In 2030, an estimated 60% of the world’s population will live in cities, and as the architect Richard Rogers has pointed out, the global urban population is increasing by 250,000 a day, the equivalent of “a new London every month”. With architecture in China and the Middle East dominating headlines in 2008, the predictions of hugely influential Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas – responsible for Beijing’s China Central Television (CCTV) building and the plans for a Waterfront City in Dubai – carry much weight as visions of the future take shape.

Koolhaas is convinced that European ideals in urban planning will be revered far less, a view shared with Pei Zhu, the Chinese architect behind Digital Beijing, the nerve centre of the summer’s Olympic games. He says generations of Chinese architects will have the  confidence not to merely replicate or import traditional Western orthodoxies. Similarly, Koolhaas says his planned Waterfront City in Dubai will be a true metropolis, containing true public space and not what he has called the caricature of public space – shopping malls.

As for skyscrapers, those symbols of power and dynamism so inextricably linked to self-esteem in the Middle and Far East, Koolhaas believes that height is becoming less of a factor, while the concept of ‘bigness’ is gaining traction. He says the 500,000m2 complexes being built today will have to be multifunctional – cities within cities, because buildings this large can no longer be filled with a single function. This can be seen with Foster’s riverside Crystal Island – a €2.5bn “city within a city” he is designing as an adjunct to Moscow, 8km from the Kremlin on the Nagatino peninsula, due for completion in 2014. Koolhaas says another result is that attention shifts to the interior, because the bigger a building the less contact it has with the outside world.  

Indeed, the ‘interiors’ of cities, from gardens to the traditional courtyards being reinterpreted by Pei Zhu in Beijing, are becoming prevalent the world over as building blocks in, rather than for, our future.