CityReads | 6 Books on Future Cities

325

6 Books on Future Cities

Understanding the way we interact with our built environment is becoming an increasingly data-driven enterprise.

Source:

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/future-cities-davina-jackson/

1. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn By William J. Mitchell

This book was first published in 1995. It was one of the most important of a group of publications that showed the internet was going to rock our world. The critical thing about City of Bits is its structure of subheads that reveal many dichotomies between the old world and the post-internet world. Some examples are 'synchronicity versus asynchronicity', 'narrowband vs broadband', 'contiguous vs connected', 'human muscles vs robotic actuators', 'human brains vs artificial intelligence' and 'economics 101 vs economics 0 and 1'. In doing so, Bill literally reversed the meanings of many accepted situations, and thereby showed that 'infobahn' technology was a truly transformational episode in architectural history. And pretty much everything he wrote before the turn of this century has turned out to be correct.

2. The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture: City, Technology and Society in the Information Age by Federico Soriano, Fernando Porras, José Morales, Manuel Gausa, Vicente Guallart & Willy Müller

The authors of Metapolis were the founders of one of the world’s most innovative architecture schools, The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. They lead the continuation of Barcelona as one of the world’s most fertile cities for progressive applications of urban theory. In the format of a selective dictionary of cross-referenced terms, Metapolis identifies a new architectural will within the contemporary social and cultural panorama. It is valuable to clarify the origins and meanings of many words that were emerging in progressive discussions and publications, such as anarchitecture; impermanences; a-couplings; ad-herence and ecomonumentality. Collected together they form a global, cross-disciplinary, multi-voiced vision of new architectural action. The book speaks of an architecture inscribed in the information society and influenced by the new technologies, the new economy, environmental concerns and individual interests. The diversity of authors and works is invaluable for the generational intersections in theory discourse.

3. Cities in Civilization by Peter Hall

This is the masterwork written by the world’s greatest 20th century scholar and historian of cities. From the cultural crucibles of Athens in the sixth century BC to the city as freeway, Los Angeles , this book details how cities of the past were innovative for their day, and how technology changed them. If anyone wants to understand cities of the future, it’s critical to understand what future cities from the past can teach us.

4. The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life by Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel

Since cities emerged ten thousand years ago, they have become one of the most impressive artifacts of humanity. But their evolution has been anything but linear—cities have gone through moments of radical change, turning points that redefine their very essence. In this book, a renowned architect and urban planner who studies the intersection of cities and technology argues that we are in such a moment. The authors explain some of the forces behind urban change and offer new visions of the many possibilities for tomorrow's city. Pervasive digital systems that layer our cities are transforming urban life. The authors provide a front-row seat to this change. Their work at the MIT Senseable City Laboratory allows experimentation and implementation of a variety of urban initiatives and concepts, from assistive condition-monitoring bicycles to trash with embedded tracking sensors, from mobility to energy, from participation to production. They call for a new approach to envisioning cities: futurecraft, a symbiotic development of urban ideas by designers and the public. With such participation, we can collectively imagine, examine, choose, and shape the most desirable future of our cities.

Carlo was a student of Bill's at MIT: They set up the Smart Cities Lab together and worked on a project called the City Car, a technologically advanced vehicle that could be parked in a tight chain, like supermarket trolleys, and could be rented, like today’s car-sharing services. After Mitchell died in the early 2000s, Carlo carried on pioneering sensor-enabled urban research experiments as head of what he called the SENSEable City Lab. He suggests we don’t start with technology, that we start with the human needs, experiences and desires, and then use sensor devices to help deliver solutions. One of his latest projects is fitting sensors in city sewers to detect traces of drugs and other substances in human effluence. Government agencies can use the sensor data to detect where there is alarming use of prohibited substances or other indicators of health problems – including warning signs of a pandemic.

5. Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design and the Nature of Cities by Nicholas de Monchaux

With three billion more humans projected to be living in cities by 2050, all design is increasingly urban design. And with as much data now produced every day as was produced in all of human history to the year 2007, all architecture is increasingly information architecture. Local Code is a collection of data-driven tools and design prototypes for understanding and transforming the physical, social, and ecological resilience of cities.

The book's data-driven layout arranges drawings of 3,659 digitally-tailored interventions for vacant public land in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Venice, Italy. Between these illustrated case studies, critical essays present surprising and essential links between such designs and the seminal work of urbanist Jane Jacobs, artist Gordon Matta-Clark, and digital mapping pioneer Howard Fisher, along with the developing science of urban nature and complexity.

However the book's best content is three key essays by Nicholas which give unprecedented biographical histories of Gordon Matta-Clark, Jane Jacobs and a data cities pioneer from Harvard's Graduate School of Design, named Howard Fisher. At Harvard, Fisher developed a data-mapping system called SYMAP which relied on typing Os and Xs to visualise geographical terrain. This system was revolutionary in its day – too far ahead of its time. But Nicholas now has clarified how that system emerged from Harvard via one of Fisher's graduate students, Jack Dangermond, to become ubiquitous in today's environmental mapping industry. Dangermond organised to take Fisher's SYMAP methods out of Harvard and into his own entity called the Environmental Science and Research Institute, ESRI. Under Dangermond, Esri  has grown into a global multi-billion dollar software company, the world's leading GIS (geographic information systems) provider. Today, anyone in urban planning who needs to map anything – including for example the spread of the coronavirus epidemic – needs to use Esri maps and often its data to produce their visualizations. It's more or less a global monopoly that originated with Howard Fisher. He made not a penny from his invention – but that's how sometimes these things happen.

6. Data Cities: How Satellites Are Transforming Architecture And Design

Data Cities explains how rocket science and electronic technologies are transforming how we live and understand architecture, as networks of semiconductors, satellites, scanners, and sensors convert light into unprecedented formats and contents of information. Flows of data will inform our future behaviors in physical, virtual, and hybrid-reality situations, and architecture and cities are being reinvented as not merely static structures, but places that pulse. This book surveys exceptional projects created by leading architects, scientists, artists, engineers, geographers, urban planners, gamers, gardeners, filmmakers and musicians who are reimagining life on our planet — and elsewhere.

Related CityReads

162.CityReads│61 Books Nassim Taleb Recommends: 31-61（Click the title or enter our WeChat menu and reply number ）

CityReads ∣Notes On Cities

"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat, 

posts our notes on city reads weekly. 

Please follow us by searching "CityReads"