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Cities in the 21st Century: Academic Visions on Urban Development (Hardback) - Routledge
8/26/15, 12:41 PM
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Cities in the 21st Century
Academic Visions on Urban Development
Edited by Oriol Nel-lo (/products/search?author=Oriol Nel-lo), Renata Mele
(/products/search?author=Renata Mele)
© (Copyright) 2016 – Routledge
288 pages
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About the Book
Cities in the 21st Century provides an overview of contemporary urban development.
Written by more than thirty major academic specialists from different countries, it
provides information on and analysis of the global network of cities, changes in
urban form, environmental problems, the role of technologies and knowledge,
socioeconomic developments and finally the challenge of urban governance.
In the mid-20th century, architect and planner Josep Lluís Sert wondered if cities could survive; in the
early 21st century we see that cities have not only survived but have grown as never before. Cities
today are engines of production and trade, forges of scientific and technological innovation and
crucibles of social change. Urbanisation is a major driver of change in contemporary societies; it is a
process that involves acute social inequalities and serious environmental problems, but also offers
opportunities to move towards a future of greater prosperity, environmental sustainability and social
justice.
With case studies on 30 cities in five continents and a selection of infographics illustrating these
dynamic cities, this edited volume is an essential resource for planners and students of urbanisation
and urban change.
Table of Contents
Foreword— Francesco Starace, Enel Chief Executive Officer Introduction—Oriol Nel·lo, Autonomous
University of Barcelona Part 1 - Cities in the global socioeconomic network 1. Changing the city,
changing the world—Mireia Belil, Fundació Forum – Barcelona Outlook 1. The City of London: center
of capital flows—Giuseppina Siciliano, University of London 2. Cities in the World System— Michael
Cohen, New School University – New York Outlook 2. New patterns of circulation of goods: the port
of Shanghai— Irina Lazzerini, Enel Foundation 3. Cities as innovation: towards a new understanding
of population growth, social inequality and urban sustainability—Julio Davila, University College
London Outlook 3. Ceuta and Melilla: the paradox and drama of international migration—Oriol Porcel,
Autonomous University of Barcelona Part 2 - Urban morphology: transformations and
dissolutions 4. Regional urbanization and the end of the metropolis era—Edward Soja, University of
California Los Angeles Outlook 4. The città diffusa of the Po valley—Angelo Facchini, Enel
Foundation 5. New urban forms: the distinctive character of the European metropolis—Francesco
Indovina, IUAV University Outlook 5. The new Luanda—Igor Cersosimo, CIEE – Beijing & Enel
Foundation 6. Beyond Urbanalization: urban form and the low-carbon challenge—Francesc Muñoz,
Autonomous University of Barcelona Outlook 6. Old and new commercial centres: bazaars vs
shopping malls in Ankara—Oriol Porcel, Autonomous University of Barcelona 7. Mutations in the
LatinAmerican metropolis: Santiago de Chile under neoliberal dynamics—Carlos de Mattos, Luis
Fuentes, Felipe Link, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile Outlook 7. Observing changes in urban
form through night satellite images in Buenos Aires and Lima— Jordi Martin, Autonomous University
of Barcelona Part 3 - Urban ecosystems: resources and energy 8. Living at the edge of chaos: a
complex systems view of cities—Gianluca Bocchi, University of Bergamo, Angelo Facchini, Enel
FoundationOutlook 8. Climate-sensitive urbanization in Tokyo-Yokohama— Angelo Facchini, Enel
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Page 1 of 3
Cities in the 21st Century: Academic Visions on Urban Development (Hardback) - Routledge
8/26/15, 12:41 PM
Foundation 9. Cities in a low carbon world—Chris Kennedy, University of Toronto Outlook 9.
Pathways to decarbonizing mobility in Madrid—C. Zulberti , Enel Foundation 10. Cities, climate
change and lifestyles—Federico Butera, Politecnico di Milano Outlook 10. Urban agriculture in
Melbourne—Giuseppina Siciliano, University of London 11. The mirage of the sustainable smart city.
