The city of tomorrow: sensors, networks, hackers, and the future of urban life

95 Pages·2016·2.648 MB·English

by  Carlo Ratti, Matthew Claudel

THE CITY OF TOMORROW

SENSORS,
NETWORKS,
HACKERS,
THE CITY OF TOMORROW
AND THE
FUTURE OF
URBAN LIFE
CARLO RATTI AND
MATTHEW CLAUDEL
Copyright © 2016 by Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel. All rights reserved. This book may not be
reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015955547
ISBN 978-0-300-20480-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Frontispiece: New York Talk Exchange (detail; see chapter 2)
CONTENTS
PART I THE CITY OF TOMORROW (AND TODAY)
1 Futurecraft
2 Bits and Atoms
3 Wiki City
PART II METROPOLITAN INFORMATION FLOWS
4 Big (Urban) Data
5 Cyborg Society
6 Living Architecture
PART III SENSEABLE CITY
7 Mobility
8 Energy
9 Knowledge
PART IV LOOKING FORWARD
10 Hack the City
11 Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Credits
Index
PART I THE CITY OF TOMORROW (AND TODAY)
We are called to be architects of
the future, not its victims.
R. Buckminster Fuller, 1969
ONE
FUTURECRAFT
On December 24, 1900, the Boston Globe ran a piece imagining what Boston would look like at the turn
of the millennium. The lavishly illustrated article by Thomas F. Anderson painted an elaborate vision of a
city with moving sidewalks, airships soaring high above the streets, and pneumatic tube delivery of
everything from newspapers to food. The author’s predictions were sweeping and optimistic: Boston
would be so beautiful that the word “slum” would be eliminated from the city’s vernacular.1
Such descriptions, in retrospect, are almost comical—yet a hope of glimpsing the future continues to
enchant us. A vibrant thread in fiction and film, speculations have become a genre in their own right,
encompassing, as a common trope, the future of the city. Notions vary widely, from H. G. Wells’ grim
dystopias to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or the pseudo–police state of Minority Report. Regardless of the
time and medium, however, “nothing ever looks as dated as old science fiction,” as the saying goes.
Futures quickly become paleofutures—early speculations about the futures that would never come to
pass.
In the midst of a sprawling graveyard of ideas, an exercise like this book—an exploration of cities as
part of Yale University Press’s series on the future—is vexed with a crucial question: Is it possible for
our predictions to escape the fate of Anderson’s? How can we avoid the scrap heap of urban visions?
And, more specifically, Does the act of considering the future—in this case, the future of the city—have
inherent and productive value?
Traditionally, most future visions have been attempts to accurately depict the world of tomorrow—and
that may be their undoing. Prediction often involves assaying weak signals at the cutting edge of the
contemporary world and flinging them far forward, for decades or centuries, to arrive at a portrait of the
future city. To Anderson, writing in the year 1900, soon after the dazzling introduction of zeppelin travel
and pneumatic technology, it seemed all but assured that these advances would define urban development
over the course of the next hundred years. The state of the art stirred his imagination and defined his
portrait of millennial Boston.
We propose something quite different: to employ design in a systematic exploration and germination of
possible futures. Our aim is not to portray what is to come. Rather, we apply a method that we call
futurecraft: we posit future scenarios (typically phrased as What if? questions), entertain their
consequences and exigencies, and share the resulting ideas widely, to enable public conversation and
debate. In other terms, we propose to extrapolate from the present condition and to place ourselves, as
designers, in a fictive but possible future context with the intent of realizing or precluding that future
through public discourse.
This concept, primarily developed through our research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s
Senseable City Lab, has antecedents. Recently, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby at the Royal College of
Art in London proposed “speculative design”—a process that acts as a “catalyst for collectively
redefining our relationship to reality” and considering how things could be. An earlier framework,
Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science (CADS) proposed by the iconic inventor Buckminster
Fuller, uses a systematic approach to design that he developed through a class at MIT in 1956. Motivating
Fuller in his work was a general belief that design, speculation, and science go hand in hand. “The
function of what I call design science is to solve problems by introducing into the environment new
artifacts, the availability of which will induce their spontaneous employment by humans and thus,
coincidentally, cause humans to abandon their previous problem-producing behaviors and devices.”2
Buckminster Fuller’s statement suggests a latent evolutionary concept. As technical culture progresses,
objects are produced and iteratively refined through design—an act that introduces mutations to improve a
function or enable a new capability. On a broad scale, these mutations collectively promote change and
development. In an 1863 text, “Darwin among the Machines,” the writer Samuel Butler proposed an
evolutionary analogy for technology: replacing organisms with artifacts and classifying the synthetic
kingdom into genera and species.3
Variations of this concept have recurred both in theory and in practice.4 If we accept this evolutionary
framework, a central question emerges: How can the designer accelerate positive technological change?
To continue the biological analogy, could the crucial role of the designer be to produce anomalies (as new
ideas)? The designer could become what, in biology, is referred to as a mutagen—an agent of mutation.
Although mutations in the natural world are random, our concept of design is directed by futurecraft.
Most importantly, futurecraft is not about fixing the present (an overwhelming task) or predicting the
future (a disappointingly futile activity) but influencing it positively. Designers should not force their
ideas into the world—in fact, whether or not an idea is realized is largely irrelevant. By virtue of being
stated, explored, and debated, a concept will necessarily make an impact. Provocation is a better metric
than certainty, for ideas both positive and negative. Effacing a dystopian vision for the sake of decency is
a disservice, precluding the possibility of avoiding that future.