Il Giornale event on cities and transport of the future in Milan. Access is free while places last, subject to registration at the link: https://shorturl.at/L2p3v
There are novels that become watches. They don’t measure time, they reveal it. Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is one of these: a dark dial that marks the anxiety of the future with the needle fixed on control. It is a prophecy that does not speak of spaceships, but of glances. The power that observes you, records, corrects. I like to think that every city carries within itself that double pulse: the luminous promise of the universal exhibitions and the thrill of a windowless corridor. The future is always a compromise between a fair and a barracks, between glass pavilions and rooms where someone counts our steps.
In 2050 the city will resemble a beehive. Denser, older, more demanding. A continent of humanity stacked in neighborhoods that ask for services, air, silence, speed. The maps, moreover, have already changed language: the countryside has retreated, the suburbs have become cities, the cities have become archipelagos. Within these archipelagos another cartography will be born, minute and forthcoming: the city of fifteen minutes, the sum of small republics with bread, school, gym, doctor and a pocket theater within walking distance. It’s not nostalgia. It’s a neighbor’s technology: designing life as a walk in the park.
And yet you don’t understand the future of cities until you look at the car. The car was the educational novel of the twentieth century: private freedom on four wheels, landscapes that flow like films, a car radio that taught you the measurement of distances. The car invented Sundays, escapes, impossible parking spaces, the emotional geography of families. Today that mythology is crumbling. The machine loses property and gains service. From possessive to shared, from noise to electric whisper, from gesture to algorithm. The car translates the city and the city translates the car: domains are negotiated, lanes are handed over, data is exchanged. There is a precise moment, the first time you get into a self-driving car, in which you feel dizzy: the freedom that had made you an adult is now a protocol that accompanies you like a gentle guardian. This is where Orwell smiles with his black irony.
It’s not a malignant process, it’s an evolution. The streets of 2050 will be less noisy and smarter. The lanes will communicate with the cars like old lovers who understand each other with a nod. The city will no longer be a battlefield between pedestrians and sheet metal, but an orchestra. The autonomous car will pop in and out of the concert, disappearing when not needed, returning when you call it. The parking lots will go underground, like certain regrets. The surfaces will be freed for trees, benches, markets, pitches where teenagers learn dribbling and solitude. It will be a world that is slower on the surface and faster underground, where new subways and fast trains will run that will make cities that today seem like borders seem close to us.
The question is: what do we sacrifice? The city will ask you to trade the sovereignty of the steering wheel for the precision of the algorithm. It’s a deal with convenience and safety. Prevent accidents, smooth traffic, reduce emissions. Apparently there is nothing to object to. But every time a system works too well, someone takes note of your route. It will be a kind and curious city, with a long memory. No more cameras to spy on, but widespread intelligence to suggest. There is a difference, but a trace of anxiety remains: the city that protects you can also train you. It will be our job to draw the border. Technology needs to be a dam, not a living room view dam.
Meanwhile, architecture will change its skin. The single-use monoliths gray the city and turn it off when evening comes. In 2050, buildings will be Swiss army knives: home, work, crafts, gym, small libraries, garden terraces. The floors light up at different times, like a vertical neighborhood. The shop windows will become shops again, not for folklore but for logistics: repairing will make more sense than replacing, mending more charm than throwing away. The voices of the elderly will resonate in the courtyards, because the future will also be a long negotiation with age. We will find ourselves demographically fragile and socially more mixed. Homes will learn the alphabet of accessibility, nursery schools will overlook residences and RSAs will have pianos turned on in the afternoon. The living city is a polis that leaves no one behind, not the sum of locked residences.
Infrastructure, a sad and wonderful word, will be the invisible backbone of all elegance. The water collected and recycled, the energy produced on the roofs, the network that breathes with the weather. The city will produce some of its light as a tree produces shade. The trees, in turn, will become teachers again. Avenues that lower the fever of summers, walls that host greenery as if they were cliffs. The landscape will not be a backdrop, but rather a therapy. Not out of romance, but out of physical necessity: resisting the heat, letting the rains flow, cleaning the air. Cement can learn education.
And the streets? I see them as blank pages. The grammar of 2050 is written there: in the precedences, in the times of the traffic lights, in the silences. The fifteen minute city works if you make it beautiful on foot. Yet the myth of travel will not die. Under the urban order, the desire to leave, to speed up, to take a wrong turn will continue. Maybe flying cars will remain a well-organized whim, maybe not. But the healthy city doesn’t laugh at dreams: it hosts them in a hangar, makes them safe, lets them try.
There is also another responsibility that we cannot delegate to engineers: language. The cities of the future will need new words and ancient alphabets. Say thank you to those who leave the way, greet your neighbor, recognize the right to silence. Coexistence is fragile software. If you break it, the city turns into hangars of well-wired solitudes. It’s not enough to design; we need to educate. Urban planning is a pedagogy of space.
They often ask me whether the future is optimistic or apocalyptic. I reply with a photograph that I didn’t take: a street at night, the rain, a passer-by who closes his umbrella, a car that stops without a driver, the wind that moves a young lime tree. At that stop there is an agreement: the human and the machine have agreed to meet halfway. Nobody demanded everything. It is the measure that saves.
Orwell will remain on the bedside table. It serves to remind us that every progress has a temptation: to transform efficiency into morality. The cities of 2050, if we know how to love them, will not be regimes of glass but communities of proximity. We will get there not with a gadget revolution, but with stubborn care for everyday life. The future is not a fair or a barracks. It is a house with many doors, streets that know how to wait and cars that no longer claim to be the only story.
Freedom will once again become a path. The rest, the metal, will do its part without demanding the last word.
Il Giornale event on cities and transport of the future in Milan. Access is free while places last, subject to registration at the link: https://shorturl.at/L2p3v