What the cities of the future might look like, from Dubai to New York

Dubai recently unveiled its 2040 Urban Master Plan. What should we expect? Towers so tall you’ll need a jet-propelled lift to get to the top? Man-made islands in the shape of the Twitter logo (sponsored, of course)? Nine-star hotels and giant Instagram screens where influencers’ trout-pouts can be seen from space?

None of these things, in fact. The plan is big on words like “sustainability”, “diversity” and “inclusivity” and low on phrases like “petro dollars”, “bling” and “migrant labour”. The images that accompany the presentation make Dubai look like a cross between Singapore and the Eden Project. You’ll struggle to get a glimpse of desert in the Gulf’s commercial capital in a couple of decades, it seems. (Let’s not be spoilsports and ask where the water for all that greenery is coming from.)

The Master Plan led me to have a look around the world to how our other great cities are going to turn out if the dreams of architects, planners and CGI wizards become reality. The answer is predominantly… well, a cross between Singapore and the Eden Project. The world’s urban areas are turning into vast biodomes – without the domes.

If you want to see the future, head to that quarry in Cornwall or Asia’s pre-eminent city state. Singapore is already well on the road to becoming a “city within a garden”. You’ll also see the future in Milan, where the high-end Bosco Verticale development points to future cityscapes of luxuriant foliage; and in Tokyo, where it is already mandated that office buildings must have green garden roofs.

The future of cities looks to those fantasy movies where the great metropolises revert to jungle. All it needs is for some genetic researcher to reintroduce pterodactyls to get the full effect.

But where is all the water coming from? Well, how about the sea? There is a second, more pessimistic strand of urban futurology which is less Planet of the Apes and more Waterworld. These designers reckon that it’s already too late to stop the sea levels from rising, so we may as well rip the sleeves off an old jacket, wet our hair back like Kevin Costner and accept the complete Venice-ification of the globe.

Here are some of the leading cities with plans to embrace the future in different ways.

Terraced gardens, palm trees, fields – green as far as the eye can see, and on the top of the chic, low-rise cubes everyone seems to be living in. The CGI people may have let their imaginations run a bit free, but the UAE’s rulers are committed to turning 60 per cent of their hot, glitzy city into country park. This is the seventh masterplan since 1960. They tend to deliver.

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Constructed on marshland, and fast sinking back into it: that’s Thailand’s mega-capital. So local architecture S+PBA – who certainly have skin in the game – have designed a “Wetropolis”. Curvy interconnected walkways, roads and houses will float like DNA strands above the vast shrimp farms and mangrove plantations. I use the term “will” loosely, of course...

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Bangkok is sinking, but Jakarta is sinking faster: 40 per cent of Indonesia’s capital is already below sea level. Solution: build a new capital. Architecture and urban design studio URBAN won a competition to design Nagara Rimba Nusa (“Forest Island Hilltop”) on the island of Borneo. Think Angkor Wat crossed with Brasilia.

No jazzy visualisations here: just a thought-through and costed plan to double the tree canopy in the Victorian capital by 40 per cent by 2043. It’s going to be a great time to be an urban tree. Seoul has planted 2,000 groves and gardens, while Milan plans to plant three million by 2030.

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New York is also busy planting trees; and the High Line was a pioneering project showing how an industrial legacy can be greened. Now Thomas Heatherwick, having failed to get his garden bridge in London, is creating a garden island off south Manhattan. But the people looking to NYC’s future find it hard to look beyond rising sea levels. A sobering 2016 New York Magazine feature showed the warehouses of the Meatpacking District waist-deep in canal waters. It was elegant, in a Venetian kind of way (and if you don't live below the 20th floor).

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The French capital suffers terribly from heat and air pollution in summer. The latest project to green up and cool down the streets will see the tatty Champs-Elysees live up to its name and become an urban field. At least mayor Anne Hidalgo’s vision is consistent with the city's Augustan formalism. You can’t say the same about architect Vincent Callebaut’s 2050 Vision of Paris as a smart city. His idea of “smart” appears to be to surround the Eiffel Tower with a forest of giant walnut whips linked by Scalextric tracks.

The Ecotopia 2021 project looks forward optimistically and, I’d guess, with the aid of powerful mind-altering substances, to the cities of 2121. Their favourite route is to go backwards. So in Birmingham, Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden is returned to its former glory and electric Mini Coopers drive through fields of sheep under giant, solar powered windmills. In the place where J R R Tolkien was brought up, it seems Mordor is going to become The Shire. Possibly.