Will 2025 be the the year we stopped procrastinating and finally started building the future again?
We never made the utopian future the tech and urbanist types promised us. We likely still won't ever see it, but we can at least get building bits of it again.
When I started my career in innovation around 2012, the future felt like it was just around the corner. Everything was positive, optimistic, enthusiastically adopting what still felt like the novel digital and mobile future. In most cases, there was a bit of a vision that usually seemed to have a 2025, or maybe 2030, date slapped on it.
Smart Homes and Cities. Personalised Experience. Everything on Demand. Universal Basic Incomes. Autonomous Transportation. Net Zero. Global Peace.
All of it practically inevitable by 2030 at the latest.
Fast forward to the end of 2024, and 2025 feels less futuristic utopia and more marginally better smartphone, with faster WiFi & 5G. Sure, we’ve made some progress, there’s emerging AI capabilities, ChatGPT, more electric cars, and everything really is in the cloud. We also had the whole NFT thing. But much of the world looks suspiciously like 2016, just with slightly shinier graphics, a sense of digital enshittification each time we try to use Google Search and the same incoming orange President with the combover.
So, what happened? In a word: process.
“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
– George S. Patton
Stuck in the Cult of Process
Somewhere along the way, we became so obsessed with perfecting the process that we forgot about where the process is meant to take us …. to outcomes! We designed frameworks, held workshops and created some remarkably beautiful PowerPoint presentations about change, supported by impressive spreadsheets, all while delivering very little of it. Planning became a substitute for action. We treated process as progress, because ticking boxes and refining workflows feels productive, even when it’s not.
This is why so many big, bold ideas from a decade ago ended up as little more than footnotes. Let’s take a massive infrastructure projects like HS2 in the UK. It started as a grand vision for high-speed rail connecting Northern cities at high speed, and much greater capacity to London, unlocking productivity and capacity.
However as the design process went on, and on, as every minor concern led to changes, which led to cost increases, and delays, we then had years of scaling it back, meaning what’s left feels like the Wish or Temu version of a railway. Just about functional, disappointing to look at in real life compared to what was on the advertising and not actually serving the purpose for what it was set up for in the first place. Seriously, after all these years they’ve ended up with a railway that will often be slower, carry less people and be more expensive than the thing it’s effectively replacing.
This obsession with process is the enemy of quick, effective action. The truth is, we don’t need reinvented wheels, we need people who can take the wheels we already have and get them rolling faster.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
– Peter Drucker
2025: A Time for Doing, Not Dreaming
Despite all this, I’m oddly hopeful. Why? Because the shiny future we imagined can’t actually wait any longer. The luxury of dreaming big without delivering has officially expired. It might just be a good thing too.
What excites me most is the potential for reforming the institutions that have, time and again, proven incapable of delivering on the big promises of the past. I’m not talking Elon Musk style Department of Government Efficiency, slashing and burning till there’s not much left.
But instead, actually saying how would we design this today with the tools that previously were not available. Greater computing power, faster connectivity and smarter ways to collaborate mean we can rethink not just what we deliver, but how we deliver it. Apply that to the basics, and we can lay so many of the first principles, much, much faster.
Instead of chasing moonshots and trimming them back into irrelevance, we can ask: “What can we do quickly that makes a meaningful difference, now?” Imagine using AI to streamline what’s really required for a housing permit, or taking a YIMBY attitude to development to avoid the NIMBYs from running the cities they want to preserve into the ground, or speeding up public transit projects with standardised modular construction. These aren’t sexy ideas, but they’re transformative because they’re doable and they unlock real progress where arguments over rights of way, or set backs, or building heights don’t.
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
– Voltaire
We hate congestion. We hate government waste. We hate high taxes. We hate delays resulting from change orders. Build baby, build. Don’t like it? Maybe a city isn’t for you. Sorry, not really sorry.
A Future Worth Building
The biggest reason to feel optimistic about 2025 and beyond is we are done kicking the can down the road. The shiny visions of the past, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, circular economies, clean energy etc. weren’t failures of our imagination of what our future might be, but more failures of our creativity in starting to make those futures real. Now, with no more road left to kick cans down, we’re finally in a position to do something about it.
The kicker is we have more of the tools now, and the experience that deferral tends to mean denial. The same computing power that powers AI chatbots and keeps TikTok endlessly addictive could be used to fix the systems that got us here in the first place. So the housing project doesn’t take longer to approve than to build, the same politician with a photo-op fetish being about to announce a project, as well a cut the ribbon. Urbanists designing neighbourhoods that don’t feel like they were ripped from a sci-fi movie but instead work on a more human scale, imperfectly planned, irregularly laid out, or more politely we might call these ‘mixed use’.
Funny how the future of most cities is actually a lot more what Jane Jacobs talked about in the 50s and 60s, than it is science fiction. Mid-rise liveable units, some shops, some entertainment, some offices, a bit of parking, lots of transit, bikes, sidewalks, bars, restaurants, parks, playgrounds, patios. It’s fucking hard to pull all that together, but we’re getting there!
“There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”
-Jane Jacobs
What we’ve learned is we don’t get there by designing the perfect plan. Utopia doesn’t, and won’t ever exist. Bits of these places won’t quite work, but we’ll iterate on the rough edges rather that tell ourselves by 2050 we can make city projects perfect first time. The winners will do that stuff faster than the NIMBY-bots can rage about it on X.
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
– Clay Shirky
Now we’ve got to 2025 having not made much progress since we stuck the 2025 or 2030 timeline on everything is it is not about designing the future in one fell swoop, but solving one problem today and setting up for the next win tomorrow.
These will be the Challenger Cities in 2025, no longer hoping for the moonshots. Instead they’ll be operating with a sense of build that bike lane, approve that housing block, get the first section of that railway, remove street parking on this road first, then connect up that other bike lane, do the next housing block a bit differently based on the experience of the last one.
We’ll use the tools (and financial resources) we already have, not for incremental progress but for momentum. We’ll have to also look for what we can stop doing as much as we can start doing, to make more of what we have.
(Hey Toronto, your streetcars will make a lot more money, and move a lot more people if you get rid of the left turning cars!! .… just do it on one street, oh wait, you did, now for the love of god make that King Street ‘pilot’ more permanent.)
The beauty of action is that it inspires confidence in more action. People want to be part of something that’s moving, not something stuck in committee meetings, reviews and studies.
And who knows? Maybe in a few years, we’ll look back and think, “2025 wasn’t the year we dreamed about the future; it was the year we finally built it.”
To being Challengers.
“Hope is not a strategy. But hope is the beginning of strategy.”
– Rory Sutherland
