The year is 2121. The Tower of London is no longer simply home to the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. It’s now an inner-city eco-village that houses pensioners and children.
The English capital’s skyline is dotted with wind turbines and lush gardens grow from bridges and tower blocks while sailing ships are the only vessels on the Thames.
This is the vision of one environmental social science professor imagining what an environmental utopia could look like in over a 1,000 years’ time.
Inspired by English statesman Thomas More’s concept of a fantastic idyllic island city – 500 years after the release of his book ‘Utopia’, Professor Alan Marshall and a group of creative students at Mahidol University in Thailand have envisaged how our world could adapt to survive environmental threats.
Their intriguing ideas for 100 cities in a post-climate-change world are laid out in a new book titled ‘Ecotopia 2121’.
Marshall’s vision for London sees a lush eco-Village being designed to make a safe space for children and pensioners, which is cordoned off from the rest of a smoggy and noisy city.
The provocative cityscape plans also include Kazakhstan – the birthplace of the apple – covered in a million apple trees, Antalya, Turkey as the Solar Capital of the Mediterranean and Lanzhou, China, atop of a rock bridge after blasting its mountains away.
Although the provocative cityscape plans shouldn’t be taken too seriously (Marshall’s hometown of Wellington, New Zealand, is pictured as a tranquil scene from Middle Earth), they certainly make you think.