I'd go even further and say the heresy that "urban living" is not the future, so making it sustainable is like scaling horse-riding to 10 billion riders.
I think it will be small multi-generational houses. Outside of a few overpopulated cities, most of the land, even in NY, is farmlands or just undeveloped. Living in hives isn't really in human nature.
It sure seems that humans have tried to build and live in such hives for an awfully long time—Wikipedia calls it 7000 BCE [0]. Sure, a drop in the bucket in evolutionary time—but neither is it purely a skyscraper-era phenomenon.
Even to this day, all that undeveloped farmland is dirt cheap compared to the hive life, and yet people vote with their feet and their money for the hive. For a substantial proportion of them, the first step is to exchange the countryside life specifically for this informal/improvised condition of dwelling, just to be close to the hive.
A small portion of humans lived in cities in 7000 BCE. And many of those cities were closer to what we consider a village by modern standards.
Mass urbanization into megapolies is 200 years old at best. With very few exceptions in older eras that didn’t house a big portion of humans in given eras.
and for most of history, most people had to live where most of the jobs were - a large % of people no longer need to do that. If you had to work in the city, buying dirt cheap land a hundred miles away didn't work - now it can for some/many, and if enough people with some money can do it, it will then have the effect of diversifying that local economy, such that now a few builders, landscapers, restaurants and other amenities and the loop feed itself.
I imagine in the future only the very rich will choose to live in some cities, the very poor will mostly have no choice and have to live there and large swathes of the middle class will love to get out into the country/small villages if their jobs allow it.
More than half of the global human population (and growing) lives in urban areas, so _by definition_ it is human nature. The artificial restrictions artificially limiting the number of new apartment blocks, causing lack of affordable housing is what's forcing younger people to move back in with their parents increasing the number of multi-generational houses. It's pretty hard for me to see this as an unalloyed good that should be the future of living.
Human nature? Of freaking course! Using tools, seeking amusement? Yes, it's human nature.
Banding together to improve our chances of survival? Yeah. In the past it was a few dozen, now it's a few hundred thousand. I don't understand this notion that living in the woods or something is human nature. Working together to grow beyond that is human nature.
I think there’s possibly a fundamental preference disconnect here. Some people like being around people. I’d never even consider living in an isolated house in the middle of nowhere; I like being able to walk places and have people around.
I think it comes to question of what type suburbs we are talking about.
Cities build of multiple well connected cores with high density going to lower with all needed services and sufficient workplaces available in each make lot of sense and is probably most self sustainable model.
The endless detached houses with minimal spacing and no services on other hand.