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.
Stream : As often in history, we feel that we are living in a new era. But what are the major changes that suggest that we are living in a real “anthropological rupture”?
Carlo Ratti : The profound “rupture,” as you called it, that sets today apart as a new anthropological era, is information. Through new ubiquitous technologies that suffuse urban space, we have developed a capacity not only to gather information, but also to impact the city. This forms a kind of sensing and actuating loop: feedback and response in real time. We have an unprecedented ability to understand and react to the world around us—whether that is the natural world, the built environment, or the social and connective landscapes of human networks.
Stream : Could you explain the idea of a “real-time city”?
Carlo Ratti : The concept of a real-time city is built on two different modes of “sensing” urban space. One is the idea of deploying a large number of sensors to generate a certain dataset—for example, air quality sensors taking measurements in a city.
Stream : We started from the idea that all these revolutions (globalization, digital technology, general urbanization, environmental crises) changed our relationship to space and time, which must affect our architecture. How would you describe the evolution of the relationship between space and time?
Carlo Ratti : Architecture is only now beginning to become “smart” and responsive—that is, dynamic through both space and time, in tandem with people. Rather than a mute structure for keeping out the elements, it will engage dynamically with its users. One small example is a project we are doing now to address the asymmetry between building occupation and climate control by creating personal climates—a system that could improve energy efficiency by orders of magnitude. Through motion-tracking and infrared lenses, an individual thermal cloud follows each person, ensuring ubiquitous comfort while minimizing overall heat requirements, and ultimately sparking vibrant encounters in physical space as people share their climates. Man no longer seeks heat—heat seeks man. In a broad sense, digital technologies allow us to create and interact with architecture in new ways, on the scale of the building, and to evolve or adapt urban operations on the metropolitan scale.
Stream : Can you describe your work and research at MIT with the SENSEable City Lab? How do sensors lead us to a new approach to the city and to a radical evolution of urban space?
Carlo Ratti : New technologies and their increasing computational power are changing the scope of an architect’s role. Until today, architects have thought of static structures, but now we are designing interactions, experiences. Buildings are almost coming alive. When we consider the brief for a new project, we find ourselves with a whole new toolkit of possibilities.
Stream : One hypothesis is that contemporary mutations reactivate the idea of the living, the metabolic metaphor in our approach to the city. This return to nature as a growth model is recurrent in the history of art, but it seems that it has taken on a new dimension with the potential of digital technologies. Do you think this metaphor of a metabolic city has become more relevant?
Carlo Ratti : What has truly changed is the possibility of co-creation within communities—recalling what I said earlier about open-source design, this is the idea of “hacking the city.” Through new modes of connection, design, and fabrication, the process of creating spaces and events has been democratized. This inclusive, almost evolutionary process resembles natural or metabolic growth.
(This article was published in Stream 03 in 2014.)
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