Future cities

How do our cities need to change to meet the environmental and social changes we face post-pandemic and with a changing climate? And what impact will this have on project professionals tasked with delivering urban projects? Alexander Garrett reports.

Constructed on 1,500 acres of reclaimed land adjacent to the transportation hub of Incheon, Songdo in South Korea is, on the face of it, a city of the future, a model for how all cities could develop. Its streets are lined with sensors that monitor traffic flow; individual homes are controlled by mobile apps that control air conditioning and lighting; its waste management system sucks domestic waste through tubes to a central plant where it is sorted for recycling. And Songdo has outstanding green credentials, with 40% of its space designated as public parks or farming plots.

And yet it would be misleading to see Songdo as a template for how all cities will look in future – especially in a country like the UK, where opportunities for large‑scale greenfield developments are few. In many cases, the challenge facing cities is to improve what is already there by enhancing environmental performance, transport or liveability. In the wake of the pandemic, cities are not facing their demise – as some pessimists predicted – but they will need to redefine their purpose to become a lot more efficient and human‑centric if they are to thrive in the decades to come.

cityscape

Changing needs

Looking at the big picture, Professor Yolande Barnes, Chair of the Bartlett Real Estate Institute at UCL, says: “We’re heading towards 80% of the world’s population living in urban areas – that’s already pretty much the case in developed countries like the UK.” The pandemic appears to have caused only a momentary setback in that process, although it will have a lasting impact, the most important part of which is the accelerated uptake of hybrid working. On the face of it, that means people working at home more, less commuting and companies requiring less office space.

The reality may not be so simple though. “Employers are realising that they have to hang on to their office space,” says Barnes. They still need to accommodate their people even though occupancy rates are lower. Offices will be reconfigured for new ways of working. In some cases, they will become more flexible, accommodating other uses outside working hours.

Houses and flats will also need to be reconfigured to provide more effective space for working from home. And Barnes says she expects to see the emergence of ‘third spaces’, which are neither home nor office, often located in suburbs and smaller neighbourhoods. “It may be a community workspace, neighbourhood workspace or cooperative workspace. You’ll see groups of employers getting together to provide a workspace where people can interact and maybe hold meetings without having to commute.”

The challenge of net zero

Looking forward, the biggest drivers of how cities will evolve will be climate change, the challenge of meeting net‑zero targets and the need to adapt to more extreme weather. Two of the biggest specific challenges cities face in meeting net‑zero targets are to reduce carbon emissions from cars and to retrofit houses to make them more energy efficient. On the first question, one answer is that developers no longer provide parking when constructing new high‑density buildings, says Sue Kershaw, Managing Director, Transportation, at Costain and President of APM. “That way you actually force the people in those buildings to use public transport,” she says. “Or if they need a car, then they have to go and hire one.”

Longer term, the introduction of autonomous vehicles will alleviate the need for car ownership, and the appetite to drive is already waning among younger people. Fewer new roads will be built in future, says Kershaw, and there will be an increasing focus on maintaining existing roads, using embedded sensors to identify when work is needed.

At a micro level, far greater investment is needed to encourage people to walk and cycle in cities, says Professor Tim Stonor, founder of the architectural consultancy Space Syntax. “A key focus of ours has always been mobility on foot and on bike and creating better, stronger networks of pedestrian movement across cities,” he explains. “The pandemic actually had a big impact on public transport because of people’s concerns about being too close to each other and that has alerted local authorities all over the world to the opportunities to invest in walking and cycling infrastructure.”

He wants people to stop thinking about roads that are car‑centric and to think instead about streets, which are human‑centric. This represents a sea change for project management in urban planning. “Converting driving trips to walking trips by building pedestrian crossings and cycle paths – these are very small‑scale interventions,” says Stonor. “They risk being so small that they lose the attention of the people who are used to investing in motorways and flyovers.”

