Imagining what our cities will look like in the future...

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Eco-designs on future cities
By Jo Twist
BBC News science and technology reporter

Imagining what our cities will look like in the future has long been a favourite pastime of the Hollywood movie industry.

Many of world's big cities are surrounded by shanty towns
On the whole we are presented with striking images of glass and metallic towering structures, flying cars and technologically smart everything.

Dystopic pockets of inequality and dirt inhabit the not so shiny bits.

Ask a gathering of leading thinkers in the worlds of architecture and design, and you get a rather different picture.

Some 70 million people a year migrate from the country to cities. That is about 130 a minute, says Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow Cities.

Many of these set up home in squats, put together from scarce materials, if put together at all. There are a billion squatters in 2005. By 2050, that figure will reach three billion.

At this rate, our future cities may turn out to be quasi-temporary, low-tech shacks, missing the basics of human life, such as water and electricity, still belching out the waste of fuels that warm the globe.

"The issue is about neighbourhoods," Mr Neuwirth told delegates at TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Oxford, UK.

"Cities have to engage these residents because they are building the cities of the future." (....)

continue reading: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4682011.stm