Digital natives and living in the city of the future: Contradictions and ambivalences

Abstract

The article interlinks two strands of German discussions on the smart city of tomorrow: Firstly, the works of future researchers attempting to predict how we will live and work in the nearer future. At the centre of their attention are the Digital Natives: Young adults who will be the most powerful and influential social group in tomorrow’s society. It is therefore very interesting to compare the future researchers’ scenarios of urban life in 2030 to empirical research on the attitudes and values of this very demographic group. The article thus, secondly, goes through social scientific youth, generation and target group surveys in order to get a picture of the wishes, needs, and desires of adolescents and young adults regarding their prospective urban living and housing. The result is astonishing: The living and housing trends as identified by the future researchers do not correspond at all to the perspectives of those who should be the former’s main driving forces. The paper describes the most striking contradictions between the urban futures the trend researchers anticipate for the Digital Natives and the urban futures the latter see for themselves. It argues that some of these contradictions already write themselves into current urban development.