18 Surreal City Photos Suggest the Future Has Arrived

Seattle's mix of new and vintage architecture is one of the reasons I love to be there.

The new OHSU Collaborative Life Sciences Building in Portland, Oregon, is designed to let in natural light, says photographer Pat Rose. Her shot "reminds me of an M.C. Escher print because you don't know which way is up," Corcoran says.

Taking the metro becomes an aesthetic experience in Stockholm. "I feel like I've entered a subterranean world on the planet Mars," Corcoran says of the shot by Markus Pavlowsky.

A transparent tunnel connects two skyscrapers in Osaka's Umeda Sky City in Japan. The blurred, slightly shaky quality of Haitong Yu's composition is futuristic, but it also gave Corcoran "an overall feeling of unease."

Dennis Wat invokes the popular block-stacking video game in titling his shot of densely populated Hong Kong. The shot "enables you to imagine living in this behemoth of an apartment building," Corcoran says.

Trees adorn the balconies of this residential tower in Milan, photographed by Gaetano Cessati. "The tight composition keeps the viewer guessing for just a minute about what they are looking at," says Corcoran.

Jackson Hung captured this image of a basketball court on top of a parking garage. "Space is scarce in Hong Kong," he says, and not a bit of it goes wasted.

Stas Bartnikas took this aerial photo of a neighbourhood in Toronto where the colour comes from the autumn leaves.

Computer chips look eerily urban in a shot that combines the idea of technology, social networks, and cities. "What a great idea to use technology itself to illustrate our future—for better or worse—they are intertwined," says Corcoran.

Ravin Schmidl took this photo to capture the increasingly vertical, somewhat claustrophobic nature of cities as population density increases. Corcoran says the effect is "like a movie still from The Hunger Games."

The view here at Garden by the Bay in Singapore, says Andrew Tsang, "was surreal and yet the sensation of a rain forest was undoubtedly real." Corcoran adds, "It's up to us to make sure we won't have to rely on a virtual rainforest in the future."

Corcoran calls out the layers of people, greenery, and light in Alexandra Diers's shot of greenery in an unnamed cafe. "To keep cities green is the challenge of future cities," Diers says.

Campbell Sheppard took this shot at Darlington Memorial Hospital in England. There's only one electric car charging station there so far, Sheppard says, but more are being installed across the country.

image taken from the top of Shanghai's Lupu Bridge illustrates the traffic and air quality problems that face so many of the world's cities.

Muhammad Na'im Mohd Fadil took this energetic shot of traffic in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a "big city that never sleeps."

Bert Bloemen's shot of a metro track running through Dubai, United Arab Emirates, offered a "personal and intimate" street-level view, as opposed to many aerial views that were submitted to the assignment, Corcoran says.

Corcoran liked Sungjin Kim's use of a wide-angle lens to distort, "what is already an unusual skyline," for this otherworldly shot of Busan, South Korea.

People move through Osaka, Japan, on a workday evening in this image from Untouchablephoto Jack. Faces are missing in the hustling traffic.