Planetary urbanization and the spectre of combined and uneven apocalypse—Erik Swyngedouw,
University of Manchester Outlook 11. Energy access and water supply in urban centers in arid
landscapes: the case of Noutkchott— Oriol Porcel, Autonomous University of Barcelona Part 4 Urban technologies: information, knowledge, infrastructures and culture 12. The cognitive city
—Franco Farinelli, University of Bologna Outlook 12. Talent concentration and brain drain in greater
Boston—Oriol Porcel, Autonomous University of Barcelona 13. Dimensions of the future city—Mattew
Claudel, Carlo Ratti, MIT - SenseAble city Lab Outlook 13. Shaping the city with big data: Seattle,
Chicago and Lyon—Angelo Facchini, Enel Foundation 14. Cities, infrastructure and planning: levers
to steer transitions—Tim Marshall, Oxford Brookes University Outlook 14. Managing public transport
in Medellín—Irina Lazzerini, Enel Foundation 15. Group-form and urban infrastructural resilience: New
York City as an example—Richard Plunz, Patricia Culligan, Columbia University Outlook 15. RES
NOVÆ: new things and concepts in the smart city of Bari—Angelo Facchini, Enel Foundation Part 5 The urban economy and society: dynamism and inequalities 16. The city as economic engine
—Luis Carvalho, Leo van den Berg, European Institute for Comparative Urban Research Outlook 16.
Urban festivals as tools for sustainable development: the case of the World Port Days in Rotterdam
—Leo van den Berg, Erwin van Tuijl, Euricur, Erasmus University Rotterdam 17. Dynamism and
inequalities in the global south cities—Caroline Moser, University of Manchester Outlook 17. Gender
and spaces of fear: the case of Mexico City—Anna Ortiz, Autonomous University of Barcelona18. The
city in the net. Infrastructural networks, economic development and urban form—Joan López,
Autonomous University of Barcelona Outlook 18. Social construction of urban spaces in Barcelona,
Glasgow and New York—Oriol Porcel, Autonomous University of Barcelona 19. "New Urbanisation":
Theory, Challenges and Research—Dajian Zhu, Tongji University Outlook 19. The slums of Manila
—Igor Cersosimo, CIEE – Beijing & Enel Foundation Part 6 - Governing cities: visions, projects and
instruments 20. The rise of urban governance—Ronan Paddison, University of Glasgow Outlook 20.
The "pacification" of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas—Oriol Porcel, Autonomous University of Barcelona 21.
Urban policies: towards new scenarios of innovation and governance—Joan Subirats, Autonomous
University of Barcelona Outlook 21. The regulation of urban citysenship. Shenzhen’s migrants—Igor
Cersosimo, CIEE – Beijing & Enel Foundation 22. Up-dating Lorenzetti´s allegories on government
towards a Europe of Cities—João Ferrão, University of Lisbon Outlook 22. Exchanging recyclable
waste for electricity in Fortaleza—Angelo Facchini, Enel Foundation Part 7 – Infographic tables
About the Editors
Oriol Nel·lo is professor of Urban Geography and Spatial Planning in the Department of Geography,
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research interests refer to metropolitan dynamics, urban
segregation, social movements and urban policies. He has been director of the Institute for
Metropolitan Studies of Barcelona and Secretary for Spatial Planning in Catalonia.
Renata Mele is Head of Sustainable Development and Innovation Research Area at Enel Foundation.
She has been working for both academia and industry on research and innovation, with focus on
sustainability in urban environment, urban metabolism of megacity, environmental impacts of energy
systems, innovative technologies for power grids and wireless sensor networks, coherent
phenomena in condensed matter.
Subject Categories
∠ Built Environment (/products/SCBU)
Planning (/products/SCBU70)
City and Urban Planning (/products/SCBU7005)
Planning and Sustainability (/products/SCBU7020)
∠ Environment and Sustainability (/products/SCES)
Environment & the City (/products/SCES09)
∠ Development Studies (/products/SCDS)
Sustainable Development (/products/SCDS75)
Urban Development (/products/SCDS30)
∠ Geography (/products/SCGE)
Human Geography (/products/SCGE30)
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Page 2 of 3
Dimensions of the Future City
Matthew Claudel and Carlo Ratti
Senseable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
1. Introduction: the “death of cities” mirage
At the dawn of the digital revolution it was widely believed that the Internet – and the
instant, ubiquitous connectivity that it entailed – would dramatically reduce the
importance of physical space, to the point that scholars predicted a “death of cities.”1 Yet
history has proven the opposite. The world is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate, and
rapidly compounding advances in technology have sparked a redefinition of urban space
at the convergence of bits and atoms. With high-resolution pervasive sensing,
sophisticated analysis, and fine-grained actuation in physical space, cities have become
digitally-integrated systems. In light of this metropolitan transformation, ‘smart cities’
have emerged as a new field hybridizing computing and urbanism. This chapter reviews
current research in the field and suggests possible lines of investigation through
categorical dimensions of urban space that could direct smart city development in the
future.
