What Should Cities Be Like in 2050?

National Geographic gave us a dream assignment. Here’s how our urban design team tackled it.

Cross-sectional rendering of SOM’s speculative Future City, developed with National Geographic for the April 2019 “Cities” issue. © SOM

By Peter J. Kindel

How would you design a “city of the future”? Susan Goldberg, the editor in chief of National Geographic magazine, posed this very question to me last year after we met at a sustainability conference in…