Urban Futures Designing the Digitalised City

Guest-edited by MARK BURRY

03 | Vol 90 | 2020

ffirs.indd 1 18/02/2020 10:50 Urban Futures 03/2020

Introduction A Socially Attuned About the Better to Make a Guest-Editor Good Future than Future: Memory, Predict a Bad One Geography and Mark Burry Urban Project Mark Burry 05 06 The Case of Metropolitan Barcelona Resisting Ferran Sagarra 14 Arrest

The Evolution Data-Informed of UNStudio Design

Thomas Daniell A Call for Theory 20 Thomas Kvan

26 Seeking an Urban Philosophy Perturbanism in Future Cities Carlo Ratti and the Senseable City Enhancing Sustainability in the Galapagos Islands through Complex Adaptive Systems Mark Burry Justyna Karakiewicz 32 38

UNStudio, Arnhem Central Station, Arnhem, The Netherlands, 2015 Augmenting Reality Diving Deep (Big-)Data-Informed Urban into Unknown Design and Planning Unknowns Bige Tunçer 52 People, Cities, Technology, Architecture and Architects

Ed Parham 44 ‘Small Pieces, Loosely Joined’

Practices for Super-local Homes, Communities Participative Urbanism and Games Dan Hill Constructing Social Agency 66 in Our Urban Futures

Shajay Bhooshan and Space Syntax, Astana (Nur-Sultan) 2030 masterplan, Kazakhstan, Alicia Nahmad Vazquez 2018

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ISSN 0003-8504 2 ISBN 978 1119 617563

ffirs.indd 2 18/02/2020 10:50 Guest-edited by Mark Burry

Matt Daniels / The Pudding, ‘Human Terrain: Visualizing the World’s Population, in 3D’, From Digital Cities 2018 to Biocities

Harnessing the Power of the Digital Revolution to Reinvent the Urban Ecology Model Synaesthetic Architecture Vicente Guallart 72 A Building Dreams

Refi k Anadol Data-Driven 76 Urbanism The Balance Between Spatial Intelligence and Urban Experiment Design Craftsmanship Taking Off on the Shan He Wind of AI 86 Wanyu He

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A Perennial Architects Without Practice Architecture

Designing Between How Transdisciplinary Urban Landscape Studios Reposition for and Urban Network 21st-Century Challenges

Philip Belesky Dan Hill 100 108

Sharon Wu, Projections of mangrove growth in the Watson Inlet, From ‘T’ to ‘π’ RMIT University, Melbourne, (pi)-shaped people 2017

Better Urban Practice through Dual Depth in Architecture and Planning Education Smart Who? Jane Burry and Marcus White Collective Intelligence 114 Urban Design Models

Areti Markopoulou From Another Perspective 122 Cyberspace: Speculative Futures of the Recent Past

Neil Spiller Contributors 128 134

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ffirs.indd 4 18/02/2020 10:50 Mark Burry is a practising architect who has published and exhibited internationally on two main themes: putting theory into

ABOUT THE practice with regard to procuring ‘challenging’ architecture, and the GUEST-EDITOR life, work and theories of the architect Antoni Gaudí. He has been Senior Architect to the Sagrada Família Basilica Foundation since

