What did NASA ask a futurist? And was I right?
The phone goes. It’s NASA. They need your help. Sounds like the plot of Project Hail Mary, right?
It wasn’t quite that dramatic. The world wasn’t in danger. And it was an email, not a phone call. But sure enough, four years ago NASA asked for my help.
If you’ve met me, you probably know that. I hope you can forgive me for not shutting up about it. But weirdly, I’ve never posted about what they asked me, and how I answered. Four years later, what I predicted to them is coming true. So it feels like a good time to write about it.
Futurism isn’t mostly about predictions. It’s about mapping possibilities and probabilities. But occasionally, if pushed, I’ll stick my neck out and make a bet on something. And push me NASA did.
Tomorrow’s Cities
So, what did they ask?
Back in 2022 was contacted by Shoshin Works, a consultancy that works with organisations to build more dynamic ecosystems. Shoshin Works was facilitating a couple of programmes for NASA’s Convergent Aeronautics Solutions project. CAS was trying to answer a difficult question: what sort of aircraft should we be building in the future?
One of the ways to answer this is to look at how we would be living. I’ve done a lot of work on future cities, so they came to me.
Specifically, Shoshin Works engaged me in two projects. First, I was one of a number of external people asked to give a talk to the CAS team to inject new ideas and thinking. And second, I was a guest on a series of public podcasts they produced based around the same ideas. You can listen to the podcast here.
Megacities vs Distributed Humanity
In my presentation to the NASA team I walked through a variety of different drivers of city change and tried to answer three questions:
Will cities thrive in the near future?
Can this persist in the long term?
How must our cities change?
I talked about demographics and the challenges of an ageing population. I talked about technology and the changes it has wrought in culture and the economy. I talked about some fundamentals of human nature: what we want and need.
At the end, they asked me a number of questions, but one really put me on the spot: if I had to predict one way or another, would we move towards megacities or a more distributed population?
I looked back at the evidence and the trends I had presented and I came down firmly on one side: we will move towards a more distributed humanity, more smaller cities rather than fewer, larger ones.
There were many reasons for this call, prompted by the output of my Intersections framework. While we still deeply value face-to-face interaction, communications and collaboration technology has, to some extent divorced work from location. Companies themselves increasingly operate as networked entities, not monoliths. And the components of those networks can be geographically distributed. People are increasingly choosing to live where they want to live, not live where they need to work, if they can afford to do so. And often companies want to be close to where those people are. Transport technology has, over time, collapsed the friction that distance creates.
At least, that was the basis of my thinking. Was I right? Well…
The evidence
We obviously don’t know whether I’ll be proven right in the long term. 20, 30 years hence the picture may have changed. But four years in? Things are looking good, based on the UN World Urbanisation Prospects report published late last year.
First, while growing megacities continue to capture the attention - not least Jakarta with a population of a staggering 42 million - more people actually live in smaller cities. And even with the incredible pace of growth of megacities, small city populations are actually growing faster because there are more and more small cities.
Second, some cities are shrinking. While this is concentrated in smaller cities - likely seeing economic pull from more successful neighbours - it’s also happening in larger cities like Mexico City and Chengdu.
Third, some recent research shows that as urbanisation progresses, large cities lose their advantages and growth rates equalise. This points to a more distributed population as the pull of urban capitals like London and New York perhaps become more balanced by more, smaller cities around them.
As I say, still a few years before we really know if I was right. But so far, so good.
NASA, if you need me again, you know where I am.