The future built environment: Inventing future cities Professor Michael Batty, Emeritus Professor of Planning at The Bartlett School of Advanced Spatial Analysis, on how city planning must evolve in the next 100 years. As the last century wore on, this view slowly began to crumble. Our experience in trying to predict the future, certainly over the long term – years, decades and generations – but even over the very short term, –second, minutes, hours and days – was dominated by few successes and mostly failures. There is now a deep scepticism that we can predict even the closest of events to our near future. Unpredictability is thus a sign of the times in which we live but it also heralds a change in our world view of what science can do. Much of this is due to the fact that we are continually inventing new ideas and technologies and that this always means that our current theories are out of date, passé to an extent, always contingent on what we have experienced in the past but never what we might invent in the future. Coping with complexity In studying cities, we have always known this, for our mission is to design a better future – to invent the future rather than predict it. City planning is about how we invent and as we cannot predict, then we cannot predict what we might invent. This makes our role as city planners and urban designers even more significant, because although we cannot predict but only invent, the process of inventing the future city is still fraught with problems, not least those of coordinating many individual attempts at designing and managing the future city. What the 20th century has revealed is that cities are immensely complicated organisms; they cannot be designed like machines,