Make Cities Smarter, Greener and Healthier
Inspired by Carlo Ratti’s work with the World Economic Forum, we sought out five real-world approaches and projects that are already changing the game.
1 FAST-FORWARD MOBILITY
With self-driving cars, “you could get rid of 20 per cent of the vehicles in Boston or New York,” Ratti says, reducing congestion and emissions. With driverless vehicles and car sharing, a single automobile
“To see the potential for transformation, you ask design questions, exploring how things could be. Then you use science, which looks at how things are, to find the answers.”
moves a number of people to and from work, school or errands. Smarter dockless bike-share systems can fill in the elusive last mile of transit journeys. Leading the way:
Ofo and Mobike, pioneers of the dockless bike systems taking China by storm, make use of GPS, sensors and smart locks to monitor fleets of cheap bikes, which riders can pick up and drop off wherever they like. Though the ad hoc nature might seem problematic for a well-planned system, Mobike’s promise to share data with planners has attracted the interest of cities such as Singapore and Manchester, U.K.
2 RE-PROGRAM SPACE
Design with multiple purposes in mind, says Ratti. A parking garage, for instance, can be made multi-functional by including areas for sports or events, or adaptable so that when people start using driverless cars, space that is freed up in garages can be repurposed as marketplaces or gardens. Leading the way:
In central Seoul, MVRDV transformed 983 metres →
of abandoned elevated highway into Skygarden. The raised park brings abundant native flora to a grey downtown and makes the city more walkable, with better pedestrian connections to hotels and shops. As other sections of road are eventually repurposed, the plan is to connect them to Skygarden as satellite green spaces.
3 THINK SMALL
Large-scale infrastructure such as highways and bridges will always be a priority for cities.
But don’t underestimate the small stuff. “Human-scale projects – such as new bike lanes, the conversion of disused lots into green spaces, and tree planting – have a bigger impact on urban space than we tend to think,” says Ratti. Leading the way:
Swale is a forest built on an old
barge that floats in the Hudson River. Last year it welcomed
60,000 visitors to harvest greens and vegetables for free. As waterways aren’t covered by restrictive city foraging laws, this simple project can easily sail up to piers that front the city’s food deserts to provide education and nutrition.
4 REDIRECT YOUR ENERGY
Cities will always have large energy footprints, but they can be much smarter about how they spend them. New “quad generation” plants can capture excess heat generated by a power station or factory and use it to heat or cool buildings. These plants can also redirect CO2 to other industrial applications. Leading the way:
When it opens in
2018, Copenhagen’s rebuilt Amager Bakke power plant will convert 400,000 tonnes of annual waste into heat for 120,000 households, among a multitude of other uses. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, the plant promises to minimize emissions; its chimney will emit a laser-illuminated smoke ring into the Copenhagen skyline every time a ton of CO2 has been released. But the real kicker is the plant’s sloping roof, which will be used as a public ski slope.
5 LISTEN TO THE STREETS
A responsive, humancentred city is one where mutations are allowed to happen based on real-world use. Through a combination of social media and live data that reflect how a city works in real time, citizens can advocate for how the streets around them should evolve. Realtime information on traffic flow and public transit help people plan their commutes while paving the way for more efficient allocation of vehicles during peak hours. Leading the way:
Kansas City’s Smart City initiative puts a public-facing window on a bustling subset of the city’s data, gathered from sensors installed in streetlights. While citizens can now monitor parking, transit conditions and foot traffic, the city can use the same tools for live visualization of everything from crime hotspots to trash collection.