During the 1990s, with the rapid introduction of the Internet and its exponential
adoption rate, there was a common belief that physical space would be stripped of its
significance by a ubiquitous, networked ‘information space.’ The Internet represented an
instantaneous and spatially-indiscriminate connective tissue, and in its shadow, a chorus
of voices predicted a future when “distance is irrelevant”2 as people would be “cut loose
from fixed locations”, 3 by a global “infobahn” 4 bringing with it a “Global Village” 5
condition. In her book The Death of Distance, Cairncross elaborated an economic, social,
and civic argument in the wake of the telecommunication revolution, characterizing the
internet as “a peek at the communications future: a world in which transmitting
information costs almost nothing, in which distance is irrelevant, and in which any
amount of content is instantly accessible.” 6 Gilder extended the idea and magnified a
prevailing view of the impending urban dissolution with his statement that “cities are
leftover baggage from the industrial era… we are heading for the death of cities.”7 Dense
urban space – formerly the enabler of human action and inter-action – would be useless
in the wake of the global network, as information could be sent and received
ubiquitously and instantaneously.
Gilder, George. 1995. cited in Moss, Mitchell L. and Townsend, Anthony M. “How Telecommunications Systems are
Transforming Urban Spaces” in Fractured Geographies: Cities in the Telecommunications Age, James O. Wheeler and Yuko
Aoyama, eds. Routledge, 1999.
1
2
Cairncross, Frances. The Death of Distance. 1997.
3
Mitchell, William. City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn. 1995.
4
Gilder, George. 1995.
Already predicted by Marshall McLuhan in 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. University of
Toronto Press, 1962.
5
6
Cairncross, Frances. 1997.
7
Gilder, George. 1995.
Habitation, leisure and production would be unmoored as activity shed its spatial
scripting. “The post-information age will remove the limitations of geography,”
predicted Negroponte in his 1995 Being Digital, “Digital living will include less and less
dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of
place itself will start to become possible.”8 And the first physical space to be dissolved
and transmitted would be the workplace – it was thought that a new generation of whitecollar intelligentsia would trade cubicles for home offices, and bitrates would replace
commute times. Why go to work when work could come to you? employees would ask, and even
more importantly, What is the use of cities?
The end of the millennium answered these questions and confirmed broader predictions
of a profound reconfiguring of spatio-temporal relationships… but not the death of
cities. Yes, employees were liberated to work from a home office, for example, but
would they choose to? The answer, proven by millions of workers, is no. A recent study
by the Telework Research Network, found that only 2.5% the workforce (excluding self
employed or volunteer workers) consider home their primary workplace. 9 This year
Yahoo instituted a policy prohibiting employees from telecommuting, with a memo
stating: “some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria
discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings.” 10 Beyond the
workplace, humans crave spatially-dependent stimulus, whether natural beauty or
magnificent architecture, human connectivity or the chaotic serendipity of communal
space. “If you can locate anywhere, you will go where it’s nice, or where it is culturally
stimulating… Cities and towns with unique architectural environments and cultural
traditions stand to benefit from the new locational freedom in a similar fashion,” 11 noted
Mitchell.
The Internet did not kill cities, but neither did it leave them unaffected. Far from the
predicted corrosive effect of networks, the dynamic virtual overlay is augmenting and
redefining physical space today. Cities have not withered, but in fact emerged as a vital
complement to virtual activity – perhaps more important than ever before. As its digital
and material dimensions continue to merge and blur, urban space becomes the crucible
for actions and re-actions between bits and atoms, all to the benefit of human
experience. This is the genesis of the smart city: urban space reinforced, reinvented and
reinvigorated by a virtual dimension.
This hybrid networked space will be reinforced by the rapid shrinking and dissipation of
technology. Just as personal computing evolved from building-scale mainframes to
desktops to laptops to pocketable smartphones – and correspondingly infiltrated every
dimension of daily life – so too will the devices that enable fine-grained sensing and
actuation in physical space suffuse our cities. “Ubiquitous computing,” 12 (or more
playfully “smart dust”13) constitutes an invisible networked fabric with repercussions in
the material dimension. The micro and the macro are engaged in an accelerating
symbiosis – technology is atomized to the nano-scale while networks grow and connect
8
Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. 1995.
Telework Research Network. Cited in: Ryan, Margaret. “Teleworking: the Myth of Working from Home.” BBC News.
27 February, 2013.
9
10
Reses, Jackie. Yahoo Human Resources Internal Memo. February 22, 2013.
11
Mitchell, William. e-topia. The MIT Press, 2000.
