Here's what cities could seem like in 2121

The 12 months is 2121.

Phnom Penh’s stilt houses rise above urban farms fed by the Mekong River, as imagined by Alan Marshall | Nationalgeographic.com

Phnom Penh’s stilt houses stand above urban farms fed by the Mekong River. Athens is smog-free after a automobile ban, and Tokyo families live in houses which might be resistant to nuclear radiation. In Greenville, South Carolina, off-grid homes are powered by solar energy and have roof-filtered water.

These cities of the long run were born within the mind of Alan Marshall, a professor of environmental social sciences at Mahidol University in Thailand.

With the assistance of university students from around the globe, Marshall imagined what cities would seem like that successfully adapt to the environmental threats of the approaching century. He collected these visions in a book Ectopia 2121 – and published it 500 years after Thomas More first wrote about an imaginary, ideal place in his book Utopia.

“The most important thing about the utopian impulse is that everything can change for the better,” says Marshall.

Accra, the capital of Ghana, is prone to catastrophic floods every year. In an imaginary photo of Ecotopia, locals try to get housing above the flood line by building cheap treehouses in the nearby forest | National Geographer — Accra, the capital of Ghana, is liable to catastrophic floods yearly. In an imaginary photo of Ecotopia, locals attempt to get housing above the flood line by constructing low cost treehouses within the nearby forest | National Geographer

The Ecotopia project was born out of Marshall’s concerns about earthquakes threatening his hometown of Wellington, New Zealand.

He realized that projects that anticipated potential disasters could make sure the city’s survival. He wondered what it might be like if the population selected hobbit-style houses slightly than skyscrapers.

“We use fantasy to make people think differently,” says Marshall, whose cityscapes mix rustic sustainability with futuristic design.

After years of working on solutions, Marshall became more confident that society would find a way to forestall a dystopian future. Nevertheless, in his next project “Frankencities” he’ll explore worst-case scenarios. “If we don’t change our ways, that’s what will happen to our cities – they will become uninhabitable,” Marshall says. “It’s terrifying, but it’s not written in stone.”

Next are among the other imaginary cities included in Marshall’s Ecotopia 2121 project: