Five Rules for Tomorrow's Cities: Design in an Age of Urban Migration, Demographic Change, and a Disappearing Middle Class

How we design our cities over the next four decades will be critical for our planet. If we continue to spill excessive greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we will run out of time to keep our global temperature from increasing. Since approximately 80% of greenhouse gases come from cities, it follows that in the design of cities lies the fate of the world.

As urban designers respond to the critical issue of climate change they must also address three cresting cultural waves: the worldwide rural-to-urban migration; the collapse of global fertility rates; and the disappearance of the middle class. In Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities, planning and design expert Patrick Condon explains how urban designers can assimilate these interconnected changes into their work.

Condon shows how the very things that constrain cities—climate change, migration, financial stress, population change—could actually enable the emergence of a more equitable and resource-efficient city. He provides five rules for urban designers: (1) See the City as a System; (2) Recognize Patterns in the Urban Environment; (3) Apply Lighter, Greener, Smarter Infrastructure; (4) Strengthen Social and Economic Urban Resilience; and (5) Adapt to Shifts in Jobs, Retail, and Wages.

In Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities, Condon provides grounded and financially feasible design examples for tomorrow’s sustainable cities, and the design tools needed to achieve them.

Patrick Condon has over 30 years of experience in sustainable urban design: first as a professional city planner and then as a teacher and researcher. Condon started his academic career in 1985 at the University of Minnesota before moving to the University of British Columbia in 1992. After acting as the director of the landscape architecture program, he became the James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Liveable Environments. In that capacity, he has worked to advance sustainable urban design in scores of jurisdictions in the US, Canada, and Australia. He and his research partners collaborated with the City of North Vancouver to produce a 100-year plan to make the city carbon-neutral by 2107. Condon and his partners received the Canadian Institute of Planners Award for Planning Excellence, an ASLA award for research, and the BC Union of Municipalities Award of Excellence for this work. He was the founding chair of the new UBC Master of Urban Design program where his teaching and research are now concentrated. Condon is the author of Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities.