Hello, I have just submitted my picture! Thought I'd share my 3D workspace (in Blender) as well, sometimes it feels even more theatrical and fun than the final picture I manage to wring out of it.

You can see it is VERY tailored to the drawn composition... things stop working / break apart / go missing with even the slightest camera shift. But that's the most fun bit in composing based on a 2D-drawing ;)

Feels done.

Changes and decisions since the first draft: I changed the perspective from very birds's-eye to more of an elevational axonometric - so that I can better demonstrate architecture and design instead of trying to impress the eye with perspectival tricks. The same reasoning goes behind putting the foreground section very close to the camera to show two scales in the same shot. 

The hot-air balloons in the end really helped demonstrating this scale shift... with one of them up close and all the rest far in the distance.

Not so sure if the 'story' comes out well, but this is essentially about a kid remotely fixing a broken balloon whilst a friend flies over to relay the news (which the protagonist obvisously already knows because - they've got hyper-speed connection... tada.) 

The few trails of smoke on the hot-air balloon and the vehicle also help a bit to tie the composition together and to suggest some sort of movement in guiding the viewer around the picture, hopefully.

Anyway thank you for following, it's been a great imaginative journey. xd

added the floating solar panels... the new energy highway. Main thing missing is the balloons that hold all these new infrastructures together in the sky... and then more detailing to suggest scale changes

items pending: solar panels, balloons, building structures inside the floating fabric for scale...

Items pending - foreground figure for scale and story, minute architectural-level details, solar panels, balloons, 5G network nodals, a background of restored ecosystems...

wip of new urban infrastructures - massive floating fabric acting as the new passive thermal/ventilation strategy for the new sustainable city... balloons, houses, solar panels and people for scale pending...

Thinking about material and spatial needs. Frame needs to be light - titanium? Circulation needed for maintenance and vehicular (Bicycle!) travel. An aesthetic of material preservation - building only the structures necessary to meet circulation and mechanical needs...

Rough linework of the network 'superstructure'... gonna try things differently this time and finish this layer of linework in blender.

Thinking about architecture and space in relation to an age of hyper connection AND ecological revival: so we have 5, 6, 7, 8G. Super fast connection. Augmented reality, accelerated reality, apex reality... in any sense, a hyper immersive digital environment. So all this needs a lot of energy. And perhaps we develop some sort of solar panel-ish device that is, by assumption of a holistic advancement of technologies, a lot better than the solar panels we have today. Conventionally we'd put these PVs somewhere in the dessert, where there is a lot of sun and land is easy to procure. But let's consider the ECOLOGICAL perspective. Imagine we are in an age of ecological revival where biodiversity catches back up into all forms of alien-looking forests, but after we in 2022 have already caused irreversible climate change and damage to the ozone layer. (plus the fact that it is not wholly ethical or ecological to simply build solar energy devices where there is a desert and transfer that energy across two continents to people's homes) So perhaps there is a lot of sun everywhere BUT there is also a strong consensus to not disturb the land for something so homogenous and in fact quite dead as a solar farm. So where do all these PVs go? To the sky. Held by hot-air balloons, made to orient toward the strongest sunlight. And we need so many of them to support the 8G network that they actually become some sort of micro-city in the sky themselves. And with the meagre weight-holding capacity of the hot-air balloons these panels hold some pontoons underneath to collect rainwater, and use that rainwater to cool down their systems - a closed loop material cycle. In the end these PVs become some kind of augmented landscape - an artificial silver lining by the edge of the sky, occassionally discharging a small waterfall onto vast stretches of restored forests - where people also happen to live in the future. And here is how the prompt of 'imagine a 5G and sustainable society' leads to the design of airborne architecture... 

Regarding the picture, I'm detailing the initial sketch.

The disaster scene of a meteor strike. The two talking people are portrayed in a different colour 'see-through' linestyle and massively out of proportion to suggest the fact that they are communicating in a digital space - whilst having sensorial access to all the physical site of incidence.

The purpose of the red circles is to show at a human scale the synthesis of physical maintenance to the ecosystem aided by digital connections... needs re-iteration as it is currently just 'conference-like'. The aim is to portray the massive physical construction needed to support a 'cloud' way of living and collaborating... which needs to be both ambitious and considerate to the existing cycles of materials and ecological exchanges.

The storyboard sketch... colour-adjusted and scaled to be printed as the back-plate for a more serious pencil sketch. Stay tuned...

In the hypothetical city-of-the-future, infrastructure serves no longer as a physical addition to the flow of materials but rather of information. The new human sits with her body in the restored eco-system whilst her mind participates in the maintenance of her physical environment - in the cloud. The physical city continues to ammend and upkeep itself through the aid of instantaneous collaboration on-line... and advancement does not come at the cost of sacrificing what's already there.