I Defiance

There will be a new velcro. The same way that pink became the new black, a power adhesive will become the new Velcro. We'll call it Mucilagro. It will attach clothes to bodies (possibly a prerequisite for halftime shows, if the FCC has anything to do with it). It will attach children to their parents (a controversial replacement for today's popular child leash.) Easily removed, expensively replaced.

With public nudity under control and kidnappings curtailed, we may have less to care about when we watch the nightly news at 10.

But in the city of the future, everyone is awake until way past midnight.

Jeanette

Okay so the City of the Future. It's probably true that when most people imagine the city of the future they see a metallic metropolis ablaze with electricity. They see Robots completing every task from something so simple as opening a door to unraveling the complicated structures of bing-bat-boom. Most likely the common notion is that things will be piled so high on top of each other people on earth will travel in hover crafts, while others may choose to live on the moon. Of course all the food to feed the city will be bought from people who make up vegetables in labs. It’s easy to imagine an answer for everything, in pill form and its quite plausible that the lifestyles people lead now will grow and evolve into fatter, lazier, more self absorbed, i'm-alive-but-i-can't-feel lifestyles. I haven't read all of the ideas others have submitted for the City of the Future, so I apologize if you've heard not what I actually think will be seen in the city of the future but what I'd like to see. Maybe that proclivity to see things getting worse for the city in the future is wrong:

One day in the City of the Future realization hit people like an asteroid. They saw that the fast paced lives they spent in their cars on the way to "the office" where they get paid oodles of dollars were devoid of anything resembling happiness. So they slowed down. Of course technology couldn't or wouldn't just get tossed away, but it'd be used for much better things than creating things that the earth can give and ways of killing mass amounts of people. It'd be used to cure horrible diseases and keep the city clean, among other things. Cars would get smaller and wouldn't pollute the environment and more people would ride bikes. Families and Friends would spend more time together. People would communicate face to face instead of screen to screen, cell phone to cell phone. Food would be organic and healthy, because people would realize feeding their babies McDonald's is the worst they could do (as a result all fast food chains would go under). People would be very intelligent, naturally, as new things are discovered everyday no matter what or where, but they would not use their intelligence to create bigger bombs rather, they'd create bigger bridges for communicating with people that live in other Cities of the Future. And you know how your grandparents talk about when they were young and they lived in the city? They talk about how you could go out at night without being afraid, or let your kids play stickball in the street. In the City of the Future your Grandpa will look back to present times and say to you, "You're lucky you're young now, the city I grew up in was not as safe or as kind as it is now."

Kitsune Tsuki

To be human is to communicate. The air of the city of the future will be filled with speech of infinite, invisible 0100011 strings. There will be wires—invisible, yet present wires—running through the air. The city of the future will be a spider web of delicate, silky wires set out to ensnare the human fly.

Foolishly, as they absentmindedly communicate through waves, with their tiny portable screen generators, they believe that on the public nets, they are anonymous. Silly surfer, your flesh is your IP. Patriot act my ass, this government knows what you are thinking.

The wariness of modification soon dissipates as amputees are given new limbs, dying old men new hearts. Philosophers ponder if the human soul will become like the cold, sterile, machines inside them. Some, filled with self-righteous bravado will begin to modify not out of necessity, but as a status symbol. It gradually spreads, business men silently muttering into tiny cell phones attached to their ears, reading the slight movements of the mouth, airline pilots with mechanical eyesight, rich housewives with constantly regenerating skin. Tiny machines run through bloodstreams, killing invaders.

Tiny machines painstakingly repairing strands of DNA. “My body will not be a host for machines” they scream, but it happens anyway. They move away, only to eat modified vegetables. The air reeks of communication.

Yet at night, when all of the machines turn off, the citizen of the future awake screaming with the same primal fears of their cave-dwelling ancestors pumping hot through their cold, mechanical veins.

Mark Lies

Well, it has been such a long time responding to this query that it must be the future now, and so I suppose what ever cities are like now must be what the city of the future is like. But I guess if we go into the far future, you’ll see all sorts of interesting stuff. The zoos will be one of the most oddly captivating features I think. There will be genetically enhanced and hybridized beasts such as the gorillapotamus, the tigerangutang, the elephantwhale, and who knows what others intriguing horrors of human innovation.

They way of life will be much the same as today, but for the faster pace and the being ruled by octopi overlords.