Future cities

FUTURE CITIES

From houses printed by robotic arms to flying taxis, inflatable farms and giant hoovers that turn polluting particles into jewellery, FOS Future Lab offers innovative and ingenious solutions to humanity’s problems

Words by Alex Moore

By 2050 the United Nations predicts that 68% of the world’s population will live in cities. That’s a difficult statistic to process, but the figure was 47% at the turn of this century and 30% in 1950. Which means our cities will need to behave very differently, very soon, if they’re to accommodate millions of new inhabitants. Will they spread out and become larger? Or perhaps grow taller, or venture underground? How will we move around them? And how can we ensure that the cities of the future are not only sustainable, but regenerative?

It is believed that artificial intelligence (AI) will replace 85 million jobs worldwide by 2025, although designers such as Britain’s Thomas Heatherwick see this as a blessing. “Humans shouldn’t be doing anything that machines could quite easily do,” he says. “Let us do what we do best, which is using our imagination and creating unexpected emotional insights – the last things that artificial intelligence will ever manage to duplicate.”

Imagination is exactly what is required to turn these utopian ideals into reality, and Heatherwick’s is one of the best. He recently dreamed up an autonomous electric car that cleans pollutants from other vehicles while doubling up as a multifunctional room with space for dining, working, gaming and even sleeping. The Airo, which is set to go into production next year, was designed with a modern, climateconscious city in mind. With Airo, Heatherwick says, “we were interested to find that edge of reality – because, ultimately, our duty is to keep trying to be inventors while pushing forward what’s possible”. Thankfully, he is not alone.

THE FUTURE OF CONSTRUCTION:

3D-PRINTED HOMES

Over the next 30 years the global population is expected to increase by 25%, which means an additional two billion people will need housing. If that wasn’t worrying enough, there is already a labour shortage – in the US, for example, there are more than 400,000 unfilled positions in the

construction industry – and Generation Z doesn’t seem to be bursting with aspiring hod carriers. Put simply, we need a new way of building houses, and quickly.

Anna Cheniuntai, co-founder of Apis Cor, a Florida-based construction 3D printing company that is exhibiting at Future Lab, thinks she has found the solution. Apis Cor has developed a mobile robotic arm called Frank, which can print houses using a geopolymer that is stronger and more fireresistant than concrete – a process nine times quicker than traditional construction methods. Frank has already built the world’s largest 3D-printed structure, a 640-square-metre administrative building in Dubai.

“The construction industry creates roughly a third of the world’s waste,” says Cheniuntai. “By calculating and printing out materials to exact dimensions, you can avoid so much waste. And the reduced need for human labour dramatically lowers the cost of building. We can disrupt the way we build houses – which, to be honest, hasn’t really changed for hundreds of years.”

Designers and architects around the world are recognising 3D printing as the quickest and most sustainable way to build new communities. The Swiss designer Yves Béhar worked with Icon, the team behind the Vulcan II 3D printing construction system, to visualise the world’s first 3D-printed village, an idea that has been picked up by the Danish Bjarke Ingels Group, which will start printing 100 houses on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, later this year.

Cheniuntai believes the sky’s the limit for 3D printing. Apis Cor is investing in extraterrestrial infrastructure, in the hope of being the first company to build on the Moon and Mars. Yet she concedes that scaling up the technology presents a serious challenge. “Demand is huge, so we need to produce printers faster. For now, our main priority is Earth.”

POLLUTION SOLUTIONS: HOW TO HARVEST SMOG

The World Health Organization claims 4.2 million people die every year as a result of exposure to outdoor air pollution. Almost a quarter of those deaths happen in India – home to 10 of the world’s 15 most polluted cities – where diesel generators are the biggest culprits. Still, as the American architect, engineer and futurist Richard Buckminster Fuller famously quipped: “Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.” Thankfully, albeit slowly, designers around the world are beginning to make the most of diesel’s deadly byproducts.

In India, Chakr Innovations, a company founded by graduates from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, has developed the world’s first retro-fit emission control device for diesel generators. The Chakr Shield can capture more than 90% of emissions without causing any adverse effects to the generator. The company then turns the captured pollution into ink and paint – it says each litre of ink purifies 700 million litres of air.

Over in Boston, students at MIT have had a similar idea. The Graviky Labs collective is turning carbon emissions sequestered from factory chimneys and car exhausts into jet fuel, ethanol and plastic. It also makes Air-Ink, which is now used by leading artists and global brands to reduce their carbon footprint. It takes just 45 minutes’ worth of vehicle emissions to make one fluid ounce of ink – enough to fill a pen.

“I believe the climate crisis is the result of bad design or unconscious design,” says Dutch artist and inventor Daan Roosegaarde, who is exhibiting at Future Lab. “The only thing we can really do is engineer our way out of it.”

Perturbed by the low air quality in Beijing (he claims it is equivalent to smoking 17 cigarettes a day), Roosegaarde created the world’s largest vacuum cleaner – the Smog Free Tower, which sucks pollution from the sky and cleans it on a nano level with patented positive ionisation technology. The tower removes 70% of deadly PM10 particles from the air, using a nominal amount of solar power – and, with Buckminster Fuller’s mantra in mind, Roosegaarde then compresses the extracted pollution and makes museumworthy jewellery with it. If you managed to buy one of his Smog Free Rings, you’ll have donated 1,000 cubic metres of clean air, and the proceeds went towards building new towers in smog-filled cities.

THE LAST MILE:

THE MISSING PIECE OF THE DELIVERY PUZZLE

The “last mile” was a thorn in the side of delivery services long before Amazon and Ocado became household names. The fiddly final stretch of any parcel’s journey is expensive, inefficient and harmful to the environment – and with many inner-city neighbourhoods becoming pedestrianised or ultralow-emission zones, it is increasingly difficult to navigate.

In recent years dozens of companies have tried to decarbonise the last mile. One such is EAV (Electric Assisted Vehicles, which is exhibiting at Future Lab), a Bicester-based business that makes lightweight, sustainable, modular transport for any service that must negotiate those final few turns. So far this includes delivery companies such as DPD (with which EAV worked on the early iterations of its eCargo bike), waste and facilities management, and local tradespeople.

EAV’s range of fully electric vehicles bridges the gap between bike and van, allowing users to transport substantial loads more nimbly than ever before. Crucially, the cargo beds can be quickly and easily reconfigured – or even swapped between vehicles – for unprecedented versatility and productivity.

“We’re trying to imagine this sort of utopia where goods are brought to the outskirts of cities, then decanted into lightweight vehicles that are benign and not aggressive or unpleasant, but just quietly buzz around the city, making their deliveries or picking up the rubbish,” says Nigel Gordon-Stewart, executive chairman of EAV. The company is developing a range of “mid-mile” electric vehicles that will shuttle between depots on the outskirts of urban areas and vehicles working the last mile.

If this ant-colony vision of the future still feels a long way off, consider this: since 2018 autonomous robots have been delivering groceries in Milton Keynes, sending a text message to let customers know when they are outside the front door. The robots were built by Starship, a local delivery service created by Estonian tech entrepreneur Ahti Heinla, who was a founding engineer at Skype. Resembling freezer boxes on wheels, they stick to pavements and can only be unlocked by the recipient via a smartphone app.

Clockwise from left: the world’s largest 3D-printed structure, a 640-square-metre administrative building in Dubai; Apis Cor’s robotic mobile printing arm in action; one of EAV’s lightweight electric delivery vehicles; and Daan Roosegaarde’s Smog Free Ring

“We can disrupt the way we build houses – which, to be honest, hasn’t really changed for hundreds of years”

“If you look at the kind of robots that are being built around the world, you see a lot that have no commercial value or very little impact on our everyday lives,” says Heinla. “And so we wanted to create a robot for everyone. How? By making local delivery faster, cleaner, smarter and more cost-efficient.”

THE THIRD REVOLUTION OF FLIGHT: FLYING TAXIS ARE ON THE HORIZON

We are fast approaching the age of urban air mobility – the third revolution in flight. The Wright brothers’ rudimentary biplane heralded the first, the jet engine ushered in the second, and the third will make flight an electric endeavour, and an everyday one at that.

Front and centre of this revolution are eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft. Part plane, part helicopter, and much cheaper, quieter and greener than either, they are designed for short journeys in areas where transport is slow-moving. Which is why they will be mainly used as flying taxis, not in 10 or 20 years’ time, but in two or three.

“It’s 100% not sci-fi any more,” says Andrew Macmillan, director of infrastructure at Vertical Aerospace (exhibiting at Future Lab), a Bristol-based company that’s at the forefront of the eVTOL industry. “There are around 200 vehicle manufacturers out there making these air taxis. We have 1,350 pre-orders [of the brand’s VX4 aircraft] with the likes of American Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Japan Airlines and Gol in Brazil.”

So the air taxis are almost ready to go, but from where, and where to? Macmillan uses Heathrow to Canary Wharf as an example; the journey can take an hour and a half by car, but an eVTOL aircraft would cut this down to 13 minutes. There’s just one catch: the vast amount of infrastructure required to make this a practical mode of transport. Which is where companies such as Skyports come in. “For the eVTOL industry to be successful, we’re going to need lots and lots of vertiports [similar to heliports, but with electric charging capabilities], preferably in the densest part of the city, where space is constrained,” says the company’s founder, Duncan Walker. “The vision is that people can jump in one of these things as part of our normal transportation solutions. The goal is to make them no more expensive than an UberX – and if we can achieve that, then it will be possible to operate at a scale that is still difficult to imagine.”

For some, perhaps, but several big cities are already gearing up for the era of urban air mobility – including Singapore, Dallas, LA, Miami and Melbourne. The speed and extent to which eVTOL operations are scaled up will depend on the cities’ procedures for consulting with stakeholders, and whether or not the concept takes off in the community as a whole. Still, investment banking company Morgan Stanley predicts the industry will be worth $9 trillion by 2050 – and that, it adds, is a conservative estimate.

“Several big cities are already gearing up for the era of urban air mobility – including Singapore, Dallas, LA, Miami and Melbourne”

Vertical Aerospace’s flying taxis could be airborne within three years, using a network of “vertiports” with electric charging capability

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Inflatable, climate-controlled aeroponic BioPods can cultivate more than 300 species of plant – even in space

“We’re making it possible to grow strawberries in the desert... we hope to create pods the size of football stadiums”

URBAN FARMING:

FROM THE METROPOLIS TO THE MOON

Food miles are a contentious issue. There’s no denying the environmental impact of putting non-local delicacies on our plates. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs estimates that the transport of food is responsible for 25% of all miles covered by heavy goods traffic in the UK – about 19 million tonnes of CO2 annually, equivalent to 5.5 million typical cars. Yet if we stopped importing food altogether, we would remove incomes from communities all over the world. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, about 1.5 million people depend on exporting food to Britain, and ending this trade relationship would reduce the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions by less than 0.1%.

Urban farming has been chuntering along since 3,550BC, long before food miles were an issue. Increasingly, however, scientists and architects are looking for innovative ways to grow fresh fruit and vegetables within the city limits, and at scale. One of the most ambitious companies doing this is Interstellar Lab (exhibiting at Future Lab), which has designed an inflatable, climate-controlled aeroponic BioPod that can autonomously cultivate more than 300 species of plant anywhere – even in space.

Barbara Belvisi, the company’s founder and CEO, spent a year working at Nasa’s Ames Research Centre before coming up with a design that has since won the Nasa Deep Space Food Challenge. One day the pods could support life on the Moon, but for now they have three main applications. “First, they can be used by cosmetic and pharmaceutical brands to grow specific plants,” says the French entrepreneur. “Instead of shipping in vanilla from Madagascar, it will allow them to localise production and optimise the yield [by up to 300 times].” The second use is food production in arid places such as Texas and the Middle East. “We’re making it possible to grow strawberries in the desert. The first iteration of the BioPod is a similar size to a greenhouse, but within a few years we hope to create pods the size of football stadiums.” The third is research and conservation: “By re-creating a specific climate, we can protect endangered species, examining how boosting CO2 levels can accelerate photosynthesis, for example.”

And the best bit about it? “Everything is integrated,” grins Belvisi. “You don’t need foundations or a water treatment system, so they’ll work perfectly on city rooftops, giving a whole different perspective to the farm-to-table debate.” Future Lab will be held at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, June 23-26.