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Editor’s Note
April 2025
by Jean-Charles Zurawicki
This year, Free City invites readers to explore the idea of emergence - the budding, clustering, intersecting and fracturing forces that shape our urban life. Put simply, emergence is the process of how small, simple parts produce new, more complex properties when they interact as a whole. Consider the relation of an individual to a household, a household to a building, building to a city block, city block to a neighbourhood, or a neighbourhood to a city. These smaller parts hold unique characteristics on their own - as residents, dwellings, communities - but in tandem elucidate larger living patterns, economic links, transportation networks, and social inequalities.
Emergence can have clarity, but it can also be nebulous. Across space and time, we are bounded to our past and present observations, leaving us unable at times to discern the start, end, recurrence, or outlier of an emerging property.
These qualities of emergence can be uncomfortable for urbanists who are often bounded in agency, space, and time. How can we plan or design a city that we cannot fully know? This issue seeks to reconcile this reality. Let us reconnect with our role in investigating the form and function of our cities, and relearn how these changes occur in the complexity that is a city.
In this spirit, Free City organized a collage—featured on the inside covers—to see how we as students understand the future of cities. Through this emerging process of piecing together our individual ideas, new relationships and meanings form into a vision greater than the sum of its parts.
This magazine is a collage of its own, too. Each submission depicts the technological, social, sensorial, and environmental shifts influencing our present and future urbanism. These emerging trends include the rise of artificial intelligence and remote work, micro-neighbourhoods, and collective power. The multiplicity of emergence is revealed through reflections on the urban ascendancy of Singapore, and in future scenarios for McGill’s School of Urban Planning. Observations of streetscapes and wildlife further capture prescient moments of change, where an emerging property is unveiled. Finally, the magazine concludes with a discussion on how to make sense of complexity. We hope you enjoy this collection of writing, photography, and art.
This year’s magazine could not have been possible without the support of the School of Urban Planning. Thank you!