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Today, roughly 55 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, a number that’s expected to rise to 66 percent by 2050, making for over 6 billion people in urban centers.

If those projections continue, over 85 percent of the world’s population will live in a city by the end of the 21st century.   

But while the sheer volume of people provides the foundation for the importance of the city in the next 100 years, it is far from the whole story. In all its forms, the city either alleviates or exacerbates the problems we face both locally and globally today, from social inequalities, economic growth, and infrastructure problems, to public health and climate change. It is the city that best reflects who we are and what we aspire to.

There’s no shortage of solutions and predictions out there about how our cities will shape the future. There’s the idea that the success and failure of cities will be dictated by their access to airports, creating cities called aerotropolises. Then there’s the megalopolis, which envisions entire corridors like the Northeast from New York to D.C. connected as one area. 

These big ideas present a good moment to think enthusiastically and cautiously about the city of the future. One hundred years ago, the world saw birth of Jane Jacobs, an urban critic and the mother of modern urban planning who warned about grandiose developers peddling urban visions.

"This is one of the troubles with what I call the 'vision' thing," Jacobs said in 2004. "The vision thing is an idea that somewhere or other in the future is a golden age we should be working towards, and when we get it, boy won't that be great."

Jacobs represents a voice for human-scaled development, skeptical of cranes and billion dollar budgets. She believed that cities can't ever trade their street-level spontaneity for glass and steel sterility. The federal government and the Department of Transportation is hoping to encourage intelligent solutions that achieve a balance when they announce the winner of their Smart Cities Challenge, issuing a grant of $40 million and technologies from Google and Amazon to one of seven communities.

The fight for urban life is also alive right here in America’s most frustrating and celebrated city, New York, where the creators of the Hudson Yards project claim to have found a blank slate to build that city of the future. 

It’s the biggest private real estate development in U.S. history, and soon be some of the most valued property in New York City. But more than that, it claims to be a model for the 21st century urban experience, where public schools sit next to major corporate offices, where park goers and affordable housing units sit next door to curated restaurants and superstores.

“This is going to be the quintessential live-work-play environment," says Jessica Scaperotti, an executive at Related Companies, which is overseeing the project with Oxford Properties Group. "When Hudson Yards is complete in 2025, you're going to have 125,000 people a day that either work in, live in, or visit Hudson Yards." 

Scaperotti says that her company was initially founded to build affordable housing. But the current Hudson Yards project is built on is trains — the development is being constructed over 30 active train tracks and the internet. 

“What is different about Hudson Yards," says Daniel Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, who initially named the project when he was deputy mayor of New York, "is that this is also occurring in a place where you're literally building Hudson Yards from the internet up and the internet itself is all about connectivity. And therefore, we're going to see an unprecedented level of digital connectivity, both within Hudson Yards, and in terms of its relationship to the wider world.”  

“We realized it's not just about connectivity and it's not just about resiliency," says Jay Cross, president of Hudson Yards.

Check out the video below for a behind-the-scenes look at Hudson Yards, and click on the 'Listen' button above to hear our interview with Scaperotti, Cross, Doctoroff, and others involved in the project.