1 – Technology and Enhanced learning 

Knowing more about city’s behaviour so that city can know more about us

2 – Active learning

Implementation of methods as project based learning, practice learning, engineering learning, experiential learning, game based learning. they enable multidisciplinary iterations, learn by doing innovations while working on real life problems.

3 – Cooperative learning

Organizations working and learning together with universities, government agencies and industry businesses.

4 – Open-learning 

The city is turning to a classroom: a lab. trandiscipliary approach to knowledge enrichment: an active flow of information and ideas among different sectors.

5- Mindful learning

Both the natural environment and citizens are seen as fuel for knowledge production. In this trend, the learning takes in consideration the social and environmental constraints. 

EXAMPLES

DEMOLA is an organization that connects companies, universities and students. They search questions from companies, government agencies, public institutes to publish and get students involved to solve them. The student team owns the license. The City of delf supports Field labs providing both spaces in the city and a case manager, coming from private or public organization, to help them realize ideas and solve practical or legal issues.

http://www.demola.net/

At AUAS (University of Applied Sciences of Amsterdam), BOOT is the operating base for research practices in city’s neighbourhoods with students having the opportunity to put their competences into practice and further develop them.

http://www.proeftuinendelft.nl/en/home

At the Poblenou superblock experience, architecture students learn how to deal with cooperation processes and learning by doing innovations.

RESULTS

The positively impact of this kind of learning is that students have the opportunity to work on real life problem improving the quality of their neighbourhood in a more rewarding experience. Moreover, they acquire creative views and ideas from colleagues, professional and researchers to address important urban challenges. From  the organization’s point of view, they get useful ideas from the knowledge available at university while testing and redefining their prototypes. Researchers can find better accesses to real data as well as the most interesting problem to focus their studies. Finally, the university as practical and service oriented institution is able to balance and efficiently exploit both theoretical and practical fields.

How can we teach Advanced Urbanism?

“When dealing with new technology we transform all the information and particularities in data, levelling everything at the exact same value. We are losing the question of specificity: a concept that advanced urbanism must refer to.” Elodie Nourrigat – ENSAM

“We are experiencing a change in paradigm. Our educational approaches are shifting from teaching the students, to learning with students and teaching the city. This has mutated many different aspects of city’s life. For example, if in the beginning, citizens voted mayor to write law, now mayors are chasing residents to
understand their real problems and to collect information through social networks in a bottom up process.” Nicola Canessa – UNIGE

“With discussions and round tables we are able to put municipality and professional together, make them talk and address the real problems of the city side by side with the citizens”. Andrea Caridi – DARTS

“With active public space and the Poblenou project, students at IAAC have the opportunity to prototype solutions addressing to real problem of the neighbourhood, producing for the city while the city learn more about them”. Chiara Farinea – IAAC

“For us at IAAC is fundamental not to pretend to know everything. In our teaching-learning environment, we are all learning together and in the APS installation this inclination was evident. Students were learning how to fabricate elements embedded in an urban area, constantly having the feedbacks of the dwellers
they were producing for and learning by doing systematically”. Mathilde Marengo – IAAC

“Re-Cycle at UNIGE is a new life approach to material, product and people in the architectural practice. One of the first goals of the research is to build a comprehensive framework of knowledge around the theme of recycling, a body of information and cultures able to develop and propose new ways and schemes of rules to interfere with the constructed environment”.Raffaella Fagnoni – UNIGE

“Being a company that designs products for cities, no matters if modern, smart, or even responsive, we have to actively learn by doing, every day, talking with citizens, dealing with cultures, exploiting past and future experiences. For us, erasing all the boundaries between schools, students and businesses is the new way to make cities, planning and understanding them”. Africa Sabe – Santa & Cole

“EXtimity is an answer to the cities actual evolution, a way to outperform traditional lighting. Based on adaptable technical modules, eXtimity creates “Light spaces”. Places that are transforming and shaping the nocturnal environment, while being dedicated to wellbeing of users. The user finds there all the connectivity needed but can also become an actor and designer of its environment”. Vassili Beillas – TECHNILUM

More than 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, global urbanisation keeps accelerating. United Nations projections indicate that 75% of the human population will be living in cities by 2050. We are losing livelihoods through both offshoring and automation, and this, in turn, leads to the demise of dynamic hubs of practical and cultural knowledge, where things are made. Extreme industrialisation and globalisation have turned cities into the most voracious consumers of materials.

