Synopsis

London, Shanghai, Paris… Today, historic metropolises are increasingly investing in technology in order to deal with the unstoppable growth of urban population. From the improvement of energetic networks to the optimization of transportation systems, digital intelligence has been given a central role in city life.   Renowned economists including Jeremy Rifkin (The Third Industrial Revolution) and revolutionary urban designers, such as the New Yorker Adam Greenfield, endeavor to imagine the new urbanity, with more sustainable practices, and the progress promised by the computer management of collective life.   The data collected by all these sensors are like digital fingerprints : if they improve the efficiency and fluency of urban facilities , they also bring about the threatening idea of a controlled society, with cities entirely regulated by a central intelligence. Are these new technologies auguring more interactions between citizens or, on the contrary, an over-centralized power ?      

Director's statement

We are at the dawn of a third industrial revolution. Urban populations are continuing to grow, and every week, one million people around the world move to the city. At this breakneck pace, by 2050, 70% of all human life will be concentrated in cities.   How will we deal with this urban population explosion and the colossal problems it will generate? This issue has every country on the planet mobilized and raises a raft of big questions on subjects including sustainable growth, digital intelligence, facilities, transportation and energy.   Cities of Tomorrow will reveal this exciting and fast-moving race against the clock to ready ourselves for this new urban reality. It will explore a range of extravagant, utopian and fantastic futuristic projects in a wide range of areas to illustrate concrete prototypes offering actual solutions that are applicable now.   The series will take the viewer on a trip around the globe to discover the most innovative, emblematic and fascinating of these urban experiments, through three episodes: New Cities, Smart Cities and Urban Farms.      

Why this choice?

How to manage a growing urban population and limited means and resources?   This film addresses an impressive amount of themes linked to new technologies applicable to cities: connected infrastructures, new economic models, electronic management of the fluxes, energy internet, sharing goods and services, local production networks… among others.   Full of information, it brings in a specialist of these matters: Jeremy Hopkins who reveals to us his passionate and compelling vision of the cities of tomorrow.   Fascinating, thanks to the perspectives it brings, this film projects us right away into the future.