Cities of Information
An ever-increasing number of economic and institutional entities have taken up the subject of digital urbanism to conceive and design the smart cities of tomorrow, but also to program the technological shift that affects the cities of today. Spearheading this research is Professor Carlo Ratti, who describes the central role played by information in the development of cities and the way it is redefining their vision, their very nature and their day-to-day operations. He then describes for Stream the urban data processing experiments that his MIT laboratory, the SENSEable Lab, has conducted. These have led to the concept of the “real-time city”, which is equipped with sensors to capture and process data in addition to being characterized by “opportunistic remote sensing” of data that is generated by the behavior of the residents themselves. Managing and inhabiting cities becomes more efficient through this open-source approach. Carlo Ratti is an architect, founder of the Carlo Ratti Associati design firm. He is a researcher and teaches at the MIT SENSEable City Lab.
