About this site

Future of City is the written archive of the YouTube channel Urban Studies & Tech. Every piece published here is a video from the channel with its full text, so it can be read, cited and found on Google: YouTube does not index what is said in a video, and much of what is in this archive exists in writing nowhere else.

It is made by Hernán Orozco, an architect and urban planner. The channel was born to explain where the decisions that shape cities come from — who takes them, on what criteria and at whose expense — with the rigour of academic research and without its jargon. The texts draw on peer-reviewed literature, public reports and the authors cited, who each have a page in the Thinkers section.

Today the archive holds 301 pieces in English and as many again in Spanish, organised in five sections and one of authors. The channel's lectures, colloquia and academic talks are left out on purpose: they are not pieces of this archive.

How a piece is made

• The text is written before the video and is the source of the narrated script. Video narration is synthetic.
• Cover images are generated with artificial intelligence and are illustrations, not photographs of real places.
• Data and figures cited come from the reports and works named in each piece. If you find an error, leave it in the comments of the corresponding video and it gets corrected.

How this site is funded

Some pieces end with a block of related reading and material linking to Amazon. These are affiliate links: if you buy through them, this site earns a small commission at no extra cost to you. They are labelled as such, never influence what is written and appear nowhere else on the page. There is no advertising, no tracking cookies and no data collection: videos load from YouTube's cookie-free domain and only when you choose to watch them.

Contact

The most direct way is the channel itself: Urban Studies & Tech on YouTube. ↗