We need to reimagine the cities and how they operate

The Fab City is an international initiative started by IAAC, MIT’s CBA, the Barcelona City Council and the Fab Foundation to develop locally productive and globally connected self-sufficient cities. The  project comprises an international think tank of civic leaders, makers, urbanists and innovators working on changing the paradigm of the current industrial economy where the city operates on a linear model of importing products and producing waste, to a spiral innovation ecosystem in which materials flow inside cities and information on how things are made circulates globally.

Innovation to be shared 

We need to reinvent our cities and their relationship to people and nature by relocalising production so that cities are generative rather than extractive, restorative rather than destructive. FabCity is a new urban model of transforming and shaping cities that shifts how they source and use materials from ‘Products In Trash Out’ (PITO) to ‘Data In Data Out’ (DIDO). This means that more production occurs inside the city, along with recycling materials and meeting local needs through local inventiveness. A city’s imports and exports would mostly be found in the form of data (information, knowledge, design, code). These data then is shared among the Fab Lab network that, going from inner Boston to rural India, in April 2016 counted 1000 labs all over the world. Fab Lab and makerspace based innovations could be a source for solutions to connect to real problems in cities, opening opportunities for businesses, research and education through projects. With its inherent zero waste and carbon reduction goals, linked to education, innovation, skills development and the creation of employment
opportunities and livelihoods through the relocalisation of manufacturing, the FAB City approach can contribute to achieving a range of city objectives.

by Thomas Diez*

*Urbanist specialised in digital fabrication and its implications in the future of cities and society, Tomás is one of the founders of Fab Lab Barcelona at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC). He is currently leading the Fab City Global initiative.

Adhocracy is the system of flexible and informal organization and management in place of rigid bureaucracy. The first edition of adhocracy was based on the use of digital tools. In 2012 for Istanbul we were witnessing the rise of the digital technology applied to architecture design and to the city as well. Three years later, we have understood that it was more an attitude that the mere use of the tool. Our conclusion, for the exposition in Athens, was that the world is changing so fast
that we have no word to describe it and we are constantly trying to reinvent our dictionary, in this eternal search for meaning. The internet for example, has exponentially grow from its first network in the seventies and now we are interacting new manners, we are all becoming cyborgs with the smartphone as the sixth sense. All this concern us while it is difficult to simplify, to describe in few words. Our cities are mashup, buildings fused with technology mixed with the active citizen participation. At the same, this infinite network is incorrect as it could give us just some partial information or wrong directions. When we think about public space, multiple images come to our mind, from the radical utopias, to the terroristic attack and the bottom up protests in North Africa. I reject the word occupy, because we cannot occupy what is already ours, we are simply reusing a public space already belonging to us. We own, or we are supposed to own, spaces in cities. However, what is the urban environment nowadays? With augmented realities we can travel and discovery many places of the world just sitting in the couch. We can also inhabit the digital. We are chasing virtual pokémons in real environment, talking with real gamers in virtual network.

Awarness to shape our environment

The main point for us is to have a critical approach to the city. Most of the time we take for granted several rules that govern our environment and we have lost our curiosity, our ability to make questions constantly. We treat other persons as robots, so how can we restart the whole interaction and learn from the beginning technology? As we take for granted intangible flows while walking, the project from La Jetée (Giuditta Vendrame and Paolo Patelli) plays with the idea of rules and freedom in city making people question their behavior thanks to ludic activities. Moreover, the Campus in Camps project from Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal questions the temporality of refugee camp and the memory of knowledge about the tent. Finally, only by questioning and critically understanding, we can start transforming our cities.