MARK BURRY 1979, pioneering distant collaboration with his colleagues based on-site in Barcelona until late 2016. His recent publications include Scripting Cultures (John Wiley & Sons, 2011), Prototyping for Architects (Thames & Hudson, 2016) and the four-volume Digital Architecture (2020), part of the Routledge Critical Concepts in Architecture series. He is the Founding Director of the Swinburne University of Technology’s Smart Cities Research Institute (SCRI) in Melbourne, Australia, an appointment he took up in May 2017. His role is to lead the development of a whole-of-university research approach to ‘urban futures’, helping ensure that our future cities anticipate and meet the needs of all – smart citizens participating in the development of smart cities. He is acutely aware that urban designers should focus on ensuring that today’s citizens, especially young people, are prioritised through providing them with a credible route to helping defi ne the future urban environment they will grow old in: cities designed with people, not for people. His principal research goal is to help develop and test a practical framework that supports the exploration of options for vibrant city living extending at least two generations into the future. New approaches to envisaging liveability scenarios realistically up to fi ve decades forward are sought and trialled, with the aim of harnessing productively the ongoing technological disruption that we all know lies ahead. His second research goal is to develop and test creative means to learn of individual needs, preferences, and ideas for future cities through innovative social enquiry, by exploiting the ubiquity of smart devices and the Internet of Things (IoT). He believes in the role of the university as supporting essential transdisciplinary urban design research into complex future-oriented transformations such as the ‘smart city’ (‘transdisciplinary’ here implies working across diverse disciplines on project-based research with at least one external partner drawn from practice, industry and/or local government). He contends that only a university can genuinely provide neutral ground for critical urban futures debate: whatever position individuals may have, the academic institution itself has none except for the pursuit of excellence under an umbrella of intellectual rigour. In 2001 he founded the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) at RMIT University in Melbourne before establishing the Design Research Institute (DRI) in 2008. He held an Australian Research Council-funded Federation Fellowship in ‘Complex Architecture and Convergent Design’ from 2007 to 2012. He joined the University of Melbourne in 2014 as Professor of Urban Futures in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning where he helped develop its capacity to consolidate research in urban futures, drawing together and augmenting expertise in urban visualisation, analytics and policy. 1

Text © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image © Swinburne University of Technology

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ffirs.indd 5 18/02/2020 10:50 INTRODUCTION

MARK BURRY

Better to Make a Good Future than Predict a Bad One

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cintro.indd 6 18/02/2020 10:49 This issue of 2 peers into possible urban futures, placing the role of the designer and the rapidly digitalised city at the fore. Cities are constantly changing – only in recession are there no cranes on the urban skyline. Society is in constant fl ux too, and technological shifts cause social convulsions when, out of nowhere, forces such as digitalisation disrupt every familiar aspect of urban design, construction, and city management systems and services. Furthermore, digitalisation is having the same levels of disruption today as that endured by previous generations during the different phases of the Industrial Revolution, though perhaps more left-fi eld, and less physically apparent. Digitalisation is not just challenging all that is familiar about urban life; it is introducing a whole set of opportunities in the right hands (or threats in the wrong hands) such as massive data capture on just about everything that happens, and on everything we do. Real-time urban analytics, transport systems optimised to be more effi cient, enablement of the share economy, mass surveillance and targeted advertising are prime examples.

Envisaging and Envisioning Urban Futures With the rapid digitalisation of everything, there is a tendency for thinking that big data and urban analytics are all so new that pre-digitalisation urban design milestones can be casually disregarded. Prominent pioneers who envisaged the future city (actively conceiving and foreseeing a desirable outcome) as well as envisioning the same (visualising a future outcome) did so without today’s urban design computation tools and algorithms. Around the same time that Engineer Ildefons Cerdà produced his Teoría General de la Urbanización (General Theory of Urbanisation) in 18671 as an adjunct to his truly remarkable 1859 project for the extension of the medieval city of Barcelona into a modern metropolis without equal, English physician John Snow traced the source of the 1854 cholera epidemic in London using a novel technique.2 Both Cerdà and Snow used data as the precursor to their urban interventions: in Cerdà’s case the proposal for a healthy modern city was derived through urban analytics as an antidote for contemporary ills. His statistical proof of overcrowding leading to poor health was new knowledge at that time. Snow mapped sites of individual cholera fatalities; thereby using visualised data to zero-in on the source of the outbreak. There are other notable instances of urban analytics infl uencing urban design before the arrival of the computer. A relatively obscure example is mid-20th-century Melbourne, Australia. In 1946, Ernst Fooks published his seminal book X-Ray the City!, an impressive work diagnostically seeking

Ildefonso Cerdà, Plan for urban extension to Barcelona, Spain, 1859

Captured from the air in 2019, Cerdà’s extension to medieval Barcelona is shown as a triumph of creative pragmatism. His system, more than just a plan, was able to absorb the Gothic Quarter (top of the image), the outlying village of Gràcia (bottom), major thoroughfares such as Passeig de Gràcia (linking the two), and the ‘Diagonal’, all already in existence. How is it that a century of New World, African and Asian city planners have missed all the subtleties of Cerdà’s approach, which were fully documented as his General Theory of Urbanisation in 1867?