12
Weiser, Mark. “The Computer for the 21st Century,” 1999.
13
Pister, Kristofer. “Smart Dust.” University of California, Berkeley. 1997.
to encompass every dimension of habitation – and at the centre is the field of smart
cities.
2. The future city: network mediated through place
The engineer’s response is to implement sensing and actuating tools to optimize the
system – treating cities as ‘computers in open air’ and labeling them ‘smart’. Urban
overhaul is a common mentality today, and the possibility of engineered urban space has
piqued the interest of Information Technology companies worldwide – is this uncharted
(and highly lucrative) territory? With this guiding question, the domain of smart cities has
been eagerly pioneered by large corporations such as IBM and Microsoft, becoming the
subject of top-down, cohesive planning initiatives like Masdar (Siemens) and Songdo
(Cisco). Information Technology companies are partnering with traditional architects and
politicians to mint smart cities around the globe, in a race for efficiency and
sustainability. A 2013 peer-reviewed article on “Bootstrapping Smart Cities” posits a
framework for the effective implementation of smart cities, based on the emergence of
heterogeneous “independent smart city departments (or the equivalent)... much like
today's well accepted IT departments,” 14 operating at the intersection of political and
technological players. Such systems would instantiate places where the “urban
environment function[s] as an information centre. Being in a city becomes synonymous
with being in an extremely intense and dense information loop.”15 These integrated smart
cities perform with unparalleled efficiency (whether resources, transportation, or
infrastructure), enabled by digitally-controlled circuitry and virtual operating systems,
ultimately transforming urban space into a living lab.
But beyond the efficient cohabitation that top-down urban computing systems imply, cities
are a place for community. Their non-quantifiable dimensions are more likely to emerge
from a combination of bottom-up and top-down. The third and final phase of the smart
city system proposed by Vilajosana et al. is a “fun/leisure dimension”16 that can only be
enacted by inhabitants themselves. This citizen-centric element of smart cities has
increasingly focused the attention of scholars, yielding rigorous analysis and case studies.
A 2013 article titled “Fostering participation in smart cities” explores urban
crowdsensing and the possibilities of “automat[ing] the organization of spontaneous and
impromptu collaborations of large groups of people participating in collective actions,” 17
at its core, this would be a coherent system that instrumentalizes the potential of an
engaged public-at-large. A nuanced and multidimensional understanding of smart cities –
one that encompasses bottom-up and top-down – reveals their position as the chaotic
common ground for interrelated and co-dependent stakeholders. In his comprehensive
overview of smart city evolution, Anthony Townsend scrutinizes the balance of a “new
generation of technology barons, entrepreneurs, mayors, and civic coders,” in the
context of contemporary and future urban space, ultimately “offering a new civics for
building communities: together, one click at a time.”18
Vilajosana, Ignasi. Jordi Llosa, Borja Martinez, Marc Domingo-Prieto, Albert Angles and Xavier Vilajosana,
“Bootstrapping smart cities through a self-sustainable model based on big data flows,” IEEE Communications Magazine,
vol. 51, no. 6, June 2013.
14
15
Sassen, Saskia. “Cities today: a new frontier for major developments.” 2009.
16
Vilajosana, Ignasi. 2013.
Giuseppe Cardone, Luca Foschini, Paolo Bellavista, Antonio Corradi, Cristian Borcea, Manoop Talasila and Reza
Curtmola, “Fostering ParticipAction in smart cities: a geo-social crowdsensing platform,” IEEE Communications
Magazine, vol. 51, no. 6, June 2013.
17
18
Townsend, Anthony. Smart cities: big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia. WW Norton & Co, 2013.
At the cusp of a new era in the history of cities – the collision of bits and atoms and the
spatialization of the Information Age – this chapter outlines current trends that have the
power to inform urban development over the years to come. Based on an assay of
present scholarship and action relating to cities, these dimensions point toward an urban
future generated from both the top down and the bottom up; future in which the
network is mediated through place, becoming fine-grained, local, and individual; in which
technology goes beyond descriptive and operational to integrate culture; in which citizens
have an active stake in their habitation ecosystem and are empowered to ‘hack’ the urban
source code surrounding them; in which new economies coalesce, based not on
monetary transaction but on social value or environmental impact – backed by a ‘gold
standard’ of social networks; in a process of reverse-engineering the future, this urban
space will be instantiated through the following integral dimensions.
3. Changing trends for the urban future
Participation 2.0
Images of digitally-enabled socio-political uprisings captured the world’s collective
attention in recent years. These were instances of excessive friction generated within
virtual social networks, ultimately discharging as violent civic action in physical space.
