Tokyo isn’t the future anymore — it’s the future 1980s pop culture promised us, perfectly preserved, while Seoul, Shenzhen, and Dubai have spent the last decade building the version that comes after

Dubai is a literal shithole

The fact is, no city or country is “living in the future”, at least not in a meaningful sense. These are all cities where real people live with their real lives and have to deal with the actual practicality of living in one with their mundane lives. I’m sure no local is thinking “Wow, I’m living in the FUTURE”. If there are certain aesthetics, then it’s because either that’s something that has continued from the past, or it’s something that the people prefer. And these people are acting as if these cities are just theme parks for them to consume and nothing more. It’s a… fucking city, not a theme park.

>Seoul, in particular, has produced, over the last decade, what feels like the genuinely new urban configuration. The integration of mobile payment, real-time public transit data, ambient retail, and what I can only describe as a particular kind of post-physical interface culture, has produced a city that does not feel like a thickened version of an older form. The city feels, more accurately, like a thinned version of an older form, with most of the physical-world friction removed and replaced by digital infrastructure that operates invisibly in the background. The neon is still there. The neon is no longer doing the work it used to do. The work is being done elsewhere, in the layer one cannot see, by the various apps and systems that have, by some quiet process, become the actual operating system of the city.

What the actual fuck is this individual talking about?

Also this person’s source is him visiting Seoul 3 times in the last 5 years and Tokyo 5 times in the last 10. His primary occupation is [running a restaurant in the Philippines](https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-mabanta-7723041b4/). A completely useless layman’s opinion that nobody cares about.

So the metric of living in the future is how much LED and extravagant buildings you have?

Dubai is the furthest thing from futuristic it’s a plastic mall

Japan has been stuck in the year 2000 since the 1980s

Seoul is a slightly more modern Osaka

Dubai?

Difference is North Korea is not launching missles into Tokyo like Iran is in Dubai, so it has that going for it.

i don’t want to live in the future, i want to live in 2007 Tokyo when designer stuff was cheap and garakei phones had personality

I don’t care how much money they pour into advertising that place. I cannot bring myself to want to go to Dubai. I don’t know what it is about it, but the vibes are totally off with that place.

Dubai has no society. It’s a monument to petro-capital with a skyline built on wage theft and passport confiscation. No productive base, no civic identity, no future that isn’t entirely dependent on oil money or the continued legal helplessness of its migrant workforce.
Seoul is late capitalism eating itself alive. Arguably the most credentialled, overworked population on earth, and they’ve basically stopped having children because the social contract has been hollowed out entirely. Optimised for output, uninhabitable as a life. The demographic collapse is already underway.
Tokyo is the sad one because it actually had something. Decades of institutional sexism and racism have thrown away the demographic dividend that could have carried it forward. It’s actively choosing ruinous decline over the discomfort of change. If you know how to read the indicators, the deterioration is already visible. The rankings will make it undeniable within a generation.
Shenzhen is the only city in this conversation with a real future. It was built by design, not speculation. It has directed industrial policy, serious infrastructure investment, a planning horizon that isn’t hostage to the next election cycle. The people living there are materially better off than they were, and that’s measurable, not rhetorical.
My point isn’t ideological either. It’s that the cities still standing in fifty years will be the ones whose governments kept the capacity to plan, to intervene, and to prioritise long-term social reproduction over short-term capital extraction. The rest are running a model that has visibly hit its limits and will be left to sort through the rubble.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ The world’s current great cities will crumble if they do not change their modes of production and reproduction.

I was just in Taiwan recently, and that also feels like its frozen in some bubble era. A lot of well-preserved old bulidings mixed with newer, shinier developments but not too overwhelming like Shanghai or Tokyo.

This article is just ridiculous. Anyone who’s lived in Japan since the 1980s or has visited Tokyo multiple times knows how much the city has changed compared to the 80s or even the early 2000s.

Compared to big cities in China, South Korea, or Dubai, which had very little modern infrastructure back then, Tokyo’s changes might not look as dramatic. But when you compare it to major Western cities, there’s probably no other city that has developed as quickly or in such a forward-thinking way as Tokyo.

What really makes Tokyo stand out is its dense concentration of diverse commercial spaces, its privately run cultural facilities like museums, and the extensive rail network that connects everything so efficiently. In those respects, Chinese cities don’t really match Tokyo, and their air and water quality don’t either.

The idea that a city is “advanced” just because it has lots of tall, flashy, LED-covered skyscrapers, like in China or Dubai, is just nonsense. Honestly, this article feels like it was written to force the conclusion that Tokyo or Japan is somehow falling behind.

Dubai is ass

Give me 80s future any day of the week thanks

Dubai is not the future. They’ll be around no question but it is not gonna be the revolutionary society mfs think it will be.

Korea still has a population crisis that ain’t getting any better and they don’t really fuck with anyone who ain’t Korean and they’ve got their own issues with Chebols fucking shit up and getting away with it

Shenzhen… no…. Just…. No.