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cintro.indd 7 18/02/2020 10:49 the root causes of Melbourne’s already disastrous suburban sprawl.3 He also drew on a wide variety of datasets (his urban ‘x-ray’) to prove that rapidly expanding Melbourne required rebooting into a polycentric city, explicitly set up to ensure that all citizens would live close to work, shops, administrative centres, education and hospitals. Today Melburnians rue the absolute lack of any meaningful take-up of Fooks’s brilliantly derived and visualised advice. Can we assume that the next generation of visionaries will be more effective with their digital workbenches? The contributors to this 2 suggest that there is plenty of potential, especially through such an expanded fi eld of operation and a wide talent pool. The digitalised city needs to be designed: can the urban designer claim the conceit that this is naturally their task? If it is, how might they shape their role to facilitate the urban Alfred Guesdon, fabric’s optimal evolution and link it with corresponding View of the Turia river from the north with the old city of Valencia beyond, societal transitions? The contributors to this issue are Valencia, Spain, identifi ed among those who should lead the design of 1853 the new or growing city, for which natural authorship has Such representations of the love of a city transcend big data. otherwise become a contested territory. For the urban Pre-digital-era holistic aerial appraisal of Valencia without the advantage of drones and cameras, let alone a neighbouring designer the two-dimensionality of the planners’ city mountain from which to construct this three-point perspective. view and urban construct is as limiting as the engineers’ The river, however, fl ooded regularly. predilection to zero-in and straightforwardly solve problems. This 2 contends that society needs a much broader professional brush than we have been used to applying in the past: if not a transdisciplinary team, then at least interdisciplinarily inclined urban design professionals who can reach across the gap between the rich philosophy and utter mundanity of urban existence. With their creative eyes they are surely the most capable of drawing out the best of all those involved in informing appropriately adaptive urban futures. The issue collates contributions from selected internally resourceful visionaries who meld the relevant sociology, geography, logistics and systems theory with the practical realities and challenges of sustainable material supply and its subsequent end-of-life disposal mobility, food and water security, energy supply and waste management. Crucially, these visionaries seek to ensure better urban futures with an assured civil and expanded convivial urban experience for all city dwellers.

Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura (RBTA), Conversion of the former Turia riverbed to a linear park, Valencia, Spain, 1988

The triumph of vision in the face of adversity. In response to major fl oods, Valencia, Spain’s third city, completed the diversion of the River Turia in 1966. The conversion of the former riverbed to a 15-hectare (37-acre) urban park with trees, fountains and water features, and sports and cultural venues was completed in 1988, giving the city a unique linear park and unimpeded active transport avenue across the city.

Ernst Fooks, Cover of X-Ray the City!, 1946

The failure of prescience. Architect and urban designer Ernst Fooks, an émigré to Australia just before the Second World War, X-rayed the rapidly growing city of Melbourne, prescribing a dose of polycentrism to ensure that no citizen would be distant from home, work, education, hospital or playground. His advice was not followed.

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cintro.indd 8 18/02/2020 10:49 Urban metastasis in southwest Melbourne, Australia, This 3 contends that society 2019

Melbourne is currently the developed world’s fastest-growing needs a much broader professional major city, but it is growing faster than any sensible urban future strategy can be devised, let alone enacted. Typical of any massively booming city in the New World, Africa, Asia or brush than we have been used to Latin America, prime agricultural land is rapaciously demoted to host urban sprawl. applying in the past

Room for single-unit houses and asphalt and not much more in low-density peri-urban Melbourne, 2019

The triumph of banality – are these the slums of the future? Melbourne is home to globally leading architectural practices, nearly all at arm’s length from positively infl uencing the suburban metastasis. Heedless of generations of good advice, the suburbs lack any civic grace or presence, nor proximity to centres of work, a consequence of which is worsening congestion.

