![Hip Cities That Think About How They Work
[via @olimould]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/11/18/business/global/18iht-srscCITIES18-span/18iht-srscCITIES18-span-articleLarge.jpg)
“Environmentally speaking, Earth 1.0 cities were takers not givers, in that they consumed resources without replenishing them. The relationship cities have with the wider world has to change. Cities need to become resourceful and to do that they have to become smart – evolving new ways to reduce their environmental footprint and to start giving back at least as much as they take.” Futurologist Melissa Sterry. (Urban Times)
Image: sustainable building concept by Vincent Callebaut Architecture.
![“The more sophisticated the integrated systems associated with a city become, the more they’ll reflect the city’s unique personality, and the more programmers will try to imbue their computers with a sense of this unique urban identity. And a sense of the city’s history, and the ways in which the city has evolved and grown, will be important for a more sophisticated urban planning system to grasp the future — so it’s very possible to imagine this leading to a sense of personal history, on the part of a computer that identifies with the city it helps to manage.”
Charlie Jane Anders, Could self-aware cities be the first forms of artificial intelligence?
Future city concept art by Robert D. Brown [via @ethel_baraona]](http://www.robertdbrown.com/picture/cityscape_01.jpg?pictureId=9729112)
“The more sophisticated the integrated systems associated with a city become, the more they’ll reflect the city’s unique personality, and the more programmers will try to imbue their computers with a sense of this unique urban identity. And a sense of the city’s history, and the ways in which the city has evolved and grown, will be important for a more sophisticated urban planning system to grasp the future — so it’s very possible to imagine this leading to a sense of personal history, on the part of a computer that identifies with the city it helps to manage.”
Charlie Jane Anders, Could self-aware cities be the first forms of artificial intelligence?
Future city concept art by Robert D. Brown [via @ethel_baraona]
“Whoever holds this book leaves a ghostly shadow of their hand on its grey cover. Made of heat-sensitive material, the cover temporarily records the imprint of the reader’s hand. It is a striking visualization of Sentient City’s subject, for as sensors and data processing capability are increasingly embedded in the physical fabric of urban environments, so we now leave a data trail as we move through the city, a digital shadow stretching across the urban topography.”
My review of Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, which appeared in September’s Icon magazine, is now online here.
“How might The Bionic City look? In contrast to the sprawling mass of disconnected, static and inert structures that compromise today’s cities, it would instead operate as a seasonally adaptive collective of interconnected and interdependent shape-shifting, colour changing, dynamic architectures, that sensitive to their surroundings, fused to form a complex adaptive system in sync with the Earth’s natural processes.”
Smart Cities
“Even before the first concrete is cast, PlanIT Valley [in Portugal] has already been built—in a simulation program that also allows detailed planning of the construction. Much of the city, which is to cost about $10 billion, will rely on prefabricated parts; its foundation, for instance, will be made of concrete blocks that come with all the gear for smart infrastructures pre-installed. Eventually the entire city and its buildings will be run by an ‘urban operating system’ that integrates all parts and combines them into all kinds of services, such as traffic management and better use of energy.”
Full article: “Living on a Platform”, The Economist [via @rusyans]
