Future of urban form
For better or worse, cities are the embodiments of conservatism. They are not a result of one technological innovation. An urban environment is a multilayered object that evolves simultaneously with the advances of humanity be they ideological, technological, ethical, or aesthetical. These layers are not spread evenly onto the urban landscape; layers upon layers are coming through the city fabric. A city is a book printed on Mylar paper; a blend of ideas and technologies that coexist together and overlap. European cities that grew from Roman military camps preserve the underlying logic of its initial layout of cardo and decumanus. As the Roman law dissolved, the backbones of castras (military camps) morphed under the pressure of individualism, polycentrism and the lack of constraints into an organic medieval fabric. Renaissance with its baroque push for order cut through organic fabric with diagonals, triviums, and oval plazas. Modernism brought back the grid, and let the car into the city destroying the life in established neighborhoods. Information age promises to bring the order into the complex historic superimposition that formed the cities. Autonomous vehicles are going to reduce the valuable real estate occupied currently by roads and parking lots, big data and artificial intelligence promise to disentangle the chaos of modern cities, shared economy is going to better distribute the services and goods to greater number of people and reduce the ownership burdens, new design tools will help to engage the communities in participatory design. All of these changes might become perplexing as the flux of urban change increase. Nevertheless, they are not going to happen overnight. Tested and checked these new modes of design and interaction with the city form will positively transform the cities, as we know them.
This essay is my synthesis of the ideas and research presented at Senseable City lab’s seminar on the future of cities and who these new ideas directly impact the urban thought and design. During the seminar we perused over a number of articles on Big Data, future of street design driven by innovations in autonomous and shared vehicles, looked at new design tools such as the implementation of VR technology, computational aspects of social science, sharing economy, and artificially intelligent cities. The combination of research allowed for a fresh understanding of the complexities of the relationships between brick and mortar architecture, artificial intelligence, transportation, social dynamics, and future economics.
First and foremost, I am an architect. Therefore, I am most interested in the spatial qualities of the urban environment. I am looking forward to seeing cities getting back the long-lost qualities of urban spatial experience, such as the proportionate relationship between the street and streetscape, enclosed and properly formed urban space, comfortable and humanistic plazas, and most importantly peace and walkability. The recent innovations in transportation technologies such as shared car polling, automotive vehicles, and automotive public transportation have a promise to transform the car-oriented cities of today.
One of the most interesting aspects of such transformation is the reduction of space needed for transportation infrastructure. Modernism taught that the efficient transportation is the key to the economic success of a productive city. However, the implementation of such transportation infrastructure in the urban setting negatively affected the livability and urban comfort. Urban planners such as Robert Moses, the New York city’s Baron Haussmann, treated urban problems with the proliferation of tunnels, bridges, roads, parking and elevated highways favoring transportation over livability. There is no argument that transportation is the key in the life of a city, but it must not overpower the city’s primary function of bringing people together and providing conditions of knowledge and information exchange, which is not possible on a parking lot and requires comfort and spatial diversity. Autonomous vehicles have a great potential to restore comfort within a city, bringing back green alleys and boulevards sacrificed in the name of traffic efficiency, and even create much-needed space for growing cities, intensively instead of promoting sprawl.
The problem is that no matter how many new lanes the city will make at the expense of urban comforts, the vehicular river would be the same, slow and inefficient. If we look at the Moscow Garden Ring road, for example, we will not find a single trace of gardens that gave it its name. It has become a twelve lane wide stagnant river of slow-moving traffic with deafening noise and toxic odor. If each of ten million residents of Moscow purchases a car it would create a single massive parking lot instead of the livable city. We cannot afford it. Having your personal living room on wheels is not a feasible transport solution. Hopefully, society moves away from a personal car shown by the decline in car ownership due to its cost, greater availability of public transport and sharing platforms such as Uber, Lyft.
Removing human factor from transportation is another advantage of autonomous vehicle technologies. Our emotions, lack of attention and concentration stay in the way of transportation efficiency causing death and gridlocks. Autonomous vehicles driven by computer vision and communication with other AVs, on the other hand, are able to bring order to the roads reducing the need for traffic controls. Most importantly the require fewer lanes as they are able to communicate with each other instantaneously reacting to changing conditions and making most efficient decisions navigating traffic flows thus occupying less space. Moreover, a car from a personal commodity can become an on-demand subscription service that gets you from point A to point B and returns back into the traffic flow to serve other users thus eliminating on-street parking. The freed space will be transformed into public avenues, parks, and housing saturated with human activity, a venue for new design solutions that improve the quality of life within a city.
Another aspect of the future cities that will advance the city form forward is the incorporation of big data collection and city information modeling solutions based on that data. A city is a massively complex object with an enormous amount of inputs and outputs that cannot be effectively managed without the use of computing technologies and AI for its analysis and decision making. From planimetric representation based on GIS data, we need to push for much more sophisticated representation of the city in its entirety. As sensing technologies become more available, the city has to redefine its nervous system enhancing the data collection and management. All aspects of the city such as building stock, transportation infrastructure, facilities and utilities have to be modeled and monitored in real time creating a complete picture of the dynamics of this complex system. Urbanists have to be retooled to incorporate data science in order to comprehensively manage the city’s complexity creating order and efficiency, as well as allowing other stakeholders to partake in decision-making process based on real data rather than theories and hypothesis. The true city science has to emerge from abstract urban theory in order to advance the quality of urban life.
