This is the Guardian.

If you're a regular science weekly listener, you'll know that the outlook for the planet right now is a bit bleak.

But the climate crisis also gives us an opportunity to reimagine how we live for the better.

So we're asking, what do we want the future to look like.

Whether it's our diets, our homes, our families, what should lie ahead for humanity?

Today, we think of them as smoggy concrete jungles, but how could our cities help us create

a climate-friendly future.

Heat waves like those currently sweeping India, China, Thailand and even Spain are even more punishing and deadly in cities as human-made hard dry surfaces absorb

and trap the heat and on the flip side that also makes them more prone to flooding when the rain finally arrives.

So forget smart cities, giant shiny skyscrapers, huge screens flashing with adverts, robots flying above us.

The future of cities is wilder and greener than you think. From the Guardian I'm Madeline Finley and this is Science Weekly.

To form an idea of what the alternative future city might be like, I headed to

Colchester in the east of England to meet Ben Wilson, historian and author of Urban Jungle, a book

about the relationship between nature and cities. Colchester was a fortuitous place to you could have this strip of kind of green river.

Colchester was a fortuitous place to meet.

It's often called Britain's first city,

becoming a Roman capital in 49 AD.

Then, after a rather long hiatus last year its city status was returned so now it's

our newest too as we stood on the river coal with some blocks of flats on one side and a disused area of weeds and

reeds on the other. I asked Ben how he envisaged a future city.

The city of the future, if we're protecting ourselves, if we're serious about protecting

biodiversity, is developing cities that are a bit more in tune of nature that can acknowledge

...