Small‑scale and replicable

It’s an approach that has also been picked up by Bent Flyvbjerg and Alex Budzier, experts in megaprojects at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. They describe how ‘smart scale‑ups’ could be the answer to delivering city development in future. These are small‑scale, replicable projects that can be delivered in an agile way. “We know that the big, top‑down projects often just don’t work,” says Budzier. “And it’s the ones that are more decentralised, more modular, and where you can learn about what it is that we want to get out of a city, that seem to be a better way to do it.”

The approach is to experiment, learn from your experiments and then, when something works, to roll it out around a city. This also takes out a huge amount of risk. He points, as a counter‑example, to the massive, futuristic city of Neom being built in Saudi Arabia, which incorporates three levels of access throughout: for pedestrians, cars and service vehicles. “It’s something that has been dreamed up by designers without trialling it and seeing how citizens would react,” says Budzier. “It’s such a high‑risk move; it might work, it might not. Who knows?”

While the car industry is expected to gravitate rapidly towards electric vehicles, with all the implications for charging infrastructure that entails, other forms of transport are in prospect. Vertical take‑off drones, perhaps autonomous, could become a feature of the city airspace. Stonor sees overhead monorail as a public transport option with huge advantages over underground trains. “The tunnelling of an underground railway has massive carbon disturbance problems – you’re taking out a lot of sequestered carbon. By comparison, monorail is light touch, low cost and can do the longer trips you need in a city.”

The 15‑minute city

In planning terms, transport strategy is closely intertwined with zoning. The notion of the 15‑minute city is designed to reduce transport impacts by providing all needs within a short walking or cycling journey. But while it has a role to play, few seem to believe people’s lives should be constricted by that. “It’s important that you are not isolated and that you still have strong transport connections that enable you to get across a metropolis,” says Lisa Taylor, Director of Coherent Cities and ex‑CEO of Future of London.

What is likely is that cities will become generally more mixed and less strongly differentiated in terms of distinct central business districts, manufacturing and retail quarters, residential areas and so on. “I live in the City of London and there are more people now living there,” says Taylor. “If you look at a development like Bankside Yards on the south side of the Thames, they call it ‘hypermixed’: there is residential, office and hotel [space] and retail entertainment – everything you can think of on the site. And their whole ethos is based around hyperlinks; it’s why you would want to rent there as an office or a residential tenant, because there is a mix.”

Much of the fabric of cities that exists today will still be there in 20 or 30 years’ time. As Chris Rogers, Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, puts it: “The usual mantra is to say 80% of what we have now will still be here in 2050.” Below the surface, that may not be the case. Rogers explains: “We build roads and bury pipes beneath them. And if any one of the utilities needs to access the pipes to repair them, the cheapest direct cost, which the water companies, for example, are mandated to do, is to dig trenches. So we create these beautiful structures, and then we dig trenches through them and we soften and weaken the ground.”

In future, he says, the answer will be to use multi‑utility tunnels that are dissociated from the road surface with sensors that can report on deterioration. This highlights an important issue: building for resilience.

“Sustainability is about not providing burdens for the future,” says Rogers. “And resilience is all about our systems being able to continue to function and deliver their benefits in the face of change.” It also highlights another important principle for those managing city projects in the future. “We tend to work in silos. In cities, where so many different stakeholders are involved, we need to foster transdisciplinary working [and to] make people confident enough in their own abilities to expose themselves to other disciplines.”

Desirable density

Among the many challenges facing planners in terms of housing in future will be to create denser neighbourhoods. UK cities are far less dense than their European counterparts, says Valentine Quinio, Senior Analyst at Centre for Cities. High rise is a less effective way to boost density than many think, because of the space around each building and that taken up by the central core. Quinio suggests a more moderate solution: “There’s what we call mid‑level, which is three, four or five storeys, as you have in Paris or Barcelona, which gives a desirable level of density and has nothing to do with skyscrapers or Hong Kong‑style density.”

In UK cities, the suburbs need a major makeover, says Barnes. Too many suburbs have a train station to a city centre but not much else, she says. “They need to become vibrant places in their own right, with shops and restaurants and buildings where you can work. And there is a major opportunity to redevelop run‑down streets of interwar semi‑detached houses into terraces with a greater sense of community through the expedient of infilling and expanding existing properties.”

The issue of making existing homes better insulated is a huge obstacle in the path to meeting net‑zero targets in the UK, and one that no government has successfully tackled so far. Rogers says a new approach is needed. “It will probably have to be done through external insulation, as internal insulation becomes incredibly disruptive. We need to find ways of automating those processes and making them far more standardised and less labour intensive.”

Finally, digital technology will become a much greater component of how cities are designed and function. Whenever the city of the future is discussed, there’s a tendency to talk about smart cities, where technology holds sway and everything is connected to the internet. But what’s more important, says Stonor, is to think about how that technology is used. “It’s about being evidence‑based and human‑focused, so everything is built around the end user,” he explains. Cities, in other words, are human constructs and the ultimate aim must be to create cities that work for people.

Greening up the city

As well as having greener buildings and transport policies, cities in future will need to be a lot greener in a literal sense, with much greater planting of trees, buildings softened with foliage and more green spaces for those in the densest neighbourhoods. Much of this is to do with heat. The ‘urban heat island’ effect occurs when cities replace natural land cover with hard paving, concrete and buildings, all of which absorb and retain heat, making life much more uncomfortable as temperatures rise.

Tim Stonor of Space Syntax says: “The deep shade created by heavy landscape, lots of big trees and the facades of buildings being green, provides heavy cooling and increases the amount of time throughout the year that it’s comfortable to walk around.” Rooftop gardens are another way of greening buildings while providing a pleasant meeting space. Expect to also see increasing development of green thoroughfares of one kind or another. Lisa Taylor of Coherent Cities says: “I’m from Montreal, and one of the things that’s happened there in the last few years is what they call ruelles vertes. It basically means green alleyways. They’ve taken over concreted back alleyways and made them into green passageways, increasing drainage and reducing the urban heat island and making places much more pleasant.”

Project management for future cities

In future, urban projects will require a different set of competencies, says Professor Andrew Edkins of UCL’s Bartlett Real Estate Institute. Far more projects will involve repurposing, he explains, because of changing work patterns, but also because of the embedded carbon in buildings and the increased taxes for demolition.

“That’s going to mean that project managers have to deal with huge increases in uncertainty. The ideal project for a project manager is a greenfield one, because of the certainty of information.” Instead of there being one stage of discovery, it will be repeated throughout the project as new issues are revealed.

Project professionals will have to master new technologies to gather information and they will have to sell the cost of this process to clients. “By contrast, demolition does all your discovery phase in one go; it says, ‘I discovered everything at this building, and I’ve swept it all out of the way so I can start with a clean slate.’ Well, you won’t be able to do that.”

Project professionals will also become more involved in the delivery of benefits, as contractors are increasingly expected to be accountable for buildings once they are constructed. As an example, Edkins says, experience shows that buildings often don’t perform to their BREEAM assessment once they are in operation and those managing the project will have to take responsibility. “It won’t be long before we end up with the sort of output and outcome contracts that basically hold contractors’ feet in the fire.”

Project professionals may want to just build and leave, but that will no longer be an option, he predicts. They will need to have a greater understanding of the different kinds of value that projects can deliver. It will be less about short‑term economic value and more about sustainability, meeting carbon targets and also less tangible aspects of value to the city as a whole. The relatively small developments that led to the loss of Liverpool’s UNESCO World Heritage status showed how value can be misunderstood, and how the value of that status to Liverpool was underestimated.

Project professionals will increasingly need to decide whether to become involved in the front‑end aspects of understanding value and shaping policy, says Edkins. “For too long they’ve said: this has nothing to do with us. But these are projects that will have an impact on people’s lives for decades.” And in the realm of digital technology, he expects that they will also become more involved in scenarios and modelling, in both construction and other aspects of the project. “For example, what happens if we have a COVID‑19 outbreak? How does this building perform? It won’t be long before we rehearse the entire project in a digital environment.”