by Ethel Baraona Pohl

Interact and interactive information in between people, space, complexities is the big revolution of our era and this new knowledge of thinking. The last few decades have confirmed the consequences of this crucial shift: from mobility and delocalization, to communication and the internet of things, the capacity to process complex and great amount of data is now a fact. We express every day the expressions of our trading and sharing environment as simultaneous, dynamic, multicultural, informational system, variable, complex, indiscipline, nonlinear, complex and interactively differential. This global and holistic capacity of this information structure that was not possible for the modernist and even post-modernist architecture is probably the greatest revolution of our time. Forms now are processes and performances. In the last twenty years, urbanist theory has tried to answer to this system with different approaches building the framework for
a comprehensive knowledge. We need to apply logics instead of models, sharing questions and studies to approach urbanism with the idea of projection and interactivity. Gradually we understand the complexity of the city and we develop interphases for citizens to express their potential in its environment.

Resiligience as an attitude to design 

Considering the map of vulnerable areas in the world, the advanced approach has the main role in understanding that all the systems are very complex and potential cancers. In this framework, new methods must be conceived. Resiligience is the addition of intelligent cities and resilient landscapes. Leaving the idea of smart city as a mere system of sensors, we can define intelligence according to five parameter: processing capacity (analytical and conceptual), adaptive capacity (evolutionary, flexible and reversible), operational capacity (creative, directive and proactive), transversal capacity (connectivity and strategy) and relational capacity (emotional, emphatic and interactive). Apparently, for resilience we can establish a match as anticipation, adaptation, resistance, integration and recuperation are its features. If as architects we need to qualify our habitat, we can directly link these topics with the mapping, socializing and organizing
possibilities to address city’s issues. Exploiting resiligience we are able to work in a dynamic way with the city: anticipating process, adapting it to new models while preserving the landing with the integration of innovative networks and emotional designs.

by Manuel Gausa

300000kms is a group of architect and planning based in Barcelona defining the new approaches to the city as a multiple scale system, from neighbourhoods to the larger dimension, and produce data on several topics, relevant in a worldwide scale. We are focused our research on how innovation and economic work in the city to more tangible and intangible aspects, as poverty or gentrification. In fact, we try to draw urban phenomena: graphical representations, or cartographies, to understand and influence stakeholders related to city functions and drive them to right decisions.

Indeed, cities are living at two velocities. If Barcelona, for example, is not growing anymore, in another part of the world we have slums cities, where reality goes faster than urban planning. In front of two considerations, we need to upgrade urban planning’s tools and adapt the vision of urban settling to the contemporary rising issues such as overpopulation or over densification. It is possible to work on either citizens or technology but how can we set urban planning to retrieve its fundamental role as a driver for a long vision of territory management? If we take in consideration Cerda’s plan for Barcelona, the idea was to envision a city able to grow with intelligent infrastructure and the actual urbanity was so strong that it showed resilience, capacity and flexibility that the city is still nowadays experiencing. The reason behind was the systematic structure of the project, based on data ranging from city’s sections to pedestrian flows and from transports to streetlights. Working with data is not a new approach.

How can data become information?

The nowadays situation provides a great amount of data, more accessibility to data and better ways to manage, visualise and report this information. This is a crucial shift, and it brings us new scenarios to design city. With data, we can add a new layer, while planning the city: the behaviours. We can compare forms and morphologies to human relations and emotions. Moving from blocks to tweet we can manage the inner tangible and intangible aspects of the city. Studying the city according to demography and workplaces, we understand the flow of residents throughout the day, and we start wondering to whom the city belongs. Considering demography as a dynamic feature, we understand residents and tourist as fluid, they may not be the same, but they are and must be permanent presences as they have significant impacts on public spaces. Houses, industries and offices mix around town and they reflect the actual economic representation of the urban settlement. The city has a metabolism, changing every day at every hour and only with the fluid information of data we are able to study it and enjoy it.

by Mar Santamaria

Today we have the knowledge and means to realize whatever we imagine, witnessing advancements in production technology not only in the architecture field but, in biology, ecology, virtual engineering as well. In fact, a radical shift is in action. The architectural debate is moving from the form or aesthetical effect to the performing aspect. In a way, architecture is breaking free from the limitation of studies and it is time to discuss, speculate and envision what could be the future of intelligent responsiveness and adaptation in design.

Smart materials like nitinol wires, silicon based systems, hydrogel capsules, biomaterials and graphene already can change their proprieties naturally, breathing buildings and systems to life in reaction to environmental, climatic, energetic and residents inputs without the plug of technological systems. Furthermore, a shift in logics always corresponds to a change in the vocabulary and so a need for new urban infrastructures has emerged with Wi-Fi technologies, sensors, fibre optics. However, we can also notice alternative infrastructures that do not belong to municipalities, administrations  or institutions but collect and map openly data so that everybody can start having a better understanding of how cities are working in distributed different landscapes. Again, imagine how design can be augmented by virtual reality, not just in the preview phase. The overlapping of real and virtual data enables us to experience the environment in a completely original manner, giving and receiving information in a continuous loop of interactions.

Can the city think?

The information society brings a digital revolution dealing with collectivism, connectivity, and endless proximity. Can the machine think? Can the building think? Can they evolve? We started talking about internet of cities, internet of buildings. If smart cities have become corporate, a scenario of selling and buying technologies, we need not to forget that the implementation of information and communication technologies in urban planning had been fundamental for the plan itself. From approximate data, now, we have tools to collect information real-time, proposing accurate and dynamic mapping of our environment for the design process. Then, how do we materialize design in order to shape form, inform new programs and respond to changes? As we introduce the idea of Internet of building, we need to understand responsiveness as a new organic paradigm. The innovative technologies and the information in the experience era are
mutating the way we inhabit our environment, we are moving to a form of habitat in which architecture is not merely sheltering but become evolutionary, technologically integrated and even personalized by the users of the spaces. I believe that the next architectural design style will not draw final or static solutions but answers that envision behaviours, design behaviours and mute spaces, following the principles not only of construction but of biology, ecology and other disciplines as well.

by Areti Markopoulou

UN-habitat promotes socially and environmentally sustainable cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all. Population is growing exponentially every year and city are the centres of massively production and consumption of goods, opportunities and diseases. Slum people, in fact, have no access to water, education or shelter and growing cities are the main challenge we are dealing with. Decision-makers at all levels need to understand the power of the city as a catalyst for territorial development, influencing directly local and national scales. In short, UN habitat tries to change the manner in which city are developing: harnessing the positive power of urbanization in an equitable, inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable system.

A triangular approach to the city 

Recently, at UN Habitat, we realized the necessity of a change in paradigms for a sustainable urban development in the XXI century and we started defining a new urban agenda: a threelayer approach based on roles and regulations, urban design, financial plans.

Rules and regulations have the power to shape the form and character of a city. In order to create an integrated policy system, regulative law is the only way to address the challenge of the urbanization and to enable local governments to regenerate and implement the transformative agenda, becoming sustainable and resilient. Concerning urban design, the city needs a design code to realize urban green extensions rather than vertical super densifications, to enhance public open spaces and control urban grow. In conclusion, municipal finances, project leaders and capital investments must be reparametrized in a new more prosperous and equitable system for the residents, stating that the idea of requiring unavoidably a sponsor to fund development is over. Professionals around the world are considering and designing new prospectives for more transversal and interdisciplinary city’s approaches since, in the end, we are all habitat dwellers.

By Maita Fernández Armesto

We live in offices. We spend our life in atmospherically sealed enclosures that define collective, internally rational and self-referential spaces eternally processing inputs and outputs. Since the pilot project of NASA living pod in 1960, man has been treated as a diagram of input and output with his habitat. He is the process’s result of his own wastes, but, despite the rigour of mathematical formulas, the contained ecosystems in which he lives are unpredictable in their evolution: sudden ruptures always occur, and there is no heating system. In closed worlds nature is sampled and systematised through technological mediation; Walt Disney, in his Epcot project in 1966, was considering dweller’s happiness as a variable just as waste or pollution management. So, it does not matter if from the military purpose of colonizing outer spaces or from self-sufficiency’s desires, impossibly controlled enclosure’s ideas have become institutionalized through a series of bureaucratic mechanisms (and eventually labelled as eco-friendly or green) while they disclose the struggle to reconcile the utopian ideas of replicating earth in its totality with adversarial and raw material reality.

