As futurists in Washington DC, we were struck by the Washington Post's article laying out scenarios for the region's future 17 years from now.

The two scenarios might be called "bad" and "worse":

• In the first, people are fearful and isolated, and the culture is deeply split by class.
• In the second, people are even more fearful and security-obsessed.

We don't want to be Tuesday morning quarterbacks, but my colleagues had these observations:

• Think positive. Scenarios give you the chance to lay out both the bad and the good outcomes, and use the latter to seek out desirable pathways. According to these scenarios, the future is bleak indeed.
• Most change is slow. To begin with, most of the buildings and transportation infrastructures of 2025 are already in place. Cities--outside of China at least--are not remade in a generation.
• Changes in values tend to be even slower. Will American values shift drastically in the next 17 years? It seems pretty unlikely, given that the decisionmakers of the 2020s are already in their thirties and forties, if not older. In other words, we already know about their values and attitudes in large part, barring drastic discontinuities. 
• Consider what is inevitable. The author of this article says that the only point of consensus was that "the haves would have more," but that is a social choice, not a law of nature. Other societies have chosen differently, as have Americans in the past, and the pendulum may swing again before too long.
• More broadly, we get to choose the future. In a democratic, capitalist society, people can shift outcomes with votes and purchases. The people in these scenarios seemed beset by outcomes they would not have chosen. We can, I think, do better.

Image: Joey Gannon (Flickr)

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Shanghai's skyline. Image: Aku Virtanen (Flickr)And now for some lighter news:

Those of you who joined us on our Futures Expedition to Shanghai in May will be delighted to hear that S)T's assessment of that city -- as a model for the future of China and Asia as a whole -- has been confirmed by noted futurist Paris Hiton. You can read her comments here.

This has to come as a big relief to our man in China, John Cashman, whose work in that city is now validated.

Thanks, Paris!

Vertical farms—urban, indoor, multi-story agricultural systems that some envision supplementing or even replacing conventional farms—have been receiving a bit of press recently, such as this CNNMoney.com article.
Farmland of the future? The innovative concept is being promoted by Dr. Dickson Despommier at Columbia University, among others.

We reported on Despommier’s idea several years back in our Technology Foresight project, and as I think about it now, they are an interesting twist on another trend we’ve been tracking for a while—the rising interest in “local food” and in reducing the carbon footprint and “food miles” of one’s food. To view our 2005 analysis of Dr. Despommier’s idea, see this research brief.

For more from Dr. Despommier, check out his vertical farming site here.

Image: Photos.com

This summer I've made the trek from LAX to Orange County and back a number of times while working on an interesting project that touches on urban lifestyles. My path, and some occasional spare time, has allowed me to meander around parts of Los Angeles I might not otherwise check out--parts of South Central LA in particular. This same project has taken me back to my home town of Atlanta, as well as to some declining Detroit suburbs.

One common factor in all of these locations is the high density of fast food joints. In LA, it's fast burgers, a profusion of donut shacks and taquerias. In Atlanta, plenty of fast food chains (many run down) and cookie-cutter fast-casual outlets surround the big malls. In Detroit, food courts and liquor stores. The common theme? Lower-income areas seem chock-a-bloc with brightly colored, cheap, but dubious gastronomic choices. Within a few hundred yards of a resident's front door, one can find any manner of fried, spicy, or triple-decker meal, often for under $5 or so.

In much the same vein as some public schools' removal of junk food from cafeteria's and vending machines, the LA City Council is mulling a motion to place a two-year moratorium on new fast food outlets--but only in South Central, one of LA's poorer neighborhoods. The move goes a step beyond similar movements in places such as New York City, by attempting to make enact a law, rather than limiting things to a call to action. The moratorium's supporters say the urban poor have few healthy food choices that are affordable. Detractors say the big fast food chains do provide some access to healthy choices, but also provide a "safe" area in often-dangerous neighborhoods, as well as critical jobs, and that most important American value, convenience.

Regardless of how the moratorium vote goes, this move represents an indicator--an early hint--of new ways the nutrition and obesity battles may be cast: jurisdictions singling out particular geographies for intervention. Will Whole Foods get a tax break for moving into inner city neighborhoods to fill the perceived nutritional vacuum? Watch this space.

New applications and uses for online worlds have been on my mind, perhaps because I’ve recently written two briefs dealing with online worlds: one discussing the future of play, and one about objects migrating from the virtual to the real world. So I was intrigued when I saw this story about famed Japanese game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi and his recently announced effort to recreate Tokyo in the Second Life world. What makes this effort different than Google Maps’ Street View application, is that the virtual Tokyo will be subjective. Rather than a straight recreation of Tokyo, Mizuguchi will be designing the Platonic ideal of Tokyo. As Mizuguchi himself states, “The Tokyo we are trying to create is based on the image of the city.”

It s not far-fetched to see that one of the benefits of real-world venues recreated online is an increase in online tourism—people visiting the virtual Tokyo in lieu of the real Tokyo. This will create a whole group of tourists who can claim they’ve seen Tokyo without ever leaving their desks. But as more locations are realized online and visitors increase, the subjective nature of the virtual representation becomes an issue. And as more people use virtual sites as a replacement for the real experience, the question, in this case, becomes, what is Tokyo? Vacations and trips have always been affected by personal tastes, one visitor might not want to wander far from Ginza, while others would seek out more quiet, out-of-the way places. The recreation of tourist sites online replaces individual choices made within the real world with a collective subjectivity: here is what we say Tokyo is.

People are not going to stop travelling, and in fact as economic conditions in Worlds 2 and 3 improve there will be an increase in tourism from these regions. But new barriers or hassles to tourism are looming every day: infectious disease (avian flu, SARS), heightened border security, rising transportation and environmental costs associated with travel. These will only serve to make virtual tourism more attractive.

But the recreation of tourist sites online raises some questions: Who do we trust to create our virtual cities? Did you visit Tokyo or “Tokyo?” Will people even differentiate between the two? (Image: Social Technologies)

The sudden collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, together with the explosion of a steam pipe on Lexington Ave. in New York City, have brought the important issue of America’s aging infrastructure to the forefront of public discourse.

Diversey (Flickr)In TF-2007-35: Lights! Water! Motion! (a brief from our Technology Foresight multiclient project), the authors project that necessary upgrades to world urban infrastructure by 2050 will total over $40 trillion, with the U.S. and Canada accounting for $6.5 trillion of that total. These numbers cover road and rail, power grids, water distribution, air travel and sea travel, so the cost of upgrading just one of these sectors would be manageable—which is exactly the problem.

Kamal H. (Flickr)The immediate reaction to the Minneapolis bridge collapse will likely be legislation aimed at improving this single component of infrastructure. These costs would be manageable and politically feasible. However, infrastructure is tightly intertwined—great bridges aren't much use if roads are deteriorating, or if the bridges lead to cities where underground pipes are bursting. The broader infrastructure debate will require more holistic planning, including international cooperation. Even if the US develops the most advanced air travel system in the world, the recent airline crash on a Brazilian runway highlights the need for global repairs and upgrades.

Infrastructure is not as exciting as war, terrorism, or even hedge fund loopholes, but it is truly the backbone of a tightly-integrated, just-in-time global trade system—and signficant breaks in the supply chain due to infrastructure failures could have worldwide repercussions.

Just as I am working on a Global Lifestyles research brief on the emergence of "superslums" globally, word comes from the United Nations Population Fund that urbanization globally, particularly in Worlds 2 and 3, is accelerating and that future population growth will take place overwhelmingly in towns and cities, which will increase in both size and number, while the number of rural inhabitants declines. And the urban growth won't only be in megacities such as Mexico City, Mumbai, and Shanghai, but increasingly in towns and cities of 500,000 or less--which are sprouting rapidly in areas such as inland China and the Gulf of Guinea in Africa. Even in the US, new slums are emerging in unexpected places, such as the outskirts of Palm Springs.

As these cities grow and spread quickly, and as the rural poor and those living in urban cores move to these cities in search of new work and better living conditions, the rate of growth is far outstripping any ability to build sustainable, quality living environments--even if the will exists to do so. Such will itself is a rarity. The result is rapid emergence of new slums, and the convergence of many into superslums that ring and connect the urban environments that feed them.

As highlighted by the UN report, Cairo provides a case in point. Its population has doubled in the past 30 years, and much of this growth has taken place in 60-odd "informal areas" comprised of temporary housing, sometimes built in toxic wastelands. If Cairo's informal areas are anything like their global counterparts, they are places where black market economies reign, poor health conditions persist, and governmental control is practically nonexistent. The 1,200 informal areas mapped in Egypt overall contain almost a quarter of the country's inhabitants.

The implications of this data are taking shape even as these cities grow. Fundamentally, the next century or more globally will be shaped by the needs, creations, crises, and impacts of Asian and African megacities and life in their attendant superslums. Supply chains will be shaped by them, attitudes toward brands will be shaped by the experiences of sometimes radicalized youth that inhabit them, innovative product and service design will emerge from the needs of the consumers who live there, and resource flows will be controlled by their spread. Not much of an impact then, is it?

(Image: Social Technologies) 

In researching an upcoming sequence of briefs on the nature of cities, I came across two pieces of information that point to how cities may deal with aging.

The first, presenting recent research from the National Association of Area Agencies on Aging and the MetLife Foundation, found that 47% of US communities surveyed have already taken some steps to prepare for the coming boom in seniors -- ranging from brighter signage on roadways  to re-zoning to allow more clustered housing for seniors.

The second piece of research, jointly conducted by Harvard University and Columbia University, looks at NORCs, or "naturally occurring retirement communities." This research found that older citizens in the developed world are either staying in or moving back to major urban centers such as New York, London, Paris and Tokyo. This research also found that, contrary to widely held assumptions, older citizens living in major urban areas are not necessarily poorer or less healthy on average than their peers living outside cities.

Nonetheless, these urban seniors remain vulnerable to factors that are often endemic to big cities, such as lack of easy access to health care, living areas that are vertically organized (like walk-up apartments), and even linguistic isolation. While smaller communities may be able to make the changes described above in the MetLife survey, major cities have a much more difficult task adjusting complex and expensive infrastructure to the needs of the elderly. Nonetheless, with the sheer numbers of seniors looming on the horizon as the baby boom ages, the next great wave of change in World 1 urban planning and policy will likely be centered around accommodating the old, just as many cities now are moving mountains to attract the young.

Image: Dan Hughes (Flickr)