The urban buildings of the near-future will be tall, smart, adaptable, responsive, honest, modular, recyclable, clean, and deeply embedded into the systems of their host cities, if an imaginative vision from Arup's Foresight team is anything to judge by. In its evocatively titled It's Alive, Arup (the firm responsible for the structural design of the iconic Sydney Opera House) asks if we can imagine the urban building of the future while simultaneously presenting its take on the matter. The report contains plenty of ideas, albeit briefly stated, so I thought it would be fun to identify some of today's science and technology that has made it into Arup's skyscraper of tomorrow and discuss whether Arup's vision is more grounded in fact or fiction.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Arup's future-scraper is the product of its time; a time 37 years from now that will suck and be awesome in approximately equal measures. Why suck? Because 37 years will see us through to the year 2050, and Arup shares (or perhaps borrows) the OECD's troubling forecast of a warming, overpopulated Earth hungry for, yet deficient in, essential resources. According to this narrative, there will be 9 billion people, with 6.3 billion living in towns and cities.

The good news is that we'll still have iPhones—or their future-proxies, at least. Arup describes the denizens of our future cities as "net-native adults" who have grown up with smart cities, smart clothes, and smart objects. The Internet of Things will be ubiquitous, Arup suggests; presumably to the point that it has been abbreviated simply to "things," the "Internet of" having been long since forgotten.

The specific technology that Arup predicts will make up our buildings varies from the likely (or even current) to the speculative, the specific to the vague. Let's start with the obvious.

The big picture: Tall and modular

The aesthetic merits of tall buildings can be debated, but if humanity is set to grow and become increasingly urbanized, cities either have to grow upward our outward. There are arguments that the former is the more environmentally sound approach, not least because urban sprawl is prevented, and existing infrastructure can be reused (or, if necessary, upgraded). Where green belt policy is in effect, building outward may not even be an option, which comes with consequences. In 2005, the Government of Ontario passed legislation to designate a green belt around Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe. As of September 2012, Toronto had 147 tall buildings under construction. Toronto is an extreme case by North American standards, but even so, Arup's prediction that the buildings of the near-future will be tall appears sound, perhaps a no-brainer.

But modular skyscrapers? Rob Hunt's illustration of Arup's future-scraper is pleasingly reminiscent of the futuristic visions of the 1970s depicting inter-stellar space hulks and off-world colonies (c.f. Donald E. Davis' painting of the interior of a Stanford torus). It shows a skyscraper composed of modular pods that can be replaced as the requirements of use change. "In this emerging age, with significant developments in construction—prefabricated and modular systems are moved and assembled by robots that work seamlessly together to install, detect, repair and upgrades components of the building system," Arup writes. A new start-up fails? No problem. The building's army of robotic workers can replace its office and all its prefabricated fixtures, with a new one tailored to the needs of the next (or instead with a pizzeria, tropical garden, or small suite of studio apartments).

Today, modular buildings are more likely to be kit houses, with components selected to meet the needs of the user. Modular buildings of any scale are few. Raines Court in London, built in 2003, is a residential block of 53 flats. Each was factory-built, complete with kitchens and bathrooms, plumbing and electrics. The first phase saw 29 units put together and connected in a mere five days. However, the developer has said that until such modules are mass-produced, modular construction is "no cheaper" than traditional construction methods, which puts us firmly into vicious circle territory. Nevertheless, a large modular residential building at 335 East 27th Street in Manhattan is on the cards. "My Micro NY," the winner of Mayor Bloomberg's adAPT NYC competition, will be assembled from 55 locally built "micro-units" of between 250 and 370 square feet.

Prefabrication of tall buildings is increasingly common, however. Notionally a step back from full modular building, prefabrication is allowing construction of large buildings in record time. In November, a ten-story residential block, Instacon, was built in two days in the Punjab. The rapid-building efforts of China's Broad Group, who built a 15-story hotel in six days and a 30-story hotel in 15, are attracting inevitable attention, though these efforts would be eclipsed, at least as a spectacle, if its plans to build the world's tallest skyscraper in 90 days are successful. These record times are massaged slightly: they tend not to include groundwork or time spent in the factory.

It seems likely that the urban buildings of 2050 will be prefabricated, but whether modular construction takes over is anyone's guess. A modular future might well result in skyscrapers looking very much more alike. A more likely bet is that future skyscrapers will go up in the proverbial blink of an eye.

Which is to say nothing of the robots. The odd window-cleaning robot and quad-rotor automatons that can build rudimentary walls aside, we are still in the early days of robot construction workers, let alone automatons that can reconfigure skyscrapers on a whim. Research at Cornell has brought about a robot which can navigate a simple truss structure, adding and removing components as it goes. But if robots are to revolutionize construction, perhaps they will first do so in quiet, inconspicuous ways, such as laying out and marking ground more quickly and accurately. But who knows? Perhaps the International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction (IAARC) will amaze us any day now.