NARRATOR : ln the future, we will fly over traffic. . .live to 150. . .and travel the world at the touch of a button Technology is pushing from every direction, getting faster with each passing second. Prepare yourself. The future is closer
than you think. As future cities grow, so do the dangers of climate change. More than half of the population are living in cities worldwide, and that is forecast
to go up to as much as 75 % over the next 30 years.
NARRATOR : 8 of the 10 largest cities in the world are located on the coastline, and nearly half of the entire world's population lives within 90 miles
of the sea.
JOACHlM : l n the current world crisis that we're in, especially climate change, we need to rethink cities
from scratch.
NARRATOR : But what if we could build cities that ride the rising tides?
OLTHUlS: So, we have to find new solutions. Not fighting against the water, but living with the water. The house you see is a floating house. This house can go up and down with the water.
NARRATOR : But homes like this are just the beginning. Koen Olthuis wants to build entire cities that float using building blocks of foam slabs encased in a concrete shell. Putting them together, he can create platforms as large as 400, 000 square feet. That's the size of two city blocks.
OLTHUlS: That gives us a lot of very stable, large-scale foundations on which you can do almost anything. You can build towers on it, apartments, put trees on it. We're really floating right now. lt feels really stable.
NARRATOR : Floating homes will combine into floating neighborhoods, which can detach and float to a new area whenever they like.
OLTHUlS: Floating roads, floating car parks, floating airports.
NARRATOR : Koen's architecture firm, aptly named Waterstudio, plans to build whole sections
of movable cities. OLTHUlS: Built in one place, and after 10 years, maybe relocated to another part of the city.
NARRATOR : l n fact, whole cities can decide to weigh anchor and drift off in search of more appealing climates. This is really gonna happen.
NARRATOR : Even existing cities will find ways to escape the limitations of land. l nstead of merely scraping the sky, we'll be building entire avenues in it, suspending massive structures in the air. The first glimmer
of what that might look like is the Chinese television tower CCTV in Beijing, arguably the world's most audacious building.
SCHEEREN : l n many ways, the design is an anti-skyscraper. lt really proclaimed very clearlynot to follow
the race for height, to dominate the skyline by being the tallest.
NARRATOR :
At over 4 million square feet, the CCTV building will be the largest office building in the world, pushing the Pentagon to number two.
SCHEEREN : The building will house 1 0, 000 permanent staff and receive several thousand visitors daily,which really makes it a building at the scale of a small city.
NARRATOR :
The CCTV building is big, but big was never the point. The point was to create vast areas of usable space that do not take up space on the ground. But this is not simply a sky bridge. lt is an 1 1 -story building hanging 500 feet in the air.
SCHEEREN : Here you can see the overhang of the building, a cantilever that projects out 7 4 meters and 1 62 meters height with up to 1 1 stories on top.
NARRATOR : Two main towers lean 1 0 degrees on a diagonal. During early construction, Chinese officials called it ''the dangerous building. ''
SCHEEREN : There was, indeed, great concerns at the beginning of this project -- kind of public disbelief
if a building like that could really stand up. lt stands on two big raft slabs, two concrete footings that, in themselves, are anchored by 1 , 400 piles that go 33 meters into the ground. Maybe one of the most important contributions that the building could make is to go a lot further and to imagine new possibilities
for people to inhabit space.
NARRATOR :
Buildings suspended in the sky are an intelligent use of future real estate. But in the future, every square inch of every city will be alive with intelligence. Because every street and every building will have a network of microcomputers built right into them. Dr. Kris Pister calls it ''smart dust. ''
PlSTER :
A smart dust particle, or mote, is a wireless sensor with sensing computation, communication, and power
in one package. NARRATOR : These all-in-one microcomputers will be small very small.
PlSTER : The size of a mote today is about the size of a grain of rice. We've shown that we can make
the circuitries small enough and light enough that, eventually, it will be possible to make things that are
on a submillimeter-size scale.
NARRATOR : Tiny specks of computer smart dust will form a vast invisible network that can help manage the infrastructure of even the largest city.
PlSTER :
Smart cities in the future will take this low-power, inexpensive, small technology and basically distribute it everywhere.
NARRATOR : These tiny computers record information about their surroundings, information they can send
to other computers or to you. Smart dust on the tracks will monitor your commuter train so you know
if it's running late. Potholes will be able to report themselves and warn your car. And you'll never have to wait for a radio traffic report
again.
PlSTER : They're monitoring the flow of traffic and giving you alerts about what route is the right way to go to keep the traffic moving.
NARRATOR : Bridges will get a coating of smart dust particles that can warn us when they detect stress fractures, helping avoid deadly collapses. But smart dust will also allow buildings and streets to recognize you
and respond accordingly.
jOURET: l think increasingly the environment will respond to who we are and adapt in consequence. The city will know where you are if you want it to.
NARRATOR :
Your workplace will know you. Smart dust at the entrance will boot up your computer. And smart dust embedded in the elevator doors will automatically ring your floor. Smart dust is going to sense the environment and allow us to improve the way that we live our lives.
NARRATOR : No matter how we live in the future city, it will be radically different. And once you leave
the future city, the road you take may not be a road at all.
HANCHETTE: One day, you'll simply be able to get into your personal aircraft and push a button, and the airplane will do everything on its own.
NARRATOR :
There are approximately 600 million vehicles on the planet today. By 2020, it's estimated there will be 1 . 2 billion automobiles on the road, leading to a traffic nightmare. But the coming decades promise entirely new ways of getting from ''A'' to ''B. '' The advances in civilization has always come about with advances
in the way we can travel.
NARRATOR : Where we're going, we don't need roads. lt's every kid's dream to be able to fly, have no constraints, and be completely free to fly through the air.
