The urban ultimatum: what should our future cities be like?

The landscape has changed radically in the decade that LSE Cities' Urban Age programme has travelled the world - but the questions it explores are more important than ever, writes Deyan Sudjic

Outside the echo chamber of religious fanaticism of all descriptions, this is not a moment in which the world is much given to declamatory statements about how things should be. Thinking about the future of the city, we are so traumatised by a century and a half of prescriptions for urbanism that have had only disastrous results that we have become cautious about making any kind of commitment to ideas or manifestos.

We are certainly more sceptical than the generation of modernist architects of the 1930s who retreated to a cruise liner sailing across the Mediterranean to lay the ground for the Charter of Athens, the document that codified a city made up of parallel slabs of housing rising out of parkland, and where work, home and leisure were divided by functional zoning.