Is Tokyo the City of the Future, or of the Past?

Tokyo, famously, feels like a city out of the future, as lampooned by this Onion article. But despite the rapid urbanization of the developing world, is the model of giant, tightly packed city still a glimpse of the future?

Certainly, there are factors that would seem to point towards an ever-greater concentration of humanity in cities. Around the world, people are having fewer children, making it more possible to invest in smaller urban spaces. Rising fuel costs and global warming concerns make areas close to business cores more attractive and efficient, as mass transit needs dense concentrations of people to pay off. And, as David Brooks points out in this column, cities serve as creative incubators, as people seem to think better when they are physically connected.

As a New Yorker (although one who will soon decamp to the nearby New Jersey suburbs), I see all the benefits of city life. But I still think cities like Tokyo are not likely to represent the future of humanity, at least not as presently conceived, for one reason: transportation technology is likely to improve again, and grant humans much more flexibility to craft the lifestyle they want.

Imagine you could get from, say, the Hamptons to New York City in 30 minutes. Or from the Sierra Nevadas to LA in 45. Wouldn't those places become attractive mini-clusters for the talented and the wealthy, instead of where those folks have summer homes or ski cabins? There would be a number of people around you who you could network and create with live, while still accessing the full value of the city when needed. Large cities would still have their place, but they would, to some degree, be transactional: the places where everyone comes together before they go apart again. Young people would probably still swarm there, to meet romantic partners and drink too much.

Cities were small when transportation was problematic. They grew, and sprouted suburbs, when the rail and then the automobile allowed greater movement in and out of the core. But if a transportation technology enabled convenient, not too expensive movement between our current big cities and the nicest outlying areas, the attractions of space, scenery and exclusivity might overwhelm the advantages of city living.

If that technology doesn't emerge, though, then the foreseeable future will be dominated by ever-denser, larger and higher cities, and Tokyo will remain the city of tomorrow.

It's the Energy Source, Stupid

For my entire life, the energy of human innovation has been focused on the individual: we have seen the advent of the computer, the cellular phone, and then the infinite improvements, iterations, and combinations of those technologies. When you read a "BLANK of the Future" article, whether that blank is filled in by "Car", or "House", or "Hammer", you can bet it has something to do with the microchip or wireless communication.

In fact, the only other trend that has had a major impact on the things we use has been incremental improvements in materials, allowing us to build things stronger and lighter. (Note, I'm sure someone could find a technology to prove me wrong on this, and I'm purposefully ignoring healthcare innovation because--well, because I want to.)

Now, as I've written before, what we have not innovated on is what I'll call 'collective technologies': things that affect a lot of people, but that individuals rarely 'own'. (Think railroads and other forms of mass transportation, or other infrastructure.) These have been improved in recent years, but there hasn't been anything like a major breakthrough: just incremental gains, caused mostly by improvements in materials and the introduction of the microchip into older technologies.

When I read things like this, then, about the need to establish an economic reason for further space exploration, I'm in complete agreement. But the author is stealing a base: there is simply no way, with the technology we have, that we are going to see space mining or any other sort of economic activity pay off until we have an energy source that makes space transit much, much more efficient.

Think of it this way: the ascension of oil as the dominant energy source (and coal to a lesser extent) made possible every single transportation improvement over the last 150 or so years. Before that we had very inefficient, unreliable wind, water and steam power. Fossil fuels represented an order of magnitude improvement, and it took about a century (until Apollo, arguably) for us to push the limits of where that energy source could take us. Since then, no major breakthroughs on collective technologies. Why? We're waiting for the next energy source that can offer an order-of-magnitude gain on the current standard.

And just so we can skip to the point, that ain't going to be fuel cells, and it ain't going to be wind or geothermal. Maybe solar can step up, if we create much, much, MUCH more efficient panels. Otherwise, it has to be fusion, or something the vast majority of us haven't heard of. But if you want to get humanity off this rock and into a solar-system wide economy, don't worry about what NASA is doing, invest in energy research.