William Mitchell “E-topia…”: smart, green and lean cities
The book by William Mitchell “E-topia. Urban life, Jim – but not as we know it” was one of the first works containing the concept of Smart Cities. Mitchell, who was the Dean of the M.I.T. School of Architecture and Planning from 1992 until his death in 2010, analyzes the changes that sensors, software, mobile devices, computing and telecommunications bring to our daily life, social behavior and economics.
Jane Jacobs: Death and Life of Cities
Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, her main book published in 1961, still remains a surprising source of ideas covering a multitude of aspects that guide life in cities: the economy, security, habitat, traffic, governance, planning, participation…
Spring 2020 On-line Program of Talks & Lectures
No travel, no face-to-face events this spring. But we will be sharing screens and ideas anyway. In these hard times, there is a lot to be talking about on urban innovation and smart cities: data, DIY manufacturing, open challenges for recovery, start-ups.
Join us in our next talk:
June, 16th. At the Smart Cities’ Sofa Summits. Talk about “Smart City Challenges for Recovery after Covid-19”
Housing in Google’s Smart City in Toronto
The critics of Sidewalk Labs’s (Google’s real-estate subsidiary) project of creating a Smart City in Toronto tend to focus on its most “Orwellian” aspect: the unjustified large-scale collection of personal data. But few have remarked that housing in Google’s Smart City in Toronto project is tantamount to a swindle.
Master in Collective Housing (MCH) – UPM/ETH
(MCH), an international postgraduate program of advanced architecture design in cities and housing presented by Universidad Politécnica of Madrid (UPM) and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). Because of its prestigious faculty and program, MCH is currently considered the best housing architecture master in the world...
How urban data reveals the hidden life behind cities
Urban data is an informal description for all the data that is collected in cities, about people or about things. It can be used to make our life better, but, as Black Mirror shows, our personal data (our “digital fingerprint”) can be used to make our life impossible, too
Situationists For Open City Makers
Amongst the “avant garde” revolutionary intellectuals, the situationists were one of a kind. Though they were few, they often were waging battles under the leadership of a young Guy Débord to surpass other contemporary movements such as letterism and surrealism. Their views on urbanism or automation were anticipatory.
Autumn 2019 Program
‘Cause not everything it’s about on-line reading, check out this autumn’s events where we can meet in person:
Innovation Districts. ¿Growth or Decline?
Innovation Districts are perhaps the most visible physical manifestation of global innovation flows. Yet we don’t believe this to be the final destination. We believe that if we’re to avoid perverse effects, town planning policies that promote economic development need to be decentralized.
Sentimental Urban Planning
I watched “Interstellar” a while back, a movie in which the human race escapes from climate disaster using an artefact of theoretical physics known as a “Wormhole”. I once wrote that que the most sensible way of avoiding an environmental “Armageddon” would be to put intelligent urban planning into practice as soon as...
