These early manuscripts contain multiple layers of text, as authors scraped costly vellum or parchment clean to reuse it (sometimes centuries after the first author). One of the most famous is the Codex Guelferbytanus 64 Weissenburgensis contains layers of text from the 5th, 6th and 7th-century, including New Testament gospels written in Greek, written on top of Latin text probably written by the 6th-century scholar and theologian, Isidore of Seville.

In 1979, geographer Donald Meinig popularised the metaphor of palimpsests in the context of humanist geography, in his book The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. He described landscapes as being "at once a panorama, a composition, a palimpsest, a microcosm," emphasising their complexity and depth. Meinig's use of the term suggests that just like palimpsests, places and landscapes are not static entities. They are, rather, dynamic and multifaceted, a heady blend of ideas, materials, voices—reused and repurposed, visible and invisible.

How do these rich and layered narratives get built into our cities? Traditional visual representations like maps, architectural drawings, gridded transport plans and system schematics help city planners categorise and define, quantify and construct our analog and digital environments. But these maps primarily focus on the construction of place, rather than the lived experiences of its inhabitants. In the late 1970’s, geographers Dennis Jeans and Yi-Fu Tuan captured this emphasis on process of constructing place, saying “Space is transformed into place as it acquires definition and meaning” (Tuan, 1977) and “To make a place is to surround a locality with human meanings” (Jeans, 1979). ¹

Unlike palimpsests, cities cannot be rubbed clean or smoothed over. The layers of our future places are constructed upon our pasts, incorporating remnants that may no longer be visible or useful. Ivan Mitin introduced the concept of "cultural palimpsest" in 2010 in the SAGE Encyclopedia of Geography, describing it a place as “... a multilayered structure that emphasises the coexistence of multiple visions and impacts of different cultures.” To understand and design for the human complexity in and of our future urban places, what new kinds of maps, drawings, databases, and stories will help a variety of stakeholders understand and design for the cultural palimpsest of places?

A good life

A good life—as architect, author, and The Conference speaker Carolyn Steel notes in her books—comes from mapping ourselves onto the world, encountering it directly at a 1:1 level. The more direct our encounters with the many facets of our world—things like place, belonging, time, nourishment, movement, and community—the more purpose and meaning we find to flourish. To gain access to the different layers of our cities and build meaning into them, wise city planners will want to consider how various denizens encounter their place, past and present. This entails sifting through the intangible and tangible materials of city life, and deciding what to keep and what to scrape away. But who and what creates encounters and collects the data of our urban lives, and who decides what serves humans, non-humans and the planet well?

Sensors, sense and sensibility

The Collaborative Foresight cycle captured by this book began with the prompt, “What does a wise city look like in Southern Sweden in 2050?” Note the emphasis on seeing. The primary path for human encounters with our urban world and making meaning is through our senses. But according to Meinig, who first described landscapes as palimpsests, the more you look, the more you see: we humans also encounter the world through sensors, feedback loops, and artificial intelligences, and machines encounter us in our lived experiences in urban environments (and those of our critter kin).

“Sense" also means good judgement, wisdom, or prudence, and "sensibility" means sensitivity, sympathy, or emotionality. As we sift through layers of what makes sense, and build digital sensor feedback into our future places, will we continue to map onto the world in a 1:1 relationship, encountering it directly, to find a good life? How to do so with various blends of sensors, sense and sensibility? What do we base our decisions on?

Desirable friction

According to the UN, today, 55% of the world's population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 68% by 2050, or roughly 2 out of every 3 people on the planet. That’s a lot of visions, cultures, and data layers rubbing up together in one urban place. How will we design our future cities to handle this massive assemblage of human senses, computer vision, and planetary intelligences? How will citizens come to consensus? Should they? As new layers get added to the urban palimpsest, what frictions will occur between the layers, and should it be avoided?

Friction is typically understood as resistance between two things when they’re in contact with one another. It’s not inherently bad or good—friction can generate movement or energy (a wheel rolling on a road, or fire made from two sticks rubbed together). As the American anthropologist Anna Tsing notes, friction can be “...a realm where unexpected alliances arise, remaking global possibilities.” The greater the number of entities introduced into a system, the greater the friction.

To generate or reduce friction for the sake of ease, efficiency, and consensus was a common critique in community’s discussions about designing the future city. Remarking on an early snapshot of one of the futures scenarios in this book (where hive mind to attain consensus was central), a community member noted, “We believe in the positive potential of friction and confrontation.” Could introducing the concept of desirable friction into our cultural palimpsest be the answer to a healthy coexistence—to growth, adaptation, regeneration—of multiple visions and impacts of different cultures?

We are inside what we make

As we envision urban futures where emerging technologies, humans and non-human kin connect in creative assemblages, it is critical to remember Donna Haraway’s maxim that “technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections—and it matters which ones get made and unmade” (A Cyborg Manifesto, 1991). We know those machined data layers aren’t any more neutral than our human layers are. As the layers of our future cities continue to be rubbed, built, and rebuilt, how will we make sense of the connections we can’t see are being made—or unmade—with accountability, transparency, trust? With sensibility? And can we design for healthy tension between and amongst them, so that new tools and alliances, new global possibilities, emerge between all the actors who are mapping, sensing, encountering the layers of their future cities?

Imagining the futures of wise cities

This book is a product of Media Evolution’s Collaborative Foresight cycle dedicated to future cities, exploring a spectrum of possible futures to unpack the relationships, skills, tools and ethical implications urban planners and dwellers need now to create the flourishing cities of tomorrow. It’s a topic that our member companies and community have expressed a need to explore more deeply for years. It is also our humble contribution to the broader conversations around the futures of cities taking place in Copenhagen this year as the 2023 UNESCO World Capital of Architecture, and the parallel dialogue happening as part of the City of Malmö’s initiative, “Malmö in the Making.” Furthermore, Media Evolution is one of the partners in the DigIT Hub Sweden project, which is funding this Collaborative Foresight cycle and has Smart Cities as one of its core themes.

The three “wise city” scenarios included in this book were imagined by a small group of twenty expert community members, developed over four immersive workshops. With representatives from eleven different countries, including designers, city planners, architects, UX researchers, software engineers, landscape architects, real estate developers, academics, and artists, the “core contributor” group refined their future wise cities based on trends, signals, contexts and critiques submitted by the broader Media Evolution community. They were then creatively expanded and narrativised by our writer, Sorrel Salb. We’ve invited previous speakers at The Conference and at-large members of our community to offer their perspectives on a good life in cities, and what it means to be wise.

The visions of possible, probable and preferred futures in this book are the result of many citizens’ commitment to converging their layers of experience and expertise, to inspire and to conspire, and to co-create futures in community. This is the heart of the Media Evolution mission. This book isn’t an academic publication, a roadmap or action plan, or a detailed recounting of the Collaborative Foresight process. Rather, it’s an invitation to make space to connect dreams and means, to move from envisioning to enacting, and to imagine in community. In the following pages we offer scenarios, references, and commentaries in the hopes that you’ll join a global conversation about the futures we want to see—a conversation made radically more rich with your voice included.