Innovating for Future Towns

How do you plan for towns in an age of climate change?

How do you plan for towns with extremes of weather, waterfall, flooding and prolonged spells of drought.

How do you plan for towns with insecure national supplies of energy amid the transition from carbon fuels?

How do you provide sufficient homes for people?

How do you understand where the demand for housing and employment will be? How will we access the data to understand the connectedness of these places and the many issues which connect them?

How do you plan for towns when transportation, personal and collective, will be available upon, under and above the ground? With such changing demand, how do you plan for existing distributed systems such as ground bound roads and rail?

How do you plan for towns with needed new networks for growing food and generating and supplying energy?

How do you plan for towns with hybrid living andliving and working in both physical and conceptual worlds?

Perhaps the Robots will know as we learn how to ask them

How do you plan for planning amid a revolution in machine, digital and human cognition?

How do you plan for loss of biodiversity and for the maintaining the strength of nature? What effects will this have on human well-being mental health at an individual and a population level?

How do you plan for towns with populations with generational poverty? And when political and social pressure is for the most efficient targeting of resources?

How do you plan for towns without real-world devolution of power from the central government?

  • Is a fifteen minute journey to access vital services, or,

  • the large scale adoption of vertical farming or,

  • money for placemaking or,

  • for learning to speak with robotics using conversational coding really going to do it?

Come to the Future Towns Innovation Hub at The University of Southampton and the Science Park at Chilworth to find out!