep our carbon footprint in range. Indoor Meta-rooms with otherwise-extinct plants will flourish and animals will roam about, while scheduled snow flurries swirl, introducing children to the pleasures of generations past.
To manage water scarcity, gray water from baths and showers will be collected and reused to flush toilets and fulfill other uses. This will slash water usage by 30% as rising temperatures bake away our moisture. As the cycle of drought and flooding accelerates, real estate far from this risk will soar in value, becoming as prized as today’s ocean views.
What’s Popping: Look for all kinds of new gray-water-safe and gray-water-compatible products to boom. And ultimately to turn gray water into potable, delicious thirst-quenching drinks. Also ask yourself: How can you harvest and put floodwater to good use?
To be safe from the soaring heat, we’ll enclose ourselves, like the Saudi Arabian giga- project, The Line: A 105- mile long, mirrored city that will snake through the desert and be a climate-controlled home to nine million people.
The 5-Minute City: Too Scared, Too Tired To Venture Far
Have you heard of the 15-minute city? It’s what urban planners envision, a place where everything you could want is within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. NGE – Popcorn-speak for Not Good Enough. The Future is faster than 15; we’ve caught a global case of ADHD. Even five minutes seems too long in an “anticipatory everything” world, where instantaneous convenience (and not a second longer) is what we expect. With all of us impatient in our Cocoons, grab-and-go gets to new heights.
What’s going to happen to the automotive industry? You won’t need a car in the 5-minute city. Saudi Arabia’s The Line, now under construction, aims to have whatever a person truly must have within a mere 5-minute walk.
Roads and parking lots will become green spaces, sending the wellness quotients of these communities soaring. Drone taxis and clean-energy-fueled trams will whisk residents on longer haul trips to the city or the bottom of oceans.
Why stay in one place? Why feel stuck, anchored, entrenched? Tomorrow, we will increasingly crave the freedom to roam, to immerse ourselves in new experiences, and connect with humans and humanoids alike who are living a more interesting life. Where to stay will be way different than anything an Airbnb can provide.
Imagine your own aquatic home that can dock or float freely. It’s already being built as part of the Maldives Floating City. Unbothered by sea-level surges, these homes will anchor in Venice- like villages, with canals instead of roads, in a car- free city for thousands. What’s more, each pod is engineered to stimulate coral growth beneath the surface, nurturing a healthier water world.
Will these be the Cities of Tomorrow, or just how we weekend in 2080? Imagine how different shopping for everything from cereal to shampoo will be when home is a snug, seafaring miniature home.
What’s Popping: The tides will transform our geography: Product portability rules, and drone delivery appears wherever you may wander.
It’s not just the high seas that will offer mobile dwellings. Parasitic dwellings will allow the New Nomad generation to have a foothold in cities around the globe. Imagine owning a place in Beijing and Buenos Aires. Or being a recent immigrant and not sure of where you want to settle. These add-on homes provide a base: Prototypes depict tent-like and 3D-printed dwellings that attach to an existing building, using its framework and resources while providing a microhome with minimal effort, for miniscule cost.
Climate change, pandemics, racial unrest, and rocky economics will send thousands or even millions of us, searching for new places to roost. We’ll own one or two of these packable, portable homes and live in them intermittently with our BFF Bot in tow.
Live Here Forever
Longevity experts say SuperAgers (those living well over 80) will soon be the norm, and the human lifespan will stretch to 120 or even 150 years. If we’ll be living for a century and a half, cities will have to support our physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.
Tech will be woven through the residences: AI concierges, sensors, wearables, virtual assistants, and companionable robots. In real time, air filtration and medicine dosing will be calibrated to maximize wellness and lifespan. (Soon enough, age-reversal tech - via gene-tweaking, dosing, and implants - will eliminate the state of “old” and keep us looking and feeling young up to our last breath. More on that another time.)
When the rigors of daily life (air-quality alerts, dangerous viral loads) keep elders indoors, VR will unfurl for them a world of experiences. Rendever VR is already taking seniors on connected adventures in the ether with far-flung family and friends. So the next city may be inside each of us. The Metaverse will be our marketplace – and our home.
What’s Popping: Don’t forget to factor in how we’ll be uploading our consciousness to the cloud forever. Our avatars will live forever in the Metaverse, meaning TomorrowLand won’t have any bricks and mortar. It’s time to start thinking about serving these eternal selves in the ether. They may not need food, but they will need the means to roam, spend, and engage with family (and perhaps send them gifts or take them out to a virtual dinner).
My Obsession:
The first step in time travel: Arriving without going. Sending your holographic avatar anywhere on the planet and maybe into space with Proto’s technology IRL or in the Metaverse. And I’m developing my second self with Journey, because why not have more selves, more lives, more fun?
Developing my own holo ‘cause I need to be in more than one place at the same time.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Beautifully considered. Lenin said there are decades where nothing happens and then weeks where decades happen. We have all been through that. So even though human beings are molecularly resistant to change, we are now more accepting of the inevitability of TomorrowLand. Today.