Insights / Future Homes: Adapting to Life in the Megacities of Tomorrow

Future Homes: Adapting to Life in the Megacities of Tomorrow

By 2050 nearly 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas, double that of 2023. Many of these people will live in one of the 43 Megacities predicted by the UN to exist by 2030.

Although cities of the future will rise higher and spread wider, as many millions more people continue to flood in, it is inevitable that humans will have keep adapting to living in smaller and smaller homes.

Image: Alex Wong

The concept of home is already changing to encompass more than the four walls within which you eat and sleep and register to vote. For many people, enabled by tech and the
opportunities and flexibility it has brought to working life, home will never again be just one place, but wherever they currently are on their digitally enabled nomadic journey through life.

Inside the home, as work patterns become more fragmented and increasingly remote, the home is quickly adapting as an environment which needs to fully encompass domestic and working life and so daily actives are competing for space.

Somewhere to call home has always been an innate human need and the importance of homes to humankind in the future cannot be overstated as the source of all life’s essentials: growing food, cleaning air, processing waste, taking care of our minds and bodies and providing security.

The cabanon by Star & Board / Image: Ossip van Duivenbode

With this space forecast to become smaller, what outcomes and solutions are on the
horizon, and where do opportunities for innovation lie?

We believe the home of the future will serve as a vital source of health and wellbeing
proactively analysing and prescribing to enhance the lived experience of humans and
the technology we live with. It seems certain that everything around us, including ourselves, will need to become more flexible, including appliances, furniture and physical layouts.

It’s an incredibly exciting sector for us to be working in for so many of our clients, capturing the exciting momentum of life and technology to come and creating bridges to current and future human needs.