Will cities still exist in the future?

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Will people still exist in the future and will people still move place to place? Even Ray Kurzweil's book "The Singularity Is Near" predicts cities becoming obsolete in future time. Do you think cities and similar types of areas will exist in the future? It actually scares me on the possibility of cities and moving becoming obsolete. I feel like in some ways, we are losing our choice and will to exist because of technology.

I hope not.



I don't understand your fear because cities exist because of technology.

I guess I'm misunderstood. Why don't you want cities to exist?

I believe the disenfranchisement you're worried about in conjunction with the rise of technology is getting itself out of the way early. People are waking up to the wasteful practices embedded in the previous ways they bought into tech. Still, colossal market sectors honestly wish to purchase more machinery without ever learning how it works. It is not efficient to shroud a simple tool in a thousand dollars of aluminum. Most users could supplant such frivolities with the contents of their home office and $25 spent on amazon - for the computer itself. Cities are being rearranged to better fit the needs of individuals, as opposed to families of 5 buying trucks to seat 12.

http://masdarcity.ae/en/

The only way cities can exist is through processes that destroy the Earth and create extreme power differentials between human beings. For example, cities consist of large numbers of people all living in one place. Large concentrations of people are the main factor in disease epidemics, not only because infected persons have access to others to infect, but because of the large amount of human waste. Also, the local food supply cannot feed them all, and so intensive agriculture is necessary. Intensive agriculture puts great stress on the ecosystem. Furthermore, transporting all of this food to the city by vehicle results in a steady stream of pollution. Furthermore, all of these people are now reliant on the farmers to live, rather than having control over their own food supply. The farmers have the power of life and death over people. In order to get food, the citizens must create a trade system with the farmer, so money is created, and jobs created so that people can earn money. But no one has control over what other people want, so most everyone is now basically a slave to an employer. Rather than simply going outside and gathering some food and water, they have to spend years in school getting educated in the hope that some one will want that skill so that they can trade money for necessities of life. Then they'll have to create a government so that the farmer can't starve them by charging ridiculous prices, and the employer can't fire them for being women or Japanese or bisexual, and basically so no one can screw over any one else, which is a big problem because no one can trust anyone else because there are so many people living in the city that people don't know one another, and resources are limited, and everyone is competing with everyone else. Now the government the citizens created has a massive amount of power over everyone and everyone is just a bit less free, or a lot less free depending on what the government does with the power.

I could go on and on. There is a practically unlimited number of problems with cities, or, more specifically, with civilization itself.

Cities will cease to exist when human civilization ceases to exist and not one second before. Not that that's a bad thing.

Despite their many logistical failings, I think cities may prove more resiliency than we credit them with. Public works are globally moving towards hydro, tidal, wind, solar & geothermal, as well as nuclear power sources, as are individuals. The irony of singularity theory is that it in no way describes a physical singularity, this is the accretion process of societal & individual elements. Cities are arranged around the same proximetric systems as single-cell organisms and galactic clusters. I see no problem with mining the earth hollow in these pursuits, so long as we let the plants & animals stay. If I'm down-to-earth, that could open up many new habitats for the animals. People often don't think linearly, for instance we already have a spaceship - we just need more.

The singularity is nonsense. And Ray Kurzweil is an absolute crackpot on the subject.

Barring a nuclear war or collision with a giant asteroid the cities that will exist in, say the next hundred years, are the cities that exist now, particularly the big important cities like New York, London, Paris etc.

ruveyn

That concept is preposterous. Simple logistics will tell you that high world population mandates cities. If we take every person in the US and give them a couple of acres of land and put a home in it (aka no cities, just houses covering every patch of land in the country) there would not be enough land to sustain any form of population growth or a working production economy.

The opposite is far more likely to occur: Arcologies are the future.

Massive self-contained, self-sustaining cities. Think planet Coruscant from the star wars clone wars animated series.... or the cities shown in the movie The 5th Element. Every inch of land in the city is like 500 stories high and interconnected.

If I remember right, Japan experimented with arcology-type construction but limited to a few city blocks and the results were not bad. I walked through one such experiment in Osaka (I think it was there) and it was rather impressive to see structures that had like 10 underground levels and 30 above ground levels covering entire city blocks...it had subway access in lower levels, shops and living areas and the terraces/balconies were used in aquaculture/aeroculture farms that gave the residents part of their daily produce needs. It had pools, entertainment areas, theatres... well, lets just say I think it would be a really interesting place to live in.

Hell no cities won't exist in the future ! Making cities takes money and we would've all killed each other off in the future over the stupidest things anyways

While technology could make cities obsolete, the simple fact is that social planners are going in the exact opposite direction....put everyone in cities because it is easier to control the masses in constructs where independent living isn't possible because all you need must be brought in (there is no land for you to live off of rather than work for the man).