The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life

摘要

One way to understand the shape of cities is to understand how the urban environment coevolves with technological culture, and how technologies impact city-making, planning, and inhabitation. In the twentieth century, technologies such as industrialization, railways, electrification, automobiles, highway construction, zoning, skyscrapers, and logistics had profound influence on the physical form and operation of cities. It is now becoming clear that digital information and communications technologies-increasingly pervasive, embedded, personalized, and interconnected-are having equally profound impacts on the twenty-first century city. As these technologies become more capable of dynamically adapting, learning, and making decisions in real time, the way that cities work, look, and are experienced will undoubtedly continue to be transformed. However, unlike the technologies of the twentieth century, information technologies have had relatively less impact on the physical architecture of the city; nonetheless, they are profoundly changing how architecture performs, how it is experienced, perceived, and enacted.1 For designers trained primarily to work through physical space and form, this reorientation toward use and behavior is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of data-driven urban technologies, requiring a reassessment of design language, tools, and forms of practice in order to realize the role of design within the context of the informational city.