Explaining Challenges for Future Cities Using the Experience of Science-Fiction Cinema

City is the mostcomplex human product, and the long-lived urbanization process has a vague future. In other words, the future of cities is facing challenges that require different tools for action because the complexity and multidimensionality of urban issues have grown far more in line with the increasing rate of urbanization and technological advances. The uncertainty of the situation, the likelihood of different futures, and the understanding that any wrongdoing can alter the fate and quality of countless people's lives have complicated decision-making in urban problems. In such circumstances, a detailed understanding, analysis, and awareness of challenges facing contemporary cities in the future will be useful in drawing rational and desirable urban perspectives. Meanwhile, as a literary and then cinematic genre resulting from the last two centuries of industrialization and the social and scientific revolutions, science-fiction is considered to be one of the few cultural and pervasive media outlets that regularly tends to the ideas about the future. Currently, science-fiction has increasingly gone beyond simple predictions of science and technology and has brought concerns about humanity, societies, governments, ecology, and their interactions. One of the most frequently-portrayed sci-fi subjects is the future of cities through narrating stories in the context of cities. Stories in which the city is not merely a background, but plays a crucial role. Science-fiction extrapolates the dimensions and aspects of the contemporary situation, the elements, and trends of the present, to find out what they end up with if their full potential is demonstrated. Science-fiction scenarios are based on today's facts and represent the future. Thus, studying and analyzing science-fiction works, followed by offering different scenarios for future cities, will caution both the public and experts about the serious consequences of today human activities. Consequently, such a heightened awareness of these different scenarios and possibilities prevents various trials and errors. The relationship between the modern city and cinema as two twin phenomena of the contemporary world has developed unique lessons for urban analysts and decision-makers, the reading of which requires adoption of efficient and explanatory methodologies. The present study has a futuristic nature and aims to develop an understanding of the subject from an interpretive and inductive perspectives by adopting a qualitative approach. This study seeks to elucidate the challenges facing future cities by utilizing science-fiction cinema experiences while applying a qualitative content analysis approach. To meet these challenges, a wide range of films (data) have been selected and studied in depth through non-random, purposeful and exploratory sampling at four stages from a series of futuristic science-fiction films. The collected data was coded and analyzed in the form of the proposition, category, and concept. The results indicate that the concepts of governance and urban governance, sustainability, spatial justice, environmental quality, informal settlement, digital media, and media architecture, augmented reality and virtual reality, smartness, structural elements of the city, culture, and urban brand will be the leading challenges ahead of future cities.