Digital Design and the Future of Cities

　　Tim Stonor

　　Architect & Town Planner, Managing Director at Space Syntax Limited

　　

　　Keywords: Places, Architecture, Environment, Landscape, Urban Design, Planning, Arts

　　

　　What Will the Future City be Like

　　Thinking about the future spatio-physical form of cities is not a new challenge. From Christopher Wren’s plan for the post- re rebuilding of London in 1666 to Ebenezer Howards’s Garden City concept, to Le Corbusier, to Bladerunner, human ingenuity has been tasked with anticipating the future.

　　A problem, if we care to admit it, is that these plans tend to fail. Look at what replaced Wren’s ideas: more of the same. Or, consider the legacy of post-war housing and the New Towns movement where, unlike Wren, these plans were actually built. What did these places create? Social and spatial isolation. Car dependency. Traffic congestion.

　　Digital Urbanism

　　Nevertheless, new urban technologies have emerged. Sometimes through the deliberate efforts of urban scientists. Often, unexpectedly, through uptake of the social media applications that pervade everyday urban experience: smartphone mapping, location tagging, and route planning.

　　When it comes to the importance of physical places, the emergence and increasing uptake of digital technology has not altered this. Indeed it has reinforced it. Cities need great human gathering places more than ever because human interaction is the analytic filter for all of the data that new technologies are producing—cities need human interaction to transform the data into intelligence.

　　If the last digital revolution was in data capture and representation then the next is in auto-analysis and sense-making. Crowd sourcing is an example of this—when the service provider is also the receiver. But of course this is not an exclusively technology-driven transformation. It is a human- technological interaction.

　　And even this will not be enough. By all means, we should use technology to improve sensing, awareness- raising, even collective decision-taking. But the challenge is even greater. It is a creative challenge.

　　Why? Because technology is not only telling us more about ourselves. It is changing our behavior. And in ways that we don’t understand. Reading emails during meetings? Occupying the new online public space? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Living in “transpace”—forming weak global networks at the expense of strong local ones. How does this change us? Does this mean economic prosperity at the cost of social wealth? Or not?

　　Transformational technologies are creating a phase change right now. The challenge of future cities is a creative one. To think thoughts and take decisions that haven’t been taken before.

　　And this challenge is a different one to the 19th challenges of the physical sciences. For example: using the laws of thermodynamics to create more and more powerful and efficient engines to enable industrial growth; challenges that can be resolved through single sciences. Today’s challenges are the global challenges of terrorism and climate change. They are multi-disciplinary challenges. No single engine will provide the solution.

　　History suggests that human beings are particularly good at handling phase change. We are able to act not only as data filters and sense-makers but also to make the creative leaps that phase changes necessitate. When the terrain shifts, when the rules change.

　　Catal Huyuk—the first city—emerged by both accommodating and enabling a transition from a hunter gatherer to a settled agrarian society.

　　The Nile Valley saw the establishment of sophisticated, permanent trade and governance systems by harnessing the beneficial power of irrigation technology to produce more food than was needed. This enabled the creation of food storage in warehouses, which meant that societies could survive poor harvests by calling on food reserves, assisted by new food processing techniques. Ultimately, this allowed societal permanence, which created the first forms of urbanism.

　　In other words, new technologies have led to massive shifts in our ways of living. It is at times of technological transformation that humanity innovates, switching to new rule sets, creatively

　　finding new ways of being. Ways that didn’t exist before. Or perhaps ways that once did exist haven’t existed recently.

　　Whichever uncertain form it takes, there is one thing that I think we can be sure about: innovation requires  first, face to face contact; second, random, unplanned encounter; third, the interaction of groups. These are the building blocks for the human transactions that lead to innovation. Each of these come in abundance in well planned cities. Both are lost with spatial segregation and congestion.

　　Future cities therefore need, first and foremost, to provide the conditions for face-to-face human transaction: to provide the majority of  first contact. Technology will then facilitate a majority of second contact. And, when technology is not available,  first contact can only be achieved through human interaction in physical places.

　　It is possible to speculate that, in order to achieve this, localism will become more important than globalism. Hollywood/Bollywood may therefore have a limited shelf life. They have, or will soon have, achieved globalism. Thereafter, people may well seek “sensation” in the differentiated experiences of local places.

　　So what will we need to achieve this? Exactly what we have lost: cities, with numerous co-located, locally differentiated clusters, allowing innovation across silos. Cities of villages.

　　In urban planning terms, this means great streets and spaces. It means getting rid of divisive inner- urban motorways. These badges of honor are the last century’s badges of honor, not this century’s and certainly not the next. Yet cities continue to build them. Perhaps not so much in the UK but certainly overseas—often as UK exports. We need to reflect on this practice. Is it an ethical foreign policy?

　　Here’s a prediction: if we get it right, future cities will look more like pre-20th century cities than 20th century cities.

　　In this regard, many UK cities are already Future Cities. London is largely a future city. Birmingham is largely a Future City. Newcastle is largely a future city.

　　But vast tracts of housebuilding are certainly not Future Cities—yet this is what many in our industry are delivering. “Eco” in name. Perhaps “Eco” in thermal insulation. But not “Eco” in terms of urban footprint.

　　And so there is significant further work to do to go the final mile, to make the essential case for complete urban transformation.

　　My recommendation is to start by understanding how cities are—how they work. How people behave in them. Start here. This is why Urban Observatories are such a good idea.

　　Then think about changing cities around the principle of face-face human transaction, supported and enhanced by digital.

　　Future Cities

　　Integration between professional silos is essential. Otherwise I see a divide forming, with one half of obsessing over having more and more data: like putting up more and more CCTV cameras, generating more and more imagery, which is barely useful if people are not analyzing and acting on the data. And the other half painting fantastic pictures of futuristic cities.

　　We can avoid this error by integrating, yes. But, I believe what’s most important is that we integrate around the receivers of our services, not simply the providers. Around people and their transactions.

　　If the 20th century city was the “city of movement” then the 21st should be the “city of transaction”. In this regard, the single, most important task for designers is to provide the continuously connected spatial networks that history shows us deliver places that work for people.

　　This is the challenge.

 

Figure 1. Disconnected layout: Low accessibility score and Connected layout: High accessibility score

（文章来源：Urban Design #2016(4) excerpts）