Cities are generally pretty great places to live if you are a young adult, but for children and older people there are a lot of challenges to living in urban environments.

This is made worse by how little these groups are taken into account in proposals conceptualising the cities of the future – if you looked at most concepts of future cities, you’d be forgiven for thinking that children were banned and that all old people were being done away with in a Logan’s Run-style system.

However, one group is trying to change that with a report proposing a number of age-inclusive future scenarios for the UK city of Bristol.

Developed out of research by Future Cities Catapult and Bristol University, the report focuses on how cities can be designed to build community trust, create opportunities for different generations to interact and provide suitable housing for a mix of generations.

Here we look at the four primary scenarios envisioned by the report:

Scenario one: The living city of the future

You won’t be surprised to hear that biomimicry and the integration of plant life into the city is a key part of this scenario, but there’s far more to it than that.

The city is powered by renewables such as wind and solar, as well as (perhaps optimistically) a form of moss, and alongside the traditional green roofs are more wacky structures such as tree houses.

Existing houses are also adapted, with new underground rooms installed and the option to add bolt-on rooms to accommodate growing households.

Cars are not permitted in the city, making public spaces a place where young and old can mingle, and increasing amounts of education occurs outside with children able to move around the city safely. Through this system kids learn a mix of life skills from adults of all ages, giving them a mixture of self, academic and community learning.

In this rather utopian concept, all citizens work a twenty-hour week and are paid a living wage, giving far more time for social activities, which is good because those with free time are expected to visit and support those who are vulnerable or have limited mobility.

The report does acknowledge the highly idealistic nature of this scenario, although doesn’t really answer the questions it raises:

“There are of course tensions in this future scenario: the balance between encouraging innovation and creativity and promoting anarchy was discussed, as was the balance between incentivising ‘green’ activities without significant regulation.

“It was also recognised that the living city may not be everyone’s ideal, and the question was raised about whether it would ostracize parts of society.”

The scenario is a nice idea, then, but probably fairly unworkable in reality – although if it can work anywhere in the UK it is Bristol; the English equivalent of Portland, Oregon.

Scenario two: The flooded city of the future

Dubbed “new Venice”, this scenario looks at the city if it were partially flooded in 2070 – a scenario that is entirely possible given rising sea levels and Bristol’s proximity to the coast.

The main characteristic of this scenario is that the significant disruption that flooding has caused has fuelled a local culture of “creativity and ingenuity”. This has resulted in a collection of practical but awesome solutions to living in partially flooded city, including innovative techniques for tall building construction to house vertical farms.

The citizens will mostly live on a diet of fish and veggies, get their power from a combination of dams and solar and will get around by boat and other water transportation. People from other parts of the UK and Europe will come to Bristol for weekend breaks, as the cities takes over from Venice.

The flooding will also impact on digital connectivity. The report describes the invention of an “embodied wireless communication network” that not only gets people online but also works as a smart management system for the city, managing limited resources and remotely assessing sick or injured members of the population before dispatching them to the nearest mobile hospital barge.

The city would also become a hub for water-based festivals and sports events, prompting the idea of a floating version of Glastonbury.

A flooding scenario would also shift the types of skills needed to survive effectively. Practical skills would have a renewed value, particularly in areas such as fishing and farming, resulting in a boom in apprenticeships and other practical learning approaches.

As with the first scenario, this concept also has some fairly pie-in-the-sky political elements.

National government is replaced by a local fiefdom, with land owned collectively by the people, as the city’s major landholders left when the flooding occurred. A swapping system for care commitments ensures everyone is looked after, and the community has a strong spirit where everyone pitches in with the tasks required.

It’s a nice idea, but would likely be unachievable without more governance – such a mix of systems would require heavy organisation, which we’re struggling to believe would be achieved by the community alone.

Scenario three: The future city built on trust

Unlike most modern cities that have different zones for residential and commercial buildings, in this scenario the city is very high-density, with all areas providing a mix of different uses so that there is no one centre. This creates a “patchwork of city villagess, which contain the mix of retail, services, industry and residential to meet ‘village’ needs.”

This village atmosphere would create a strong sense of community spirit, which would be scaled up across the whole urban region.

However, this wouldn’t just be about knowing your neighbours and getting involved in local events. Instead, this community concept would be highly technological, with feelings of isolation and anonymity commonly associated with cities being countered by facial recognition software and digital displays to create a feeling of belonging.

Fears about safety would be targeted with “myth-busting digital displays” that countered misconceptions about, for example the safety of kids walking to school, and the system would be able to tell if you were feeling sad or lonely and seek to cheer you up.

In reality this might come off as just plain creepy, but it is interesting to see these sorts of technologies being considered in a positive light.

Transport in the city would be ubiquitous and affordable, combining the concept of personal and public transport in one SkyTran-like system made of connectable pods:

“Embedded sensors communicate where traffic is, where people are and where they need to be in order to collect individuals and join them to trains of pods for the main journey, to split off for the last personalized section of the journey.”

In order to provide enough places to live in such a packed city, the city would adopt ‘lego’ housing made of detachable living modules that enabled people to reshape their homes as their household needs changed.

Scenario four: The future hub city

Conceived for a future where radical overhaul through environmental or social change has not occurred, this “city of hubs” scenario is based around the idea that all civic facilities are located in number of central hubs based around the city.

Each hub would contain schools, health services, cultural services and facilities such as art galleries and museums, making them function as a kind of town centre for each section of the city.

Reaching different areas of the city would be easy on foot – with a network of safe walking highways surrounded by nature .

In theory this would increase the amount that different generations mix, as the hubs and their connections would also play a psychological role in making people feel part of the city.

An important aspect of this would be governance, as each hub would govern its own section of the city in a system that – at least in theory – allowed anyone to have a voice.

The concept is an interesting one, but we can’t help feeling that certain people would end up running some hubs in a pseudo-dictatorship, with major inequality between different areas.

Images courtesy of Future Cities Catapult.