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cintro.indd 9 18/02/2020 10:49 The Future Urban Condition: Much More than This 2 is intended to recontextualise urban futures as only the ‘Smart City’ one component of the barometer for improving urban life What is so different about our time that pushes 2 to through design, and not the whole instrument. The sine qua prognosticate on ‘urban futures’ today? The ‘smart non for the issue is an unabashed emphasis on technology-led city’ is already fi rmly established as a loose-fi t cliché analysis and option seeking, along with intelligent problem- to encompass the role played by information and solving. Given the rapid evolution of urban technologies, who communication technologies (ICT) in making cities more are the architects riding the wave of the new possibilities for user-friendly, sustainable and resilient for their citizens. In urban design? How do contemporary agencies fi nd pathways this issue, sensor-driven responsiveness leading to smart to understanding the challenges and opportunities presented street lighting, smart parking, smart traffi c management by evolving urban technology, and how does architecture and so on is the least of it; as a label, the smart city masks engage with the other rapidly expanding pool of associated a far more fundamental challenge in the fi eld of urban disciplines? And which are the schools of architecture and design and, at the same time, a set of opportunities. urban design already engaging with ‘radical urbanism’, if not The digitalisation of society offers today’s urban smart cities? To tackle these questions, the issue comprises designers new routes to speculating on how the future three loosely assembled subthemes: a theoretical foundation; built environment might be, and its relationships to some accounts of contemporary future-oriented activity; and outlying rural hinterlands and the dwindling wilderness speculations on future practice and education. beyond. Such creative speculation is critically different to predicting the future. Through referencing our knowledge of the past and its historical interpretation, what can we Interactive urban flow installation, Singapore City Gallery, read from this? And what can we read from today’s rapidly Singapore, changing reality in order to be able to construct credible 2019 and plausible scenarios for achievable enhanced urban Home of urban future thinking, this clean and tidy city state has futures? What are the emerging tools and techniques that morphed into an exciting beacon of urban density enlivened by intense urban experience. Is Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment help us ensure future prosperity and its augmentation, not Agency, host to the Singapore City Gallery, a beacon of what only sustainably, but also in a manner that corrects the happens when thinking about urban futures is unimpeded by the short-termism of Western democracy, and citizens are gifted with a environmental damage already caused? comprehensive facility to X-ray their city?

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cintro.indd 10 18/02/2020 10:49 How Might Others Learn from an Established Contemporary Practice Predicated on Tackling the Future Theoretical Basis? Traditionally, data analysis has been the pursuit of new The cyclical view of history determines that we are knowledge through seeking answers to known unknowns: bound to repeat our mistakes, and in terms of the urban relational sets of data are computationally plundered for environment indeed we do: common examples are the the secrets that are invisibly contained within, inaccessible bloated commercial malls built on the periphery to stimulate to even the trained eye. New algorithms and increased the local economy with the unintended consequence of computational power and agility offer researchers entirely exacerbating town-centre decimation, and adding extra lanes new possibilities: those that come from ‘inferencing’. As to urban freeways to relieve traffi c congestion, but inevitably the research team at NASA faced when plunging into the achieving the opposite. Will today’s emerging visualisation depths of space for answers to questions they were not able technologies allow principal stakeholders and end users to frame through not knowing what the questions were, alike to ‘see’ the potential ramifi cations of decisions directed multidisciplinary teams of urban futures analysts can now, for at boosting possible futures in time to disrupt the cycle of the fi rst time, seek answers by computationally delving into repeated mistakes? the vast sets of interdisciplinary datasets that are emerging Contributions on this theme include Ferran Sagarra, who today: delving deeply into the unknown unknowns of urban discusses the drive towards a more ‘socially attuned future’ future experience. (pp 14–19); Thomas Daniell, looking back at UNStudio’s pioneering contributions (pp 20–25); Thomas Kvan’s call for data-informed design theory (pp 26–31); Carlo Ratti’s drive for an urban philosophy (pp 32–7); Justyna Karakiewicz Weston Williamson + Partners, Anaklia Smart City (ASC), on transitioning to sustainability using complex adaptive Georgia, systems (pp 38–43); Ed Parham, diving deep into the 2019 unknown unknowns (pp 44–51); and Bige Tunçer on data Melding the existing with a visionary response to the need to grow augmenting reality for better-informed urban design and through intelligently harnessing big data. This planned new smart city is positioned to become the premier hub of the Black Sea planning (pp 52–9). coast. The architects used computational methodologies to iterate design options parametrically, responding to layered datasets, and conceiving a series of distinct but complementary industry clusters connected by a sustainable urban infrastructure corridor.