Information technologies brought down the cost of communication to zero, yet for some reason, we do not know what is going to be built behind the fenced construction site across the road from us. The modern city is not democratic, but largely top down in its nature. Very few people in power make decisions for the whole city, no matter how many public hearings they might have. However, pluralism in shaping the future of the city can be achieved. The first step on this path is clear and direct communication. We have to see the city we live in through the lens of data in order to understand it. Data visualization has become crucial in the interpretation of the inner-workings of the city.
Pedro Cruze (City Portraits and Caricature) paint an urban portrait with data claiming that is in order to be recognized data visualization has to be exaggerated and simplified. This figurative approach to data promises to bring information using visual metaphors emphasizing only certain aspects of data. For one such approach provides and simplistic view of the city creating what he calls “city caricatures”. On the one hand, such methods serve to digest information to the format that easily understood by the general public. On the other hand, such approach allows for a great deal of misinformation and curation of data, which could lead to a wrong and inconclusive analysis by the public.
Elmira Jamie investigates the role of virtual reality in promoting smart cities. Virtual reality technology developed by entertainment industry promises to become standard in the representation of the future cities. Traditional means of architectural representation often serve as marketing tools to sell the vision of the future to the stakeholders and community. As such, two-dimensional renditions often misguide the public by creating perfect visual conditions that are misrepresentative of the true three-dimensional world. Virtual reality distances us from representational abstractions and visual conventions developed by artists and architect since the invention of perspective. VR provides a true three-dimensionality and dynamism that allows experiencing the urban space before and while it is being designed thus bringing the public to the drawing board of the future reality. Returning to the projective nature of design, VR allows the city to project itself into the future reality rather than simply following the projection of designers. Single point perspectives is a device better suited for the Renaissance Italy than the modern urb with its pluralistic and democratized design. Smart cities of the future require new means of representation of the reality and data, technologies such as VR and augmented reality serve to align the visual image with real data. In the future, we must be able to point our smartphones, or any other future computational tool, at any object in the city to augment the physical reality with information that is concealed within it. Misrepresentation and concealment of the future city image and its data have to be eliminated. Computer representation technologies allow for openness and truthfulness in visualization and representation of reality that could never be achieved previously. The question is whether we are going to be honest about the future image of the city or continue to use smoke and mirrors in representing the future realities.
The economy is the driver of the city existence. A city is the spatial concentration of economic factors. According to Jarzombek, the first cities in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago were created specifically for the sake of acceleration of agrarian production economy. They did not grow from villages into bigger settlements that later became cities. They were specifically designed to accommodate thousands of inhabitants that would participate in the agrarian production. Contemporary cities, according to Glaeser, however, dislocate the production and manufacturing away from cities onto their periphery or abroad. Contemporary cities today, as well as future cities tomorrow, will be fueled by consumption and knowledge creation that far outweigh the manufacturing economy in terms of value generation. In order to accelerate the city growth, the future cities will require amenities and comforts to attract the most brilliant minds into the city. To be competitive, city governments will have to invest in clean streets and public facilities and services. San Francisco, Boston and New York today are the great examples of this trend where investment in better urban environment yields higher rents and taxes. The economy is not only changing its drivers it also changes its inner structure. Sharing economy promises to redefine the ownership and exchange of products and services thus establishing new social relationships, and means of production. What is a point of having a personal car when you can order Uber, pay for the trip and forget about insurance, gas, and parking? Better still autonomous vehicles companies might offer a prescription services that would combine point to point transportation and economic benefits of not having a liability of car ownership. Airbnb is redefining hospitality and on-demand ownership. Shared economy is going to allow an alternative to traditional ownership that limits the flux of people to greater economic opportunities. For better or worse future cities potentially are going to increase the fluctuations in the workforce, promoting new modes of employment where traditional jobs will be broken down into subtasks. We already see the increase in freelancing and individual entrepreneurship.
This essays looked at the potential future of the cities we inhabit today. The changes are coming sooner then we might expect. I looked at the changes that are going to affect the building environment. The economic changes will directly impact the city form. We are going to see greater diversity in services that a city can offer, be they new housing typologies, public amenities or transportation modes. I believe that cities will density intensively taking over space from excessive transportation network. The diversity and quality of urban experience will also improve with the rise of rents and consumption revenues generated in cities. We are going to experience smart and efficient cities that are going be monitored and balanced like a complex mechanism. Future urbanists will have to adapt the skills and knowledge from the data science world in order to work with data generated by the city, otherwise, we can become irrelevant and sidelined. New design tools such as VR and augmented reality are going to change the way we design and present our designs to clients and community. There is going to be less room for dishonest representation of urban space. All in all, I look at the future positively. Yes, there will be problems, gentrification, certain push to change education, loss of jobs or their change to more entrepreneurial endeavors. We have to adjust and adjust we will.