The net result is a proof that in the context of political engagement, a tangible public
sphere is the catalyst for group dynamics sewn by digital connectivity. But the same
energy that rent public spaces can be tapped to work constructively in the same
dimension, shifting focus from Civic Protest 2.0 and onto Civic Participation 2.0 – an
idea that was elaborated in Scientific American’s August 2011 special issue titled Better
Greener Smarter Cities. A multitude of 311-style apps allow inhabitants of a city to report
the easily-resolved problems they come across in daily life – from potholes to cars rolling
through bike lanes. These citizen-watchdog systems give urban space a new pair of
reflexive eyes and bring citizens together to fix their own neighborhoods. The order of
involvement is directly one to one: citizens will point out problems and opportunities
and jointly contribute to solving them. Anyone can become what Boston’s former Mayor
Menino termed “New Urban Mechanics.”
[INSERT FIGURES 1A AND 1B HERE]
Smartphone/Smartcity (or, The City in Your Pocket)
Smartphones are the active components of spatialized networks, serving to sense and
gather, to connect and to distribute information. As a result, they are increasingly
enmeshed in the urban tissue: mediating space and communities through a smartphone
will soon be as integral to urban experience as asphalt or streetlights. Smartphones will
not replace built space (they cannot not provide shelter) but they will augment it
(connecting travelers and hosts or booking a last minute hotel room). The miniaturized
computer becomes an extension of corporeal occupation of space. But as Hayles notes,
the human-as-cyborg metaphor that Donna Haraway introduced in 1991 is too singular,
“quite simply, it is not networked enough.”19 The idea that the human body would be
augmented with technology is no longer revolutionary – what smartphones show is that
Hayles, N. Katherine. Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere. 2006. Published in: Architectural Theories of the
Environment: Posthuman Territory. Routledge, 2012
19
we are not only digitally assimilated, but digitally connected. Smartphones are a tool that
generates and relies on crowd-sourced big data, providing an interface for users to
simultaneously digest information and apply it constructively in daily life. Mobile phones
serve as a lens into and out of the digital dimension, through which mass quantities of
data – including messages, photos, preferences, habits, encounters, location and more –
are streamed in real time. Not only will smartphones unlock new means of efficiency,
they will enable an unprecedented breadth and quality of human interaction. Social
networks are spatialized through the personal digital interface.
[INSERT FIGURE 2 HERE]
The City That Speaks
Unlocking access to all databases in real time – from transport to groceries to retail to
library books – the digital blanket over physical space becomes more and more finegrained, ultimately a pervasive “Internet of Things”.20 Responsive objects will be realized
through the suffusion of ubiquitous computing into formerly mute materials. Every
object in and of cities will tell a story. Furthermore, digitally-augmented physical materials
will allow information transmission processes to be folded into the constituent fabric of
architecture and objects themselves, serving as a bidirectional communication interface.
Information was formerly displayed unidirectionally on screens, but in the future, spaces
and objects might have the capacity to learn from human beings through interaction.
Not only will objects communicate with people, they will increasingly interact with one
another – for example, a car turning on the home heater five minutes before it pulls into
the garage. Habitation space comes alive with a sentient and responsive dimension as
every thing communicates across the network.
[INSERT FIGURE 3 HERE]
The Passenger City
Individual objects are learning from humans, learning from each other, and speaking in
their own languages – forming a growing and increasingly independent ecosystem. As the
same intelligence is embedded into cars, they approach an event horizon of automotive
automation. When a car knows the location and destination of every other car on the
road – as well as the character of the road itself – it can drive on its own, safely and
efficiently. In an autonomous vehicle network, cars can determine their paths to optimize
traffic flow on the systems level. Traffic lights become irrelevant, accidents obsolete, and
excuses for tardiness suspicious. But most importantly, self-driving vehicles stand to
dramatically blur the distinction between public and private transit. A single car can run
dozens of trajectories throughout the day as it is shared between members of a family,
friends in a social network, or the community at large. Rather than simply driving to and
from the office and idling, unused, in a parking garage for the remaining twenty three
hours of the day, each car will be constantly active and efficiently employed – yet with as
much privacy, comfort and convenient routing as private vehicles have traditionally
offered. At the tipping point of automation, the same number of people can arrive at the
Ashton, Kevin. "That 'Internet of Things' Thing, in the real world things matter more than ideas." RFID Journal. 22
June 2009.