Sustainability is a new form of capital

Our indoor environments are politically charged spaces that reflect social ideas, economic agendas and cultural specific standard of taste and judgement. Because data and measurements in controlled enclosures offer trustworthy mediums on how to develop sustainability criteria, they have become pervasive and they have persisted either in the challenging settlement of our overpopulated and dense cities. Architectural processes have been redeemed by the sustainable design practices, minimising energy loss at the cost of air and light. The manipulation of organic and ecological processes contained within artificial enclosures have become a metaphor for enforcing bio-standardised life, recalling the power of data and cultural capital. Is the idea of self-sufficiency compulsive and hysteric in the will to generate ceaselessly new life out of all cycle production’s wastes? So, what degree resource-conservation strategies are sustainable form of practice?

by Lydia Kallipoliti

What are we really talking about when it gets to technologies? Technology itself has a dual nature. It can both provide tools for a positive contribution as well as the opposite, according to its use. However, the digital phenomenon presumes and orders the space we live in, it routinises our habitat when we need to recognise creativity, to exit the loop by inventing new possibilities, new languages to understand the city. Constantly we are guided by the technical capabilities rather than following the real questions that shape our life. In fact, digitisation as a variable can be completely derivative: a glorified version of the ancient myth of progress. Nevertheless, it can be transformative and constitutive as well, producing new opportunities, new ways to do the familiar. We need to consider the technological evolution like an activism movement able to change deeply and concretely our landscape. With the power that we have nowadays, a video uploaded to amnesty international by the mother of a child tortured in Mexico becomes instantly a worldwide case, an environmental issue, a threat to humanity. The understanding of being part of a larger network is probably the most powerful goal that we can achieve with the complex apps environment surrounding us.

What is urbanization and who are the actors in play?

Smart city as a collection of smart building is the example of municipal tissue’s de-urbanization by the imposition of a rigid technological system. Often, when city’s leaders wonder about urban growth the first approach is to call big firms, formerly discovering technologies and applications rather than start from issues to build technological solutions. What happens is that when we introduce corporation-controlled system, we exclude part of the city’s actors from the equation. In the United States, low-wage workers struggle every day to achieve a modest lifestyle never being the target of the technological progress. Our cities need more innovation toward low-income neighbourhoods developing applications that enable their life. In fact, some of the larger ecologies of meanings become extreme in cities, where patterns of different ideas and worlds survive for centuries standing still in front of the fall of firms, corporations and companies. The neighbourhoods are the organisms of our urban environment, and if the city does not mobilise the intelligence of their residents, it may have smart machines, but it will not be smart in its totality.

by Saskia Sassen

Colossal Order is a nineteen-people game developer company based in Tampere, Finland, which focus its research on simulations, basically reproducing events and processes of the real world into a gaming platform with a modest addition of fun. “City: Skylines” is their main title, with 2 million copies sold worldwide, and it brings the entire city development under player’s control. Making the game entertaining and engaging was actually a challenge for us as we discovered that people are actually interested in their own habitats, trying to reproduce familiar environments to bring a positive contribution. Actually, town planning, in its complexity, is a lengthy process and people complains for not being involved. Therefore, gamification could be a solution and we encourage municipalities to include citizens in the planning process through shareable gaming platforms.

Gaming platforms can actually provide ideas and suggestions for the development of a city

Pilot projects in Hämeenlinna (Finland) and Stockholm (Sweden) have proved that citizen’s participation is possible through videogames and the results are unforeseen and helpful for the city builder to a better understanding of the site. Currently, the platforms are developed for the gaming industries so they are fun first and second realism, several simplifications take place, but the process is just at the beginning. These two cases studies, in fact, open the discussion on how to create tools for the community to be part of the city’s development and we, at Colossal Order, are sure that in the future citizens are going to be the ones actually creating habitats.

by Mariina Hallikainen