This message has been cross posted to the following Discussion Forums: Committee on the Environment and Regional and Urban Design Committee .
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Cities now represent the core hubs of the global economy, acting as hives of innovation in technical, financial and other services. (A quote from a 2011 brochure titled "the new economics of Cities")
Cities and metro regions have become the dominant human life-form, Cities are considered nimbler, easier to govern and therefore more innovative than states and countries. Many Cities have become the drivers in sustainability, in resilience, in local food production and in alternative transport.
Increasingly mayors collaborate across continents such as in the
Global Cities Initiative, a five-year project that aims to help leaders in U.S. metropolitan areas reorient their economies toward greater engagement in world markets.
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| Is big data nothing but a quest for another utopia? |
In this context it is obvious that urban design has to step up its game.
No longer can the model be the "Collage City" as architectural historian Collin Rowe had called it, an artful juxtaposition of fragments. It can't be merely self organization as Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has occasionally propagated it in his reporting from Lagos. Certainly, it won't do any longer to represent cities with analogue wood models.
Can big data, open data, and real- time measurements of everything get us to such a thing as "evidence based urban design", fact-based city planning, and an approach that thinks long-term instead of in election cycles? In other words, can Smart Cities technology, i.e. the transition from analogue to digital, bring about a more holistic, system-based and scientific approach to city planning? Can a more scientific, data based approach address issues of equity?
The answer depends on whom one asks. The topic of the digital city promises Read full article -------------------------------------------
Klaus Philipsen FAIA
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
Baltimore MD
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