20
same number of destinations in the same span of time, but using a fraction of the
vehicles.21
[INSERT FIGURE 4 HERE]
Directed Energies
The systematic improvements ushered in by intelligent technologies will transform
climate control systems of the future. Just as powerful networks can optimize traffic
flows, they can orchestrate energy distribution in cities – from smart grids to heating and
cooling at the building scale – and dramatically reduce energy loads. Climate control is a
clear example: the earliest form of habitation technology was the primordial grotto, and
over the course of human history the evolution of temperature systems has been a trend
toward decentralization. From the cave to the fire pit to Victorian pipes to central
heating and suburban thermostats, man exerts more and more command of his climate.
Yet today’s combination of central heating and itinerant lifestyles has exacerbated a
dramatic asymmetry between human occupancy and energy use. Entire homes are heated
during the day when residents are at work or school, and when they are home, empty
areas of the house are indiscriminately kept as warm as those in active use. To ensure
constant comfort, man heats every space he might possibly inhabit. Intelligent thermostats
like The Nest learn from residents and optimize temperature patterns over time, but the
next leap will be to exercise the same degree of control over space – synchronizing heat
with where people are. In the future, an individual ‘thermal cloud’ could follow each human
throughout a building, ensuring ubiquitous personal comfort while minimizing overall
heat requirements.
[INSERT FIGURE 5 HERE]
Disciplines Beyond Silos
The same spatial liberation that has unmoored personal atmospheres and productive
work environments might correspondingly emancipate intellectual disciplines. Not only
where we are but what we do can be rendered flexible and recombinable. Materials,
specialties, or domains are less defined with the progressive augmentation of interfaces
between them: connective tools, common languages and interwoven compatible systems.
Fed by increased access to knowledge and communication, a growing class of
“professional amateurs”22 might one day drive the work force. Yet far from rendering
expertise obsolete, this is a phenomenon that expands the purview of any given specialty
beyond its traditional demarcations, allowing for superpositions and hybridizations, both
intellectually and professionally. In fact, the field of scientific publication has already felt
the impact of this disciplinary cross-pollination over the past century. In an analysis of
over 2 million patents and 20 million papers published since 1955, researchers at
Northwestern University found that “in the early 1950s, the most cited paper in any year
was more likely to have been written by a single author than a team, but this pattern
21
Santi, Paolo. Senior Researcher, Istituto di Informatica e Telematica del CNR.
Leadbeater, Charles; Miller, Paul. The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts are Changing our Economy and Society. Demos,
2004.
22
reversed decades ago. And the citation gap continues to widen.”23 The lone genius has
been replaced by heterogeneous groups that amalgamate skills and capacities, ultimately
bolstered by intellectual diversity rather than singular specialization.
[INSERT FIGURE 6 HERE]
The World’s Classroom
Today’s archaic model of higher education is perpetuated by a momentum that
reinforces, among other things, traditional academic boundaries and limited scope. In the
same way that disciplinary silos have eroded and academia has begun taking advantage of
productive commingling, so too can its barriers to access be eliminated, allowing diverse
points of entry (or, rendering moot the question of ‘points of entry’). Network-enabled
tools will expand by orders of magnitude an education system that is currently not
scalable. Established universities such as Yale, Harvard and MIT, as well as independent
companies, are beginning to offer courses online. In a process of reverse-osmosis,
education has begun to shift away from selective admission and turn outward to reach
anyone and everyone with Internet access and an inclination to learn. A new model of
academia could digitally recreate the collaborative, energetic experience of universities
and disseminate it on a global scale. This education format responds to the needs of
individual communities, particularly in developing countries, owing to its immediate
response time and topical relevance. With these tools, the education gap would shrink
and anyone – not just full-time students – would have the opportunity to learn.
Intellectual potential could no longer go undiscovered.
[INSERT FIGURE 7 HERE]
The Factory Next Door
The word fabrication conjures an image of bleak Industrial Era factories where workers
bound to production lines churn out endless identical objects. Tomorrow’s fabrication
will be the opposite. Just as education is increasingly streamed to personal screens
around the world (rather than demanding physical relocation to academic hubs) smallscale, local, and even in-home production would enable personal best-fit design. Focused
on innovation rather than volume, a new economy of ‘downloadable’ objects is shared,
modified and brought into physical space with dimensional printers. "Biomass and
infomass are intersected, in some effective combination… where physical actions invoke
computational processes, and where computational processes manifest themselves
physically." 24 As the same forces that enabled Open Source Software are applied to
fabrication, the shift toward digital and local production will constitute a 3rd Industrial
Revolution – a trend that The Economist Magazine elaborated in its April 2012 cover
story.25 And on a scale larger than individual products, architectural construction itself
can become iterative and dynamic through similar means. A more flexible design process
might encourage an ecosystem of digital tools for the continual input and feedback of
23
Whitfield, John. “Collaboration: Group Theory,” Nature Magazine, issue 455. 08 October 2008.
