‘This process of innovation is often described as creating smart cities, but I am not in love with that word, because it lacks a human dimension,’ he says. ‘That is why we called our research unit at MIT the Senseable City Laboratory. Its mission is to investigate how digital technologies are entering the physical sphere and anticipate the implications for city-dwellers.’
The convergence of digital and physical is changing our lives, and when lives change, cities must change too.
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Carlo Ratti, director of Senseable City Lab
Urban mobility is one aspect of city life which could benefit enormously from the deluge of real-time data. Motor vehicles are becoming like computers on wheels, with thousands of sensors in an average car emitting high-frequency signals and providing a lot of information about their drivers and the roads.
This can be used to estimate what they are being used for and whether they could make fewer trips to reduce the number of vehicles on the road.
New York’s traffic data, uploaded into the HubCap interactive visualisation devised by Senseable City Lab and Audi, showed that the city’s Medallion cabs made 150 million taxi trips in 2011. The data included GPS coordinates of all pick-up and drop-off points and corresponding times of journeys, and analysis by the research team found that many could have been saved by ride-sharing.
A second component of city life where the internet is having an impact is urban places of work, which are largely offices.
Why do people go to offices for work when so much of what they do in a digital era could be done from home or elsewhere?
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Carlo Ratti, director of Senseable City Lab
His answer is that there are still reasons to go to the office, but they are not the same as those that led to the use of offices in the 20th century.
In the early days of office work, its purpose was to execute mechanical tasks from rows of desks or cubicles where employees were all doing the same thing. There are still companies where that sort of work is needed, but there are others where it is now done by computers or, increasingly, by artificial intelligence or robots.
‘In such cases, the only reason for going to offices is to interact in a physical space with other people. We can interact online over the internet on Skype or through video conferencing, but this tends to involve a pre-determined group of people focusing on a particular purpose.
When interacting in person, there is greater bandwidth: you can come into contact with more people and exchange new ideas, which can change careers or outcomes.’
Carlo Ratti calls these exchanges ‘serendipitous interaction’, but it requires different workspaces to facilitate creativity and collaboration. One workplace provider called WeWork is already transforming office buildings into what it describes as ‘beautiful, collaborative workspaces’. After its latest fund-raising, it is now valued at close to USD 20 billion.
‘Reflecting on what we had learned from the MIT campus, we decided to open it more to the city by adding a protruding glass body, which hosts a café and acts as an inviting element to passers-by in the neighbourhood. We also opened it up between the floors and between rooms on the same floors so that people could talk to each other more easily. And we opened it more to nature, with places to work and meet in the garden, which now has an orchard.
By integrating digital technologies seamlessly within the physical space, we can forge better relationships between people.
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Carlo Ratti, director of Senseable City Lab
One of the central ideas behind the Agnelli Foundation is that, by integrating digital technologies seamlessly within the physical space, we can forge better relationships between people and with the building they inhabit, ultimately fostering interaction and creativity. This is what we call Office 3.0. It’s a vision that overcomes the limitations of the pre-internet spaces as well as the alienating isolation of tele-working.’
In the building, each person can customise their workspace environment by interacting with the Building Management System (BMS). A smartphone app makes it possible for occupants to check in, interact with co-workers, book meeting rooms, and regulate environmental settings with an unprecedented degree of personalisation. In short: energy-saving human interaction and a more pleasant working environment.
‘There will be other disruptions to buildings created by the internet,’ says Carlo Ratti, ‘Shopping malls are already shutting down in the US in response to competition from online retailing – 25 per cent are forecast to close over the next few years. The convergence of digital and physical is changing our lives, and when lives change, cities must change too.’
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