TRANSPORT
Thanks to smart street
design, we will walk, cycle
and use scooters much
more, while light railways,
driverless buses and cars
(for car-sharing or
Uber and taxi services)
will all be electric. Clever
cars find their own parking
spaces in multi-storey
structures.To ease street
congestion, the air is
alive with flying taxis and
drone deliveries.POWER
Solar panels on the roofs
of houses are standard in
2019, but in 2050, solar
panels will cover walls
and roofs, while
transparent solar panels
will be attached to
windows. Solar walkways
will provide power to
nearby buildings.Skyscrapers will have tiny,
ultra-light wind turbines to
generate power. The
turbines can do triple duty
as solar panels and water
collection devices, too.Say bye bye to stinky
street bins. Rubbish will be
collected via underground
tunnels (by robots, of
course) and taken to
biogas plants, where
it’s turned into fuel.
DATA
You may feel like you’re
being watched. In 2050,
data is being collected
everywhere, but it’s not to
track our movements (and
data anonymisation will
have improved hugely).
Street lights, road kerbs
and pavement surfaces
will gather data to
improve the city, like a
living organism that learns
and betters itself.FOOD
A lot of what we consume
will grow in underground
farms beneath our houses
and workspaces. But it
will also grow in vertical
farms, roof gardens,
community gardens and
small urban farms.depends on industries sticking to their
allocated “carbon budget”. The textile
industry’s share of the total budget is
currently two per cent, but if production
continues to grow at current rates, it will
consume 26 per cent of it by 2050. In
fashion terms, this is the worst trend ever.
Fortunately, though, the foundation
serves up not just troubling realities, but
also potential solutions, including that of
a “circular economy”.
Instead of the current “take, make and
dispose” model of consumption of all
things from fridges to clothing, the
foundation proposes a circular model,
whereby objects are returned to the
manufacturer when they are no longer
needed and are disassembled and
recycled, or repurposed into new goods.
One such example is the clothing
recycling process developed by the
London-based innovation agency BRIA,
which turns cotton and viscose clothing
that would otherwise go to landfill into
new biodegradable materials, including
a cardboard, a transparent film for
packaging and an MDF equivalent for
retail/home interiors and furniture. These
new materials remain 100 per cent
biodegradable and recyclable, and are
therefore deemed circular.
Miroslava Duma, the founder and
CEO of Future Tech Labs (FTL) and
a World Economic Forum young global
leader, is a passionate facilitator of, and
investor in, pioneering developments that
seek to transform fashion’s wasteful
processes and materials into sustainable
ones. FTL has more than 1,000
technologies and start-ups in the pipeline,
so when I ask Duma to highlight the one
she believes will be the biggest game-
changer when it comes to achieving
sustainability in the fashion industry,
she cites VitroLabs. Offering the first
animal-based, environmentally-friendly,
lab-grown luxury leather, VitroLabs
derives its cultured version from the cells of
animals such as cows, crocodiles and
ostriches, but no creatures are killed, and
no water or chemicals are used during the
production process. This means that the