It’s estimated that by the end of the year the world’s population will reach seven billion with that number continuing to steadily rise as time goes on. With food production and power consumption quickly becoming massive points of interest, this influx of infrastructure required to reasonably sustain the human race will quickly make the Earth look quite different from how it does today. But how will it look?
Futurists have said for years that with the expansion of the Earth’s populations, we will have to depend on new methods of city building in order to improve the amount of space on the Earth. But with these new life giving systems, vast changes may one day take place to make the planet less recognizable than ever before. And as the population expands, there may be a time when we really do have to rethink things like cities.
At the moment a single population has to move quite a bit to perform its duties. Recreation and leisure increasingly have started happening within the home in the past hundred years, but the ability for human beings to break away from that and travel has also improved with the creation of better cars, planes, and other means of transport. But what if an entire city was planned to reduce travel requirements for the average citizen? Grid patterns have worked well in the past, but developers at The Venus Project have designed a new system based on circular cities with central domes.
If this sounds a bit ambitious like some of the projects proposed for colonizing the moon in the 1970’s at first, these newer cities are proposed to be based on economic stability, agricultural responsibility, and minimal environmental impact. Furthermore, developers at the project have proposed even colonizing the oceans in an effort to allow population growth even while decreasing the amount of developmental pressure on land. At least that’s how it would work in theory. In the mean time there is a current crisis of infrastructure and an even more catastrophic lack of funding for future projects.
The cities of the future will have to not only be built in new ways, but be built in such a way that they can be created economically and reasonably. One method for doing this would be factory cities that are designed and built and then put together on-site once they arrive at their intended destination.
And the idea doesn’t only apply to cities. Domed towns have been proposed that could be sustained in the most inhospitable of conditions. A dome over a small community would allow those inside to grow crops even in the harsh winters of the poles while enjoying a reasonably warm stay inside and crop production year round.
Are these cities the answer to our population woes? With any luck they will help us transition into a world where population is no longer a problem, but where the human race will welcome and even encourage a vastly larger population.