The rising costs of city living and shrinking size of spaces are exposing systemic weaknesses in our cities. How appealing are these habitats if they become only more and more exclusive? If their structure increasingly exacerbates inequality? And with the number of urban inhabitants predicted to increase by 3 billion in the next 30 years, are cities realistically equipped to deal with this mass influx?¹

The demand for open space and fresh air is growing. It’s not just a trend resulting from inner-city pressures, but also a reflection of new, flexible forms of living and working. We may see a shift towards decentralized living: blending urban and rural lifestyles in what could be called ‘liquid territories’.

Unfold’s second edition looks at the challenges facing today’s urban environments and their inhabitants, revealing what’s possible if we think beyond city limits.

The city has become the most attractive and dominant system in which to live and work. In 1950, there were only two megacities with 10 million inhabitants. Today there are over 30.² Currently, over 4 billion people live in cities.³ However, in 2019, the UN projected that urban inhabitants will exceed 7 billion by 2050 – 70 percent of our booming global population. What would it actually take for this prediction to play out over next 30 years? Can we realistically expect cities to accommodate an additional 3 billion people? The answer is no longer a resounding ‘yes’.

The city as a construct is being called into question. In March 2020, nearly one out of four people left Paris to wait out confinement in rural countryside homes.⁴ Virtually every major city has seen a similar urban exodus – people hoping to escape dense competition for resources and crowded bottlenecks to access support. These are short-term signals, of course, but what does it say about our cities if we rush to leave them during times of crisis?

Cities are the epitome of systemic inequality. We have all felt the crushing weight of rising rental costs, but this trend has been even more dramatic in several major cities. In Toronto, the price per m2 rose 425 percent in the last 30 years, while family income has increased only 133 percent.⁵ And this is not an isolated example. From 1973 to 2013 in the Paris metropolitan area, property values multiplied 14 times while the income of young households grew just 3.8 times.⁶ Since 2004, rents in Berlin have risen over 120 percent.⁷ Property value in Amsterdam increased by 20.9 percent in 2018 alone.⁸ As a result, cities are becoming accessible to a dwindling number of different demographics. How good are our cities if they only become more and more exclusive? How good is a system that serves to deepen inequality?

Not only do spaces cost more, but they are steadily shrinking. In Europe, the average size of accommodation is about 75 m2 for a three-room apartment.⁹ Over the last 50 years in France, this typology has shrunk below 60 m2.¹⁰ Still, the home played a largely well-defined role before global lockdown. And then seemingly overnight, our tight private spaces were pushed to their limits. Sleeping, working, cooking, exercising, and raising children all had to take place in an extremely compact environment. With or without confinement, this is becoming the norm. How much overall quality of life and wellbeing will deteriorate if we are continuously packed into smaller and smaller spaces?

The elevator completely transformed the way we build and inhabit cities. It’s not something we think about often, but Elisha Otis Graves’ invention of the elevator in 1845 marked a radical shift for the future of urban environments – from horizontal to vertical expansion. By enabling cities to grow and densify vertically, the elevator led to the rise of the office tower and apartment block, two core elements of the 20th-century habitat. From that point onwards, cities could limit their sprawl while accommodating the inflowing rural population.

Laptops, smartphones and widespread Wi-Fi access are this generation’s elevator equivalent. Mobile by definition, the laptop has a very direct impact on architecture: it frees space from predefined functions. This device has allowed us to work from anywhere – even from our beds. As remote working continues to rise and technologies rapidly improve, this tendency towards greater flexibility will only continue to accelerate.

Current modes of housing were built for a scenario that’s losing relevance. We need to shift our perspectives and rethink habitats to match our growing flexibility. If the challenge of the last century was to densify our cities vertically, the challenge of today is to make our spaces more elastic in their functionality – true to the way we have actually come to use them. In response, we are already witnessing the emergence of new types of shared-architecture: coworking and cohabitation spaces. These prototype experiments are opportunities to explore novel ways to flexibly access and share spaces.

As we see, urban living is a very recent development. For most of our history humans lived in low-density, rural settings. Prior to 1600, it’s estimated that the share of the world population living in urban settings did not reach 5 percent. By 1800, this share reached 7 percent; and by 1900 had increased to 16 percent. Only over the last 50 years, has it rapidly spiked to exceed 55 percent.¹⁴

— Hannah Ritchie
Our World in Data