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cintro.indd 11 18/02/2020 10:49 Weston Williamson + Partners, Circular City, 2018

left: Conceiving of radical new models for the ideal city of the future, this concept for transport-oriented development puts liveability at the centre of a connected, concentric and pedestrianised urban morphology. The city is thought of as a node built around a high-speed rail station with everything citizens need to live, work and relax in close proximity, and privately owned vehicles entirely replaced by electric autonomous buses.

Mark Burry and Marcus White with MGS Architects, iHUB, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, 2020

opposite: iHUB is a federally funded, interconnected digital pin-up space and workbench hosted at fi ve Australian universities. Potential ‘urban futures’ can be debated in a reconfi gurable set of pods where experts, government offi cials, suppliers, managers and citizens, all hooked up to the pods simultaneously, can participate (rather than merely engage) in ‘what-if’ scenario testing, drawing on real-time analysis of many datasets, and collaborating across Australia’s four principal cities. Render by Awnili Shabnam.

Shajay Bhooshan and Alicia Nahmad Vazquez are among of multiple futures contingent on how effectively emerging the contributors to this section of the issue who use game technologies are embraced across the disciplines and engines to construct social agency in our urban futures (pp professions. It does not purport to be comprehensive in any 60–65). Dan Hill looks at practices oriented towards super- way; it is more a sampler. local participative urbanism (pp 108–11), and Vicente Guallart The issue naturally falls under an ‘urban design’ explores harnessing the power of the digital revolution to umbrella, but it marries critical aspects of past and present reinvent the urban ecology model (pp 72–5). understanding of the urban condition and its foundation with a view to concocting approaches to harness big Future Practice and Education data and rapidly emerging analytics and visualisation The complexity of the datasets being accessed by designers technologies affording glimpses of possible urban futures. requires a representational sophistication to assist in For the established architect, engineer, planner and urban explaining the signifi cance of the analysis of their discoveries designer, there are some crucial insights to inform ways to to a wider circle. Emerging advances in visualisation afford transform these insular professional guilds. For the many multidimensional displays that blur the distinction between students becoming part of a crowded space endlessly visualisation aiding discovery for the analyst (envisaging), ‘parametrising’ this-and-that cool effect at the building scale, and visualisation aiding comprehension for the end user the issue encourages the scaling-up of their newfound skills (envisioning). In this latter case the end user is the designer from building-as-object to the city-as-system. who will enact scenarios based on the discoveries made by The ‘smart city’ technologies embraced are grounded on the analyst. There is still a vast gulf to be bridged between seeking opportunities rather than providing answers. They analyst and designer: analysts are not used to preparing focus on diagnostically identifying future challenges, and their discoveries as design inputs, and neither are designers reacting positively to them, principally the ongoing mass trained to work with big data. global migration to cities; the pressure to increase access to Contributors working in this fi eld include Refi k Anadol more affordable housing; ensuring a safe supply of clean exploring synaesthetic architecture (pp 76–85); Shan He water and fresh food; equity in access to essential services commandeering data-driven urbanism (pp 86–93); Wanyu He such as health and education; and transport infrastructure. using AI for urban experimentation (pp 94–9); Philip Belesky Increasing levels of automation are used to increase, not designing between urban landscape and urban network (pp diminish, work opportunities across both stable and 100–107); and Dan Hill repositioning architecture for 21st- growing urban populations offering a far more sophisticated century challenges through transdisciplinary studios (pp response than just ‘problem solving’. The core postulation 108–13). Jane Burry and Marcus White propose broadening here contrasts an ‘urban futures’ approach to that of ‘city urban design practice through looking at combining crucial futures’. Whereas city futures is inclined to push for a aspects of architecture and planning education (pp 114–21), predicted outcome derived from a prescribed set of and Areti Markopoulou discusses urban design models drawn sequential actions within a more or less scientifi c framework, from collective intelligence (pp 122–7). an urban futures approach, conversely, is one of alternative envisaged ‘what if?’ scenarios competing against each other. Avoiding the Technology Trap Such scenarios are tested for viability using a wider range of While intended to be neither positivistic nor pessimistic, this discipline perspectives than we are used to working with. issue of 2 is anything but utopian: it tackles future urban Rival scenarios can be deconstructed backwards to build a society’s differing ranges of expectations and realities – ‘how did we get there?’ model set of conditions and actions, mostly tempered by increasing inequality. It proposes a range leading to an assessment of relative viability.

