The Future is Vertical
Our cities are about to get weird.
Why does all cutting-edge activity happen in cities? Why is that all the bankers are in New York, the techies in San Francisco, and the oil barons in Houston? And why are they the richest parts of the country?
It’s because they are vertical. The economic prowess of a city compounds with verticality. The more people in a single acre of land, the greater the amount of activity — more traffic for businesses, more people at events, more job opportunities and job seekers for employees and employers. Our collaborative and transactional nature compels us to come together in clusters — in cities.
However, this natural process has stalled in recent decades. We approached our engineering limits. Our skyscrapers can’t be infinitely tall. Our subways can’t be infinitely deep.
No longer. We are about to make another step change. We are about to go vertical.
With the advent of the drone, eVTOL, and the self-driving car, the throughput of our roads will drastically increase. You could probably replace a 4-lane road with a 2-lane one, while still increasing the efficiency of cargo and passenger delivery by an order of magnitude. You could build a skyscraper on top of another — you are no longer constrained by the need for elevators. You could hop from the roof of one building to another. This is huge. Everything is as accessible as the “ground floor” of a building.
Our cities will radically change. They’ll have far more bustle. Making taller buildings would become more economically compelling. Manhattan may have 6 million people instead of 2 million. And we must build for this future.
If we play our cards correctly, this future can be more social. It can also be a more spacious one — even while retaining the same density of existing cities. We must figure out regulations, architecture, and civil engineering to bring this bright future into fruition. Chongqing, with its immense verticality, is a sight into this future. We must prepare our societies for it.
Whoever becomes the Volkswagen of eVTOL or the Toyota of Drones stands to win massively. And it's these companies which will determine the destiny of our cities. Just as General Motors and Ford turned America into suburbia and killed trains, the future mobility companies will similarly command our physical spaces. We must ensure they serve society’s needs better this time.