was disappointed with the book because of its title, I though it would give insights about how cities deal with unpredictability and create future visions, I think the book should've been called "History of Inventing Future Cities," because it gives great insights about development of the cities throughout history and how complex the systems have become.
What do to about the unpredictability of the future No clue, Boring for me It reads as very meandering and theoretical and didnt really tackle the questions I was most interested in as an urbanist in the YIMBY movement it touched on those issues for a few pages only to dismiss them as irrelevant / unlikely to be impactful.
I found it odd that he spent so long talking about unpredictability and trying to be robust to cultural variation, only to acknowledge the debate here so superficially, to describe the desire for compact infill rather than sprawl as “controversial”, before summarily concluding patterns of global development were unlikely to change and thus not of interest.
The most interesting content was largely a shallower rehash of concepts in Geoffrey Wests Scale, which I read last year, I also learned a bit about how researchers define city boundaries, which was interesting in itself, I only got halfway through so it is possible the second half is better, Interesting book, however it leaves you somewhat wanting for more, I completely agree with the author that predicting the future of cities is not really a realistic endeavor, however, the author constantly tries to do just that, In his final chapters he reiterates the fact that we cannot predict the future and insists that inventing it, taking the larger context into account, is what we should be doing.
How to do this or even what to exactly take into account to do that, he leaves in the middle,
On the other hand, the book is well researched and some interesting trends are shown an exercise in prediction to my feeling about the future of cities in the world, so it is still worth the read.
Be prepared however not to get an answer on how to invent future cities, Well researched book that provides many thought angles, It starts off with a mainly spatial focus but then broadens to amongst others social and technological aspects, Sadly it concludes with stating that as cities are organismes formed from bottomup mostly selfish actions we can picture and vision but these are especially just a basis for discussion and to help change to happen.
I am left with the main question if city planning is useful or not in the end I think some of the mechanismes might have been left out.
How we can inventbut not predictthe future of cities, We cannot predict future cities, but we can invent them, Cities are largely unpredictable because they are complex systems that are more like organisms than machines, Neither the laws of economics nor the laws of mechanics apply cities are the product of countless individual and collective
decisions that do not conform to any grand plan.
They are the product of our inventions they evolve, In Inventing Future Cities, Michael Batty explores what we need to understand about cities in order to invent their future,
Batty outlines certain themesprinciplesthat apply to all cities, He investigates not the invention of artifacts but inventive processes, Today form is becoming ever more divorced from function information networks now shape the traditional functions of cities as places of exchange and innovation, By the end of this century, most of the world's population will live in cities, large or small, sometimes contiguous, and always connected in an urbanized world, it will be increasingly difficult to define a city by its physical boundaries.
Batty discusses the coming great transition from a world with few cities to a world of all cities argues that future cities will be defined as clusters in a hierarchy describes the future "highfrequency," realtime streaming city considers urban sprawl and urban renewal and maps the waves of technological change, which grow ever more intense and lead to continuous innovationan unending process of creative destruction out of which future cities will emerge.
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