This article was taken from the November issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
The full Digital Cities package:
Networked information will reshape our cities
London after the great 2047 flu outbreak
Your neighbourhood is now Facebook Live
The transport of tomorrow is already here
Scholars back in 1995 speculated about the impact of the ongoing digital revolution on the viability of cities. Only 14 years ago, the mainstream view was that, as digital media and the internet had killed distance, they would also kill cities. Technology writer George Gilder proclaimed that "cities are leftover baggage from the industrial era" and concluded that "we are headed for the death of cities", due to the continued growth of personal computing, telecommunications and distributed production. At the same time, MIT Media Lab's Nicholas Negroponte wrote in Being Digital that "the post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. 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."
In fact, cities have never prospered as much as they have over the past couple of decades. China is currently building more urban fabric than has ever been built by humanity. And a particularly noteworthy moment occurred last year: for the first time in history more than half the world's population - 3.3 billion people - lived in urban areas.
The digital revolution did not end up killing our cities, but neither did it leave them unaffected. A layer of networked digital elements has blanketed our environment, blending bits and atoms together in a seamless way. Sensors, cameras and microcontrollers are used ever more extensively to manage city infrastructure, optimise transportation, monitor the environment and run security applications. Advances in microelectronics now make it possible to spread "smart dust" networks of tiny, wireless, microelectromechanical system (MEMS) sensors, robots or devices.
Most noticeable is the explosion in mobile-phone use around the globe. More than four billion mobile phones were in use worldwide by early 2009. Across socioeconomic classes and five continents, mobile phones are ubiquitous: they allow us not only to communicate with each other in unprecedented ways, but to create a pervasive sensing network that covers the whole globe.
One consequence of this process is particularly important: cities can start to work as real-time control systems, regulated by a number of feedback loops. In past decades, real-time control systems have been developed in a variety of engineering applications. In so doing, they have dramatically increased the efficiency of systems through energy savings, regulation of dynamics, increased robustness and disturbance tolerance. Now: can you have a city that performs as a real-time control system?
The city already contains actuators such as traffic lights, remotely updated street signage, etc. More profound actuation is relatively problematic: for instance, we cannot double the size of a street in real time if we detect traffic congestion. However, unlike other real-time control systems, cities have a special feature: citizens. By receiving real-time information, appropriately visualised and disseminated, citizens themselves can become distributed intelligent actuators, who pursue their individual interests in co-operation and competition with others, and thus become prime actors on the urban scene. Processing urban information captured in real time and making it publicly accessible can enable people to make better decisions about the use of urban resources, mobility and social interaction.
This feedback loop of digital sensing and processing can begin to influence various complex and dynamic aspects of the city, improving the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the places we inhabit. For example, an automated trip planner that relies on real-time information about bus, train and taxi location, as well as congestion and pollution levels, can help people find not only the fastest travel route, but the one that also has the least impact on air quality. A simple real-time feedback mechanism between citizens and emergency-rescue units could avoid the repeat of tragic mistakes like those that affected New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Feedback loops could grow inside each other: buildings could become probes and ambient displays, but also evolve into real-time, responsive devices in their own right.
The implications for architectural aesthetics are interesting.
For several years now architecture has attempted to mimic in formal terms the rapid flow of digital information. We can think of any number of fluid buildings. Unfortunately, once built, shapes that are designed to look fluid tend to end up frozen in concrete or steel. Antoine Picon, professor of the history of architecture and technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, has predicted that with the city incorporating digital technology into its very body, architecture itself will conversely become more restrained.
Picon's view is heretical. He compares work by architects such as Zaha Hadid to the Baroque architects of the 17th and 18th centuries who were "obsessed by questions like the trajectory of light inside churches and its spiritual meaning". Like our contemporaries, says Picon, Baroque architects preferred to imitate movement in their work rather than create buildings that made movement easier. Picon predicts a return to the Neo-Classical approach. We'll see more "compositions that remain voluntarily rigid in order to be functionally more efficient" and a "digital/minimal attitude in which unwanted agitation is suspended".
In 1963, the British architect Cedric Price created the idea of a Fun Palace. "Every town should have a space... where the latest discoverings of engineering and science can provide an environment for pleasure and discovery," he said. We need Fun Palaces for the post-digital era.
Carol Ratti is an architect and director of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT
Want more Wired UK magazine? Get your copy every month by subscribing online today
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