24
Mitchell, William. 2000.
25
Gordon, Robert. “A Third Industrial Revolution.” The Economist. 21 April 2012.
various stakeholders. Static construction documents could be replaced by sophisticated
systems that encompass each step in the process of design, materials sourcing,
fabrication and assembly. When networked computers become a comprehensive tool for
both design and construction, their feedback loops will allow components to be
engineered, fabricated, adjusted and assembled on-site and in real time: the formerly
distinct phases of building conception and construction are blurred into one.
[INSERT FIGURE 8 HERE]
Penniless Economies
Many of these new urban dimensions enable (or are enabled by) atomized mobile
technology, but this does not imply a decentralized and disconnected future without
social cohesion. A new connected energy is at the crux of a redefined sharing economy: it
is social and local. New economies are less about quantifiable, financial, extrinsic gains
and more about social connectivity on the order of reputation, lifestyle and community
building. It is well known that human action depends on rewards – financial and/or
interpersonal – yet collective economies emerge as a response to both. This turns
Veblen’s theory of Conspicuous Consumption 26 upside down, through a no-less socially
driven Conspicuous Collectivity, hinging upon the powerful non-monetary reward of a
person’s standing within the collective. Individuals seek a human scale to the networks at
their fingertips – and a physical, interactive instantiation of the same – which will draw a
critical mass of participants into sociable economies. Vibrant ties within an active
community are crucial; constituting an intuitive network that reflects humans’ ingrained
need for connection.
[INSERT FIGURE 9 HERE]
Hacking the City
Virtual-physical systems, operating from transportation to economics, enable citizens to
come together as actors in the context of the city. As bits and atoms become increasingly
intertwined, any action on the digital side will have repercussions in the physical city (and
vice versa): through their reciprocal enmeshing, the digital and physical can, and must,
work together for citizens to enact metropolitan solutions. Given such hybrid tools,
space can be thought of as a new, programmable interface – the city is an open-ended
venue for engaged citizens to play by design. What Linus Torvalds did for open source
software by sharing the “kernel” of an operating system can just as well spawn a culture
of hackers in physical space. ‘Urban code’ no longer means zoning, but instead signifies
‘software code’ and ‘genetic code,’ both carrying implications of accelerated replication,
mutation and distributed collective action. Digitally-controlled physical actuators like
arduinos, fab-labs, and smartphones are already allowing anyone to manipulate their
environment in the same way as they have been able to tweak and upload software.
“Multi-layered manipulative platforms that integrate digital and physical representations
will have a significant impact on urban design and planning processes in the future. The
usefulness of these platforms will be in their ability to combine and update digital and
26
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. Macmillan, 1899.
tangible data in seamless ways to enhance the design process...” 27 Smart cities and
technologies can provide a networked metropolitan nervous system, but urban hackers
will be the muscles that effect kinetic spatial transformations in urban space.
4. Conclusion
None of these dimensions could exist as exclusively digital or physical: they thrive at the
intersection of bits and atoms. At the dawn of the Information Age it seemed that
networked information space was the portent of a future without cities, yet growing and
decisive trends prove the opposite. The smart city of tomorrow – the human and
ultimately sustainable smart city – is predicated on a tightly meshed hybrid space. Yet as
much as this digital integration provokes genuinely new relationships and modes of
habitation, it nonetheless reinforces age-old human proclivities. As technology continues
to dematerialize and permeate the physical environment – essentially, to disappear – it is
foregrounded by the non-digital aspects of life: community, aesthetics, and nurturing
environments. The value of a ubiquitous digital overlay, and of each trend identified in
this chapter, will be proven in its capacity to achieve a meaningful sociability and
productivity for humans inhabiting digitalized physical space. Dimensions of the
sustainable future city will place emphasis not on smart cities but on smart citizens.
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FIGURES
Figure 1A
Figure 1B
Figures 1A and 1B. A series of visualizations generated by 311 data. A "citizen watchdog" tool allows
anyone to report issues in the city surrounding them, and to come together and solve problems. Here,
Boston and New York City by density of calls and issue reported, respectively.
