Cities have attracted people for millennia because they offer something that one cannot find anywhere. They are groups of people coming to a place, to work, play and live with one another. One could argue they have been a great pacifying force in history, as commerce has proven time and time again to prevent wars, as people trading with one another would have too much to lose. City-states, of which there is arguably only a handful remaining today, were great examples of that.
With the rise of the modern nation-state and breakneck technological progress of the last couple of centuries, especially with the ever-decreasing travel times enabled by modern transportation, cities may have lost a little of their importance in enabling humans to interact and trade with one another, but they still offer one advantage that technology has not yet been able to supplant: the proximity to one another and therefore the ability to cultivate face to face relationships. While it is now nearly frictionless to make a video call from Toronto to Shanghai, we communicate so much in person that it cannot be communicated through a FaceTime call that I do not see the need to be near one another vanishing anytime soon.
The question is: how do we build the cities of the future that are continuing to leverage and improve upon these in-person interactions?
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