Taller, greener, smarter and home-based
Artists'
impressions of tomorrow's urban utopias usually depict cities of
giant towers, some bulbous or twisting, others connected by walkways
in the sky and buzzed by flying cars. The reality could be more
practical, liveable and equally imaginative.
Significantly,
we, the people, may have a bigger say in how our cities evolve. The
BMW Guggenheim Lab, a collaboration between the car-maker and art
museum, is an ideas forum for urban design which is holding a rolling
programme of talks in cities around the world. Discussions held at
its first stop, New York, suggest future cities will be shaped
increasingly at grass-roots level by ordinary citizens says Thomas
Girst, BMW Group spokesman. “Small urban experiments initiated from
a culture of participation, crowd sourcing, community cohesiveness...
will inspire larger, city and region-wide efforts aimed at urban
improvement,” says Girst.
Despite
the Lab's initial findings, planning professionals dominate thinking
for now, and 'Place-making' is one of their favourite buzzwords.
Instead of dividing a city into distinct residential, retail, office
and industrial zones, the idea is for districts to become a mix of
these elements, so it is alive all hours of the day, and enables
people to live close to their work places, shops and leisure
facilities, saving them time and money on travel. Early examples
include the City of London which, in addition to being Europe's key
financial district, is now a prime residential area, because it has
changed from being a place where hardly anybody lived to become home
to 9,000 people, many of them residing in new, luxury apartment
blocks, such as The Heron.
The
future city will be high tech. Companies like Siemans, Philips and
Cisco Systems promote 'smart cities' where technological innovations
like wireless