Living Buildings vs.(and?) new market for telecom companies?
By Kim Nommesch
Former blog entries have made clear that smart city has become a buzzword only in the last 1-2 years. The increasing number of conferences and debates gathering participants from a wide range of sectors architecture, business, academia, foundations, science, engineering, are a sign of the rapidly growing interest, enthusiasm and eagerness to spread the idea. We decided to visit a second conference entitled: ‘Smart Cities- la nouvelle révolution urbaine?’ organised at the Sorbonne on 25th March 2014. This blog entry will not specifically relate to the case of Grand Lyon but will address more broadly the vision of smart city.
I took two main interesting points from this conference. First, the way Callebaut presented his projects and the links he made between nature, ecosystems, architecture and social relations were highly thought-provoking. His futurist view of the city pictures an ‘ecopolis’: he recouples nature and culture, creates the foundations for social relations based on social inclusion, increased importance of neighbourhoods, collective spaces and rejects binary (either/or) thinking. He proposes a ‘green, dense and connected’ smart city, where agriculture is reintegrated and buildings are self-sufficient mini-power stations. Callebaut’s understanding of architecture relies on the idea
‘to intensify the ability of the architectural project to improve the environment, to protect it, and even to restore the biodiversity. This is to enable to reimburse and to stabilise our ecologic debt by minimising the human print and to do so that the nature can be more spontaneous […] The main raw material of the architect is the living as dynamic and functional element of his construction (2007).
In his keynote at the conference, he made reference to the ‘repatriation of nature’ into the heart of the city to increase life quality and create ‘living’ buildings with metabolic systems. This vision of smart cities goes beyond the use and development of smart technologies aiming to render transport and energy use more efficient. First it includes the element of social relations, the potential of architecture and urban design to encourage eco-responsible behaviour as well as alter and strengthen social relations. Second, the idea of understanding buildings as living organisms is interesting as well as it represents construction and ‘nature’ as symbiotic rather than the former superposed on the latter.
Projet Dragonfly: Metabolic Farm for Urban Agriculture- New York City, Roosevelt Island
Agora Garden (luxurious residential tower), Taipei
Furthermore, ‘eco-systems’ are frequently referred to in the discourse on smart cities. Yet, the use of this term is somewhat confusing as different implications and underlying meanings are suggested. Thus, Callebaut stresses the inspiration urban designers and architects can and should take from natural ecosystems. He goes as far as to say:
‘Je veux transformer les villes en éco-systèmes’
He is not the only one to make reference to ecosystems. When we participated at the conference Villes intelligentes-Villes démocratiques? (organised on 13/02/2014 by Berger-Levrault), Karine Dognin-Sauze, Vice-President and Director of the Innovation and New Technologies Department of Grand Lyon depicted smart cities as eco-systems as well but this time to put the accent on the ‘network-city’ and compare the interconnected urban community to the complementarity and interconnectedness of natural ecosystem organisms.
The second observation we made is related to the involvement of economic actors in the development of smart cities. Nicole Leboucher, Director of the programme Smart Cities of Orange, presented the company’s contribution in the development of smart cities: she sees telecommunication companies as essential actors able to realise the potential of smart cities considering that the smart city are still characterised by fragmentation on multiple levels. There is indeed an important market for telecom companies to conquer as many elements of smart cities rely on smartphones to be implement.
During the Q&A session of the conference, we raised the question of whom smart cities benefit at the end of the day and whose interest they pursue. After initial puzzlement and reluctance to answer the question, Leboucher agreed to respond, although she did not address the question in itself. Several speakers and visitors seemed even surprised that we raised this question as they considered it to be obvious that of course, everybody (business, citizens and natural ecosystem) benefit. Yet, after the conference members of the audience approached us to share their concerns with us, which shows that there are citizens who are worried about the developments and the pace companies take in in the design, development and implementation of smart city projects.
References
Callebaut (2007). Essay on Archibiotic. http://vincent.callebaut.org/page_texte-img-archibiotic2.html (accessed on 26/03/2014).
