Responsive Cities Symposium (day 1)
Today, I am attending the Responsive Cities Symposium in Barcelona. Great event organized by the folks at IAAC. Plenty of fantastic speakers:
What’s a shareable city? @AlbertCanig mentioned a definition of it (which is quite useful to drive future research):
Mariina Hallikainen talked about a game that “gamified” urban planning in a small city in Finland. It was called Cities Skylines. A Youtube video related to it:
Saskia Sassen’s talk focused on a quite controversial question — “Can the city hack technology?” (not the other way around). More specifically, The City as Hacker:
- of spaces
- of technologies
- of self-interest
Most of what she mentioned is in line with Jane Jacobs’s work — density is not enough, cities are great engines of (even small-scale) innovation, high towers are not “urbanism” as they destroy the social texture, etc. Her talk led me to the latest research by the great Putnam.
Most of the kids Putnam profiles in the book had smartphones, but the poorest ones tended to use the devices “in completely different, mindless ways,” he said. “Affluent Americans use the Internet in ways that are mobility-enhancing, whereas poorer, less educated Americans typically use it in ways that are not.”
More on this news piece
Related to that, Saskia mentioned that, in a study involving school kids in two US schools (in poor vs. rich neighborhoods), kids at each school were gathered in a room and were presented with Internet-connected tablets. Socially-deprived kids used tablets for shopping (and for fulfilling similar aspirations), while well-to-do kids used them to network with other kids in the room. It comes at no surprise as daily habits do change quite substantially for poor vs. rich people.
A cool quote from her speech: “Unless a city mobilizes the intelligence of citizens, specially of low income workers, it’s not a #smartcity”. Interestingly, Saskia’s slides (pointer to come soon) should contain a full list of apps currently used by low-income people in big US cities.
Finally, to the central question of “What has enabled cities to have long lives?”, she gave a very simple answer (very much in line with JJ): “The city is a complex system. BUT it is incomplete”. You can find more about this in her “Does the city have speech?”
@AretiMark called for the design of new dynamic ecosystems for the city and go beyond static structures. The point is very simple yet powerful — since we now have technologies that sense all sorts of things in the city, designers have the responsibility to tap into this data having responsive cities in mind. And that is a radical shift for the field of Architecture.
In closing her speech, Areti mentioned a few cool projects that made use of Graphene (which might be of interest to the New Materials team at Bell Labs Cambridge):
PRO_SKIN [PROGRAMMABLE SKIN ]
INTEROP WORKFLOWS: GRAPHENE MEMBRANE
REAL TIME_ GRAPHENE URBAN INTERFACE
Mar of @300000kms opened the afternoon panel with the idea that “Urban planning is not only about concrete.”
She put forward very interesting questions:
- Does form follows behavior? (on this, it would be interesting to know when form does not follow behavior. to do that, one should know to which extent technology affects behavior and breaks what one could predict solely from form)
- How can we create synergies across neighborhoods? (economically speaking, for example)
- Does mixture turn into conflict? (mixed use is definitely great, but when does it turn to conflicts)
- Has the city an arrhythmic metabolism?
- Where Barcelona is Barcelona? Each city has a metabolism, so it’s necessary to analyze and design with the factor of “time”
- How has Barcelona expanded over the years? (if you track the tag #barcelona over the years, you would see quite a few changes)
- Who belongs to a neighborhood? Who sleeps or who works in an area? Demography is a dynamic data!
@ethel_baraona talked about Adhocratic City. Here is a definition of adhocracy for you:
For more, please check the hashtag #responsivecities on twitter.
