The Quantum City
Do city planners play dice with cities? The question admits of several answers, and all of them are probably true and false at the same time. In any case, recognizing the intricate complexity of the city advises accepting our limits when modeling and predicting its behaviors. Big data can help us understand the city, but the city is not the product of a creator, rather each inhabitant creates their own version every day when they open their eyes.
KPIs for an agile and evolutionary urban design
One of the first KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) that I remember seeing for urban space is included in the Maciá Plan that Josep Lluìs Sert carried out for Barcelona in the 1930s. It proposed as the main KPI the decrease in infant mortality in the Ciutat Vella district, which at that time was around 20% per year.
7 scientific laws about cities that will fascinate you
Urban development, as everything in nature, follows certain rules. It is a question of time that science will find more laws about cities. In the Universe there are humans, and in those humans there is a brain. And those countless human brains have invented many things along history. Amongst those things, striking indeed for its...
3GPP: Smart Cities Should Engage With Mobile Standards Developers
A challenge for smart cities is to identify the impact of new standards and technologies and determine how 5G standards development creates (or constrains) opportunities for urban innovation.
The 5G Digital Divide
5G fervour is noticeably high and immersed in the conjecture that deployment of this technology will increase digital inclusion for people who currently lack access to broadband Internet services. However, the potential benefits of 5G to society at large — and how it might affect social inclusion — are more difficult to define.
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.
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.
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...
