From: IFTF's Future Now: Reconfigurable Cities

"Last week, I was reading the British "lad" magazine FHM on the way back from Europe, and came across a picture of GMC's new concept truck for Los Angeles - the "PAD" (click on the image at right to enlarge). The PAD is envisioned as a combination vehicle/residence, what GM calls "an urban loft with mobility". While cars.com gives this an official "zero chance of production", I think its a lot more realistic vision of the future than it may at first appear.

IFTF's Technology Horizons program is focusing its research this year on the theme of "lightweight infrastructure. These new infrastructure designs will emphasize smaller, smarter, more independent components that can be organized in ways that are more efficient, more flexible, and more secure than the capital-intensive networks of the 20th century.

While at first, the PAD concept may appear as the culmination of the ever-bigger trend in SUVs in America, we can also see it as a lightweight alternative to the traditional home or apartment. IFTF has noted the emergence of temporary cities like Burning Man as an important trend in our 2005 Map of the Decade, but if the concept embodied by PAD really caught on, we could see a whole new form of urbanism based on nomadism and reconfigurable cities. Lightweight infrastructure might allow us to rapidly prototype new forms of settlement as needs and constraints shift from day to day."