Carlo Ratti Director
Assaf Biderman Assoc. Director
Team: Benedikt Gross, Dietmar Offenhuber, Joseph K. Lee
http://senseable.mit.edu/bos311/
Figure 2. An analysis of the number of mobile phone calls made in Washington D.C. on Obama's
Inauguration Day, showing peaks of call activity as the crowd anticipates the oath (2-3x avg call volume), a
drop in call activity as the crowd listens to his inaugural address, and peaks again as the crowd celebrates the
inauguration of the new President (5x avg call density).
Assaf Biderman | associate director
Mauro Martino | interaction designer
Carlo Ratti | director
Andrea Vaccari | project leader
http://senseable.mit.edu/obama/
Figure 3. In the Information Age, the flow of Internet traffic between locations is nearly ubiquitous. This
project visualizes the volumes of Internet data flowing between New York and cities around the world over a
24 hour period. The size of the glow on a particular city location corresponds to the amount of IP traffic
flowing between that place and New York City.
Carlo Ratti group director, Kristian Kloeckl project leader,
Assaf Biderman, Franscesco Calabrese, Margaret Ellen Haller,
Aaron Koblin, Francisca Rojas, Andrea Vaccari
http://senseable.mit.edu/nyte/
Figure 4. This project reveals the United States' largely unknown waste management patterns through a
Seattle-based deployment of geolocating sensors attached to thousands of trash objects. The project is an
initial investigation of the 'removal-chain' in urban areas, representing a bottom-up approach to managing
resources and promoting behavioral change.
Carlo Ratti Director
Assaf Biderman Assoc. Director
Dietmar Offenhuber Team Leader
Eugenio Morello Team Leader, Concept
Musstanser Tinauli Team Leader, First Phase
Kristian Kloeckl Team Leader,
http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/
Figure 5. Local Warming is a prototype that tracks people's motion and directs a targeted beam of infrared
energy - so they can be comfortably warm in an otherwise cold environment - and thus eliminating the
inefficiencies of ambient heating all together. Warming explores a vision for the future of heating systems,
suggesting highly efficient, dynamic and intelligent transmission of warmth.
Director: Carlo Ratti; Associate Director: Assaf Biderman; Engineering Lead: Leigh Christie; Project Lead: Miriam
Roure; Curator: Matthew Claudel; Electrical Engineer: Carlos Graeves; Research: Yaniv Jacob Turgeman, Rex
Britter; Motion Control and Visualization: Matthias Danzmayr, Jacob Fenwick, Shan He, Pierrick
Thebault; Fabrication and Design: Ricardo Alvarez, Thomas Altmann, Dorothy Bassett, Clara Cibrario
Assereto, David Dowling, Feifei Feng, Sebastian Grauwin, Chris Green, Elyud Ismail, Sam Judd, Jessica
Marcus, Aaron Nevin, Jessica Ngo, Oleguer Sagarra Pascual, Kristopher Swick, Michael Szell, Remi Tachet
des Combes
Figure 6. A map of connections and relationships in the field of scientific publication. This topical
cartography was generated by sorting 800,000 scientific papers into 776 paradigms based on the frequency of
being cited together in different papers. Proximities are organized by connections, aggregations and
popularity. Copyright (c) 2006 W. Bradford Paley
Figure 7. "OLPC aims to provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop. To this
end, they have designed hardware, content and software for collaborative, joyful, and self-empowered
learning. With access to this type of tool, children are engaged in their own education, and learn, share, and
create together. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future." (One Laptop
Per Child website)
http://one.laptop.org/
Figure 8. A visualization of taxi pickups and drop offs on the island of Manhattan - colored yellow and blue,
respectively. Analysis of this data shows that the taxi fleet could be reduced by up to 40% without sacrificing
efficiency, through sharing similar routes.
Carlo Ratti - director
Michael Szell - back-end/data mining
Eric Baczuk - project coordination
Benedikt Groß - visualization/concept
Joseph Lee - visualization/GIS
Pierrick Thébault - web development
NJ Namju Lee - video
Andi Weiß - web development
Stefan Landsbek - web development
http://hubcab.org/#13.00/40.7219/-73.9484
Figure 9. The Cloud is based on a new form of observation deck, connecting visitors to both the whole of
London and the whole of the world, immersing them in euphoric gusts of weather and digital data. Each
individual footstep on the ascent to the Cloud participates in a vast collective energy-harvesting effort.
Everyone around the world can contribute to the Cloud – whether by visiting or by sponsoring a LED and
helping to keep the London lamp aflame.
carlorattiassociati | walter nicolino & carlo ratti with Alex Haw and Atmos
Team: Carlo Ratti, Giovanni de Niederhausern.
http://www.carloratti.com/project/the-cloud-2/