Inventing Future Cities, by Michael Batty. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2024; 304 pages, $26.95.
You would be forgiven for guessing, based on the title, that Inventing Future Cities might be a science-fictional retrospective or analysis, examining authors’ depictions of urban environments in distant decades or centuries. But author Michael Batty is actually discussing not metaphorical “world building” in the novelistic or cinematic sense, but what form we as a civilization might literally invent for our future cities.
Batty, a highly recognized expert on urban and regional planning, particularly with respect to modeling and visualizing cities as complex systems, has won numerous awards over his long career. A key premise of this book is that cities “are more like organisms than they are like machines. … They are the product of countless individual and group decisions that do not conform to any grand plan.” As such, cities are unpredictable to a very significant degree, despite efforts and wishes to the contrary.
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How, then, is the book about “inventing” something that can’t be predicted? One might imagine it in the same way that a book on inventing future computer networks could have been written 50 years ago, even without specifically predicting the particulars of the internet, cellphones, smart devices, or the microchips that power today’s technology. It was nevertheless clear that they would evolve into something else.
Batty notes that because accurate prediction isn’t possible, “this is not a book about visions of what future cities might ‘look like,’ nor is it a set of recipes for designing future cities.” Instead, he continues, “it is much more about how we should think about future cities based on the argument that we invent those futures.”
And thinking about them is what Inventing Future Cities does for much of its length. It touches on topics ranging from “The Great Transition” (a chapter about the ongoing shift in the worldwide population toward cities) to how the ever-increasing effect of distance-shrinking technology might affect the size of current and future cities. (Spoiler alert: It is likely to continue changing the effects of distance without ever fully eliminating distance and location as significant considerations and organizing principles.)
The book includes many other more complex observations, drawn from Batty’s deep well of research and understanding about the spatial aspects of cities and what makes them tick. Batty has a string of other books to his credit, including several on closely related topics such as The Computable City, Cities and Complexity, and The New Science of Cities. He has served at the University College London since 1995 and is currently the Bartlett Professor of Planning there as well as chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.
From the advent of smart cities to how we should define a city, from aging populations to dizzying technological advancements, Batty leaves few stones unturned in his meditative take on future urbanism.
Make no mistake, Inventing Future Cities is a heady work, at times almost philosophical in tone while never losing its scientific and research basis. Perhaps the best way to describe this is to use a description of the book’s content from Batty himself in the opening chapter: “Our arguments here are in the nature of a long essay that is both speculative, technically focused, and grounded in a well-versed philosophy of modern science that treats prediction as being contingent.”
As for those of you looking for a better handle on what Batty himself sees, writ large, for future cities, he offers this: “A global world where cities are connected ever more closely to one another, where physical migrations between cities at all levels of the hierarchy will be the dominant force in patterns of growth and decline, and where the traditional ways in which we produce, procure, and consume goods will be affected by enormous strides in automation: these are the portents for these future years.”