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cintro.indd 12 18/02/2020 10:49 There is still a vast gulf to be bridged between analyst and designer: analysts are not used to preparing their discoveries as design inputs, and neither are designers trained to work with big data.

It seems remiss not to conclude with the topical and Is automation threatening the designer’s role? Like Gordon, highly relevant thoughts of two leading economists: Robert J Frey observes that growth is fundamentally declining, noting Gordon and Carl Benedikt Frey. that ‘Only half of Americans born in 1980 are economically Robert J Gordon insightfully links the ‘shape’ of modern better off than their parents, compared to 90 percent of those cities globally to a century of ‘Great Inventions’ – in born in 1940’.6 He concludes that technology is not necessarily particular electricitic light and power, sanitation, chemical driving society towards an inevitably brighter destiny; rather and pharmaceutical manufacturing, the internal combustion that we will increasingly face challenges in the domain engine, and modern communication – but he argues that of political economy, not technology. Dystopia does not overall growth is fundamentally declining.4 Frey’s recently necessarily beckon, however, and to paraphrase Isaac Asimov, published The Technology Trap (2019) identifi es a condition this issue of 2 attests that urban designers demonstrably where automated labour (principally robots) could lead to have the unique ability to ‘make’ urban futures rather than a new Luddite era, in which their introduction is forcefully ‘predict’ them.7 resisted in reaction to their disruption to the status quo – Notes 5 the ‘technology trap’. Although Frey’s book concludes with 1. Ildefonso Cerdà, Teoría general de la urbanización, y aplicación de sus principios y a more-or-less optimistic message, its central proposition doctrinas a la reforma y ensanche de Barcelona, Imprenta Española (Madrid), 1867. 2. Simon Rogers, ‘John Snow’s Data Journalism: the Cholera Map that Changed the World’, is one where society globally risks a repeat of the fi rst The Guardian, 15 March 2013: www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/mar/15/john- Industrial Revolution. He recalls all the negative social snow-cholera-map. 3. Ernest Fooks, X-Ray the City! The Density Diagram: Basis for Urban Planning, Ruskin and political consequences of industrial innovation and Press (Melbourne), 1946. points out that it took three generations of workers before 4. Robert J Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2017. any worker could be shown to have benefi tted fi nancially 5. Carl Benedikt Frey, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labour, and Power in the Age of from automation that defi ned the Industrial Revolution. Automation, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2019. 6. Carl Benedikt Frey, op cit, Kindle edition location 332, citing R Chetty et al., 2017, ‘The Workers were fi nally released from occupational hazards Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940’, Science, 356 and drudgery of factory life only after the publicised horrors (6336), 2017, pp 398–406. 7. Isaac Asimov, Prelude to Foundation, Random House (New York), 2012, p 29. forced parliamentary legislation to improve conditions including worker compensation. This is to say, only factory Text © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 6-7 satellite image © 2019 Maxar Technologies; owners and investors profi ted from the rstfi seven decades p 8(c) © Ricardo Bofi ll Taller de Arquitectura; pp 8(b), 13 photos Mark Burry; p 9(t) Google Earth. Imagery © 2019 CNES / Airbus, Landsat / Copernicus, Maxar Technologies. Map data © 2019; p of industrialisation. 9(b) Google Earth; pp 11-12 © Weston Williamson + Partners

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