Futuristic Cities Already Being Built

In 2010, the oil-rich country of Qatar won the FIFA bidding process that gave it the right to host the 2022 World Cup. Rather than build on their own existing cities, they decided they it would be easier to build a brand new $45 billion dollar city instead, and thus Lusail City was born. Does it sound crazy to build an entire city in the middle of the desert in just 12 years? Of course it does, but Qatar has taken on the challenge and has so far been pretty successful in building what is supposed to be city for 450,000 people—which, by the way, is 200,000 more people than the entire population of Qatar itself.

Lusail City has several attractive advantages, including citywide integrated IT, a public transportation system to cut down on traffic problems, district cooling to combat the desert heat, and a pneumatic trash tube that will efficiently process all of the waste in the city. As a further middle figure to mother nature, an entire man-made waterway is being created by cutting off the westernmost top of the city to make Qetafian Island, which will serve as the main tourist center.

So far, the city has planned for just about everything, including an eHome service in private buildings that remotely controls heating and cooling, turning garden sprinklers on and off, and even the closing and shutting shutters. However, with all of this awesome stuff, there has to be human exploitation involved. Qatar allows employers to do pretty much whatever they want with the migrants building the city. One estimate says that as many as 4,000 workers could die by the 2022 World Cup, but remember this: these brave workers are giving up their lives so overpaid athletes can play soccer and the future citizens of Lusail City can be couch potatoes, so it's all worth it.

Pena Station Next is the American response to the Fujisawa Smart Town and is being built near Denver International Airport. Already a parking area covered with solar panels has been built in addition to a storage micro-grid. While Fujisawa is simply a smart community, Panasonic has described Pena Station Next as a "smart city lab" to test future technologies that will be incorporated into their smart city projects. Since Pena Station Next is in the outskirts of Denver, smart transit shelters have been designed for the most awesome transportation experience possible with features like LinkRay light technology that transmits data like transit schedules and even shopping deals to smartphones over light (it's probably witchcraft for all we know).

The houses there include even more wondrous acts of science like transparent TV screens that replace boring old windows, tabletops, and refrigerator doors. Another innovation is one that also comes from Japan: the sake fridge, which works to control different temperatures for different foods stored inside. Then there's the smart cooking counter that makes cooking a task you never really have to do again. With built-in cameras, the entire cooking process is monitored to prevent kitchen accidents and multi-purpose tables that allow you to charge your phones simply by placing them on the surface. Tools like the "Flat-Top Cooker" reheat anything you place on it. If you can think of it, this town has it, like smart street poles with security cameras topped by a device resembling a beehive that has been called a "FitBit for cities" and records everything from air particles to noise, temperature, and humidity.

Remember, this place is not made up, and its first 220 apartments should be done by mid-2018.

Saudi Arabia is a magical place where oil money has allowed its wealthiest citizens to build cities deliberately designed to look as whimsical as possible. The King Abdullah Economic City (abbreviated as KAEC, pronounced as "cake," which sounds pretty good right now) is just the latest of these sci-fi utopias being built in the barren wasteland. The city, first announced in 2005, has been designed with the future in mind. Specifically, a future when the oil that so far rules the country runs out. In fact, plans for the city include electric cars for its citizens free of charge to cut down on carbon emissions. Plus, there are even plans for a driverless car system that will be a solution for the whole "women aren't allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia" problem.

When the city is completed by 2035, it will serve as both a major port and an intermediary between two of Saudi Arabia's most important holy cities, Medina and Mecca, so it's not like they're building a random city in the middle of nowhere. The city will cost some $100 billion dollars, which is a lot even for the ultra-rich ruling class of the country, so they're banking a lot on the city's success even as oil prices fall worldwide.

One of the biggest components used to make the city the most advanced in the Middle East is automation through the Internet of Things, which makes pretty much everything in the city work for you at your command like your very own genie (the analogy works, since it's Saudi Arabia, you know). While there have been setbacks, Fahd Al-Rasheed, the managing director of the KAEC project, has said that the population grew by 70 percent by this year, which means the city has seen some success despite stumbling blocks.

Following the example of Gandhinagar, Naya Raipur is another of India's up-and-coming smart cities and is even more impressive than its predecessor. For instance, India has long had a problem with sewage and waste management, so the developers of Naya Raipur designed a system that would make it India's first "zero sewage discharge city" because as we all know, you can't have a city of the future if it has the sewage system of medieval London. It also holds the prestigious title of the world's first "integrated city" using a "Master System Integrator" to effectively manage the city's inner workings by collecting intelligence and assessing the best possible solutions for whatever problem arises. That sounds an awful lot like Skynet from Terminator, but it's more digital civil servant than dystopian A.I. Overlord.

Rather than rush and hastily build infrastructure, the designers have chosen to gradually develop its amenities so they can see what best fits the inhabitants and have so far been quite successful. In a country where the vast majority of the population has little to no access to healthcare, Naya Raipur has developed a state-of-the-art medical community for its citizens, including specialty cancer and heart centers. There's even an effort to making learning fun, which sounds incredibly corny until you look into the city's efforts that include knowledge parks and accessible education centers. That's way better than the rest of the world where education is whatever you manage to remember in between doodling and daydreaming. The city is a giant wonderland that you'd never want to leave from now until the Master System decides to annihilate us all.

Hudson Yards is the largest real estate development in the United States and is being built on a platform completely covering its namesake—one of the busiest railways in the world, the Hudson Railyards. This area will have quite possibly the most high-tech smart city in the United States with brand-new skyscrapers, parks controlled by cutting edge green technologies, and, hopefully, no schlocky tourist stands clogging its streets. The platform is held up by giant custom-made columns that will allow the city to be built without worrying about it collapsing onto the bustling train systems below.

One of the main structures of the city is the CoGen plant that will produce 70 percent of its energy needs, making it almost entirely self-sufficient. Since the energy is being produced on-site, none of the future residents of Hudson Yards will have to worry about weather or any other unforeseen disasters knocking the power out. Then you have sensors that will cut down on energy consumption by closely monitoring the city's output so nothing is wasted, and air quality data collection will determine how clean the air is based on asthma hospitalizations, so you won't have to worry about going outside like you would in New York City where the atmosphere is usually kind of gross.

Another plus is that most of the data that be gathered on a voluntary basis, which is reassuring considering the government is probably watching you right now as you're reading this. And what about those cutting edge parks? Jet engines and ventilation will allow the soil to be kept at optimal temperature by stopping the heat from rising from the trains running below. A 60,000-gallon water tank will collect rainwater to irrigate the parks, saving water and cutting down on costs.

The first skyscraper was completed last year, and the remainder of the first phase of development should be completed by 2019, so there you have it: the future is out there. Let's just hope this future isn't also filled with death machines or violent aliens from outer space.