In 2005, Shanghai began building Dongtan — the world’s first purpose-built eco-city, on Chongming Island at the mouth of the Yangtze River. The plan was extraordinary: a zero-carbon city of 50,000 residents by 2010, rising to 500,000 by 2040. Wind turbines, organic farms, water recycling, electric transport, energy-positive buildings. The architects were Arup. The ambition was global.

By 2010, Dongtan had not opened. By 2015, the project had been quietly abandoned. Today, the site is farmland and wetland, as it was before.

Shanghai did not stop trying. Lingang New City — launched in 2003, expanded as the Lin-Gang Special Area in 2019 — is the successor: a planned city of technology, manufacturing, and residential development on Hangzhou Bay, connected to central Shanghai by a one-hour drive. Lingang has succeeded in the ways Dongtan did not: it has residents, businesses, universities, and infrastructure. It also has housing prices that start at approximately 40,000 RMB per square metre — among the highest of any new development in China.

This is the pattern that repeats across every major future city project in East Asia and beyond. A city is imagined. A city is built. The city that is built is, almost without exception, organized around the income level of people who can afford to move to a new place.

This is not an accident. It is economics. Future city projects require enormous capital investment. That capital requires return. The return requires residents who can pay for housing at a price that justifies the investment. The low-income family, the climate refugee, the elderly person displaced by rising water — none of these people generate the return that a future city’s capital structure requires.

The consequence is specific and urgent. The climate crisis is already displacing people. In East Asia, the displacement is visible in concrete places: the Yangtze delta communities that flood more frequently with each decade; the coastal villages of Vietnam, Bangladesh, and the Philippines that are losing land to the South China Sea; the Pacific Island nations whose territory is disappearing. The people being displaced are not wealthy. They did not choose to live in climate-exposed locations because they preferred risk. They lived there because it was affordable. When they are displaced, they will not be able to afford the climate-adapted future cities that the world’s architects and urban planners are designing.

The gap between the city of tomorrow and the person who needs it most is not a design problem. It is a financing problem. It is a political problem. It is, ultimately, a question about what a city is for.

The person who wrote Sim Eternal City — a framework for floating cities designed specifically around the needs of climate-displaced elders and low-income communities — launched that book in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a neighbourhood that floods regularly and whose population includes a significant proportion of low-income elderly residents who cannot self-relocate. Three days after the launch, New York flooded again. The book reached #1 in Amazon’s Weather category. None of this is coincidence.

The future city conversation is happening. The income question is not.

(Sources: Arup / Shanghai Lin-Gang Special Area Administration / UN-Habitat / IPCC AR6 / Sim Eternal City, IWBFD Studios — 2022–2026)

Songdo 🇰🇷 — The World’s First Smart City. $40 Billion. 40% Empty. Only the Wealthy Arrived.

Songdo International Business District, built from reclaimed land on Incheon Bay at a cost of more than $40 billion, was designed to be the world’s most connected city: sensors embedded in the streets, pneumatic waste collection, LEED-certified buildings throughout, fibre optic connectivity everywhere. It was to be the proof of concept that the planned future city could work. Today, Songdo functions — it has residents, offices, schools, and a park designed by the same firm that designed New York’s Central Park. It also has vacancy rates in commercial districts that speak to the fundamental problem: the people for whom Songdo was planned were international business professionals and wealthy Korean families willing to pay a premium for the infrastructure of tomorrow. The factory worker, the delivery driver, the elderly resident of Incheon’s older neighbourhoods — these people did not move to Songdo. The smart city filled, slowly and partially, with the people who could afford it. Shanghai’s Lingang is the same story, written in Chinese. The future city attracts capital. It attracts the people capital follows. It does not attract the people who need a new city because their old one is failing them.

NEOM 🇸🇦 — The $500 Billion City Being Built in the Saudi Desert. The Income Level of Its Future Residents Has Never Been Publicly Discussed.

NEOM is the most ambitious future city project in the world: a $500 billion linear city, 170 kilometres long and 200 metres wide, powered entirely by renewable energy, with no cars, no roads, and no carbon emissions. It will sit in the northwest of Saudi Arabia, in a region that currently has almost no infrastructure. The workers building it — predominantly migrant labourers from South Asia and Africa, living in labour camps, working under conditions that have been documented by human rights organizations — will not live in the finished city. The people who will live in NEOM have not been publicly identified or income-profiled. The Saudi government has described it as a home for ‘cognitive’ workers — the global professional class. The climate refugees of Bangladesh, the coastal displaced of East Africa, the elderly low-income residents of Shanghai’s flood-prone districts: none of them are in the NEOM plan. The world’s most visible future city project has spent $500 billion designing the city of tomorrow and has not once asked who tomorrow’s most vulnerable people will live in.

Jakarta 🇮🇩 — The Climate Displacement Is Not in the Future. It Is Happening Now. The People Being Displaced Cannot Afford the New Capital.

Jakarta is sinking. The northern districts of the city — home to the port, the oldest colonial-era neighbourhoods, and some of the densest low-income communities in Southeast Asia — are subsiding at rates of up to 25 centimetres per year in some locations, the result of groundwater extraction, the weight of buildings, and sea-level rise. Indonesia has moved its capital to Nusantara, a new city being built in East Kalimantan on Borneo. The total cost: approximately $33 billion. The residents of North Jakarta’s flooded kampungs — the informal settlements that house hundreds of thousands of people who have lived in Jakarta for generations — are not moving to Nusantara. The new capital is being built for government workers, technology professionals, and the middle and upper-middle class residents who follow institutional investment. The Jakarta story is the future city problem in real time: a city that is already uninhabitable for its poorest residents is being responded to with a future city that those residents cannot afford to move to. The gap between the climate problem and the city solution is measured in income levels, not kilometres.