The idea is that by harvesting the incredible amount of data “exhaust” that every one of us generates as we traverse a city, planners can optimize services in the city to make them more efficient, cleaner and cheaper.
But there is a fear that such top-down programs may threaten the very vitality that attracts people to cities in the first place …
According to Carlo Ratti of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology SENSEable City Lab, cities occupy just 2% of the world’s surface, but house 50% of the population, consume 70% of the world’s energy and are responsible for 80% of the world’s carbon.
PlanIT is a €10 billion, four-year project to build a new smart city in Portugal to house some 225,000 people. With sensors built into every building it presents itself as an urban utopia where smart buildings can sense our presence and anticipate our needs.
The Telegraph Looks at the City Of The Future: Seasteading, Superskyscrapers and Eco Cities
(via The Way We’ll Live Next | Telegraph.co.uk ht Big Think)
What socially beneficial uses can you think of for a billion loosely coupled, low power microprocessors and their associated sensors? Because in 20 years time, buying and deploying such a network will be cheap enough for city planners to consider it routine.
The logical end-point of Moore’s Law and Koomey’s Law is a computer for every square metre of land area on this planet — within our lifetimes. And, speaking as a science fiction writer, trying to get my head around the implications of this technology for our lives is giving me a headache.
We’ve lived through the personal computing revolution, and the internet, and now the advent of convergent wireless devices — smartphones and tablets. Ubiquitous programmable sensors will, I think, be the next big step, and I wouldn’t be surprised if their impact is as big as all the earlier computing technologies combined.
A Design-Based Approach to Living With Climate Change
The world’s population will top nine billion by 2060. Because of climate-change-induced environmental degradation, scientists project that tens of millions of people will move into today’s small and medium-size cities.
To prepare for the influx, says Dennis Frenchman, an architect and professor of urban planning at MIT, city designers must make decisions today to mitigate the migration of tomorrow. And those decisions should focus on making systems more efficient.
Transportation networks need to be rethought to limit congestion. Politicians should offer incentives to manufacturing firms to relocate to city centers to decrease the number of commuters.
Power generation and food production should become local, too; reducing transmission and transportation costs would keep prices lower. Further, Frenchman says, single-purpose-use spaces like shopping centers and housing developments should be swapped for mixed-use neighborhoods that contain homes, medical offices, stores, schools and offices. With essential services packed into one relatively small area, even the densest city would feel more like a small town.
(via Strategies for a Changing Planet: Shelter | Popular Science)
A Reality-Based Look at the City of the (Near) Future
By 2050, seven out of every ten people on Earth will live in cities. Compared to the beginning of the 20th century, when just 20 percent lived in urban settings, the increase is staggering.
This rapid urbanization coupled with the population explosion that will see 8.9 billion people living on the planet in 2050 presents the challenge of more total humans and a higher percentage of them flocking to cities to find a better life. So, what is the city of the future and what is the future of cities?
Txchnologist asked a few leading thinkers to give their impression of what future cities in 50-100 years will be like.
(via Bye Bye, Jetsons: Engineers and Consultants Offer A Reality-Based Future | Txchnologist)
(ht futurist.com, ht The Futures Agency)
Novelist Douglas Coupland Designs Lamppost/Parking Meter/Microcell/EV Charging station of the Future, for Vancouver
Streetlamps, cell phone towers and parking meters lend a certain urban charm, but these unnatural forms can also get a little clunky, especially as they grow in number.
To get rid of the clutter, the city of Vancouver is planning new all-purpose utility towers that will provide WiFi, cell phone service, parking, car charging and more — all wrapped up in a Candy Land-like stripey pole.
They’re called V-Poles, for Vancouver, and they’re the brainchild of Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland. He conceived the idea after he stumbled upon something called the lightRadio, developed by Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent, which compresses a cell phone tower’s circuit boards and cables into a tiny cube.
The devices can be stacked up inside a tower like Legos, according to Coupland. It can serve multiple frequencies and standards, i.e. 2G, 3G or LTE, and it can work anywhere there’s a power supply and a broadband connection. Just add other services, and you’ve got a complete information and energy ecosystem on one tree.
From bottom to top, it would include an inductive coil charging pad for electric vehicles; stacked telecom boxes for various providers; a WiFi transmitter; and an LED streetlamp The poles could even power a neighborhood bulletin board.
Coupland’s idea also includes a wide array of color schemes from which neighborhoods could choose, representing anything from a pileated woodpecker to the Vancouver Canucks.
