THE CITY OF THE FUTURE ALREADY EXISTS – ARW at Utopian Hours 2026

We are used to imagining the future of cities through addition.

More buildings. More infrastructure. More technology. More square metres.

But what if we are asking the wrong question?

What if a significant part of the city we will need over the coming decades has already been built?

It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid this question. European cities are full of buildings that are active for only a few hours a day, infrastructure that has lost its original purpose, vacant ground floors, inaccessible rooftops, underused public assets, and spaces designed around a single function while the society inhabiting them increasingly demands many.

This does not mean that we should stop building. It means recognising that building cannot be the only way we imagine change.

Perhaps the next great urban resource is not space yet to be created.

It is space waiting to be reactivated.

MEASURING THE CITY DIFFERENTLY

A building can be highly efficient and still remain unused for most of the day.

An office empty at night.
A school closed at weekends.
A car park whose intensity of use changes completely between day and night.
A roof covering thousands of square metres that no one can access.
A public building that physically exists but no longer generates urban life.

We are used to measuring architecture in square metres.

Perhaps we should also begin to measure it in square metres × hours of use.

It would change the way we see the city.

What appears saturated might suddenly reveal itself to be empty. And what we consider obsolete could become one of the most important spatial reserves of the contemporary city.

A city can be out of scale not only in space, but also in time.

FROM OBJECTS TO POSSIBILITIES

This is one of the reasons Utopian Hours matters to us.

In its tenth edition, Stratosferica’s international festival brings together city makers, designers, public officials, businesses and researchers in Turin to discuss not one single vision of the city, but many different ways of transforming it.

The Manifesto for a New City Making begins precisely from the idea of the city as a complex organism: one made not only of buildings and infrastructure, but also of relationships, conflicts, possibilities and forms of care.

Looking at this year’s programme, one particularly interesting thread emerges.

In Basel, a former railway ramp becomes a corridor for water and biodiversity. In Rotterdam, rooftops are treated as a new urban surface capable of hosting gardens, culture, water and public space. In Copenhagen, a former factory is transformed into a place where associations, researchers, artists and innovators work side by side. Other discussions address the future of public assets and of the intermediate spaces that shape everyday urban life.

These are not simply adaptive-reuse projects.

They share a broader shift in perspective: to stop treating the existing city as a fixed condition and start seeing it as material available for transformation.

ARCHITECTURE ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH

There is another question at stake.

If the challenge were simply to design better buildings, the answer would be relatively straightforward.

But reactivating what already exists means dealing simultaneously with design, ownership, economics, management, public policy, mobility, communities and time.

It means asking not only what a space is, but who can use it, when, under what conditions, and who will take care of it over time.

This may be one of the most significant shifts in the role of the architect today: moving from the design of an object to the creation of the conditions in which something can happen.

This is also why we will be at Utopian Hours 2026, in Turin on 16 and 17 October, taking part with the Professional Pass: not only to attend keynotes and talks, but to join working sessions bringing together professionals, businesses, city makers and public officials from Italy and across Europe.

Because some of the most important questions facing contemporary architecture cannot be answered by architecture alone.

PERHAPS UTOPIA IS CLOSER THAN WE THINK

Utopia is often associated with something that does not yet exist.

New cities. New buildings. New forms.

But today, one of the most radical propositions may be something else entirely.

To look at what is already in front of us and imagine more possibilities within the same amount of space.

To make buildings last longer.
To allow them to change.
To overlap uses instead of separating them.
To transform obsolete infrastructure.
To open spaces that were once inaccessible.
To make a place live for more hours, for more people, in more ways.

The city of the future, at least in part, is already here.

We simply need to learn how to see it.