The Smarter, Denser City, in Photos

The space in our cities is shrinking. But there's just no stopping the continuous wave of people who want to live in them. By 2050, it's projected that as much as ​66 percent to ​75 percent of the world's population will be living in urban regions. And as the pressures on our cityscapes don't look set to ease, what kind of challenges are we left facing?

​#FutureofCities, an ongoing global social documentary campaign and exhibition, which is on show at Somerset House in London until May 10, aims to visually explore some of the issues. The exhibit displays the works of 12 documentary photographers from the Panos agency, who've zipped between cities as different as Kinshasa, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Mumbai over the last nine months.

​Focusing specifically on the environment, infrastructures, physical spaces, and the challenges faced by communities embedded within different cityscapes, the exhibit encourages debate on how the average city dweller might contribute in shaping their urban environment.

The images take you all over the place. Fifty-meter-high environmental tech-clad "supertrees" in Singapore reveal the country's growing clout as a "smart city" superpower, a portrait of a Japanese Buddhist monk inside a neon enclosure reveals how the country deals with issues of real estate for the deceased, while an eight-foot-tall traffic-directing robot in Kinshasa hints at how we'll increasingly live side-by-side with our robotic counterparts.

On show are the kind of problems or trends that are emerging as our cities either go "smart," or as people within in them just try and find ways of keeping their lives sustainable.

It all drives towards a strikingly simple conclusion: Driven by rapid urbanisation or incoming migration, our cities are set to keep morphing, whether we're like it or not.