Dreaming the City: Designing How We Live in the Past, Present, and Future

Ask any child to draw a home and you’ll get more or less the same sketch every time: a triangle sitting on a box, a couple of windows, a door with a wonky doorknob. They might add a blue strip for the sky, or some spiky green grass. It doesn’t matter whether the child actually lives somewhere grey and rainy, or whether they have a grassy lawn, or any outside space at all. Somewhere along the way, they’ve adopted a mental image of what a home is. But where does this image come from, and what does it tell us about the social conventions and lifestyles we’ve come to view as a given?

The way we live is shaped by the spaces we live in. Even if many of us don’t actually live in a home like that classic kid’s drawing, the single-family house is definitely a symbol of a comfortable, successful life. But we’re not born with some innate desire to live like this. Our homes, neighbourhoods, and cities are all designed with a certain vision in mind. If the social values of the people who designed our living spaces had been drastically different, maybe the way we live together in community would also be drastically different.

Today, we often hear about people dreaming of escaping the city, claiming they’re lonely, overcrowded, or not built to meet the needs of their growing populations. In a post-COVID world, where so many of us had to ride out lockdown in one-bedroom flats with no gardens, fantasising about running off to the countryside has become the new normal. And in the media, densely-packed cities are often painted as places without enough resources or space to go around, so while we might love the social, cultural, and work opportunities presented by the city, that countryside grass can definitely seem greener at times.

It wasn’t always this way. Believe it or not, about a hundred years ago, the concept of fully industrialised, technologically advanced cities was an exciting new prospect for how people might live together differently in the future. Now that people didn’t need to live off the land in quite the same way as before, what could communities look like? Architects and artists relished the challenge to dream up new cityscapes, using design to shape how people might work, travel, socialise, and live differently in the city of tomorrow.

In 1925, Harvey W. Corbett drew up a utopian American city of the future, with tree-lined parks above rooftops, buildings stretching half a mile into the sky, and schools stacked above offices above storefronts. Streets would be layered like onion skins: pedestrian-only levels peel back to reveal multi-lane highways, which peel back to reveal public transport hubs, buried deep underground. In this vision of the future, high-density doesn’t suggest a lack of resources, but an abundance of them, where everything you need to live, work, and build a family would be just a stone’s throw away, with community all around you.

Just because we’re used to something doesn’t mean it’s the only way. Take the private homes and gardens that we associate with suburbia and the countryside: could they be brought into the heart of the city and stacked one on top of the other in a towering skyscraper? In this world, ‘suburbia’ would become a place that stretched into the sky, accessed by elevators, rather than a place which sprawls outwards and is accessed by cars and roads.

Just as designers of the past came up with mad ideas that never came to fruition, we have to remember that so many of the once-crazy concepts did come to pass. Skyscrapers themselves were once revolutionary; architects were inspired by the challenges posed in limited spaces like the island of Manhattan to think beyond the floorplan. Endless expansion outward wasn’t possible, so they were forced to look to the sky, forever changing our perceptions of space. As populations continue to grow and technology advances, ideas which seem implausible to us now might become reality as architects dream up new ways for how we might live together in the future.

The Hyperbuilding, OMA’s conceptual plans for a ‘self-contained city’, would be the final evolution of the skyscraper, hypothetically seeing an entire city raised into the air in one unimaginably huge structure. It asks where the boundary is between a city and the buildings which make it up. And back in the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller imagined a two-mile dome that would cover midtown Manhattan in an attempt to solve air pollution and regulate weather. While this never happened, probably for obvious reasons, it’s fascinating to imagine the city as a controlled space enclosed in a single structure. Pushing that idea even further: what if the city could literally take on a life of its own, roaming the earth while life unfolded inside it? 

Sure, these examples range from implausible to pure science fiction. But the point isn’t that we should reject our current environment in favour of one of these wacky ideas, only that we should question it. The way our homes and societies look isn’t inevitable. The people who plan cities and construct buildings aren’t just designing spaces, but the way we live. Shaping whether we’re more likely to live together or apart, whether we value community over privacy, and whether a full city is a failing one or a thriving one. We dream of owning single family homes and teach our kids to draw two-up, two-down houses because it’s what we know, but who’s to say we can’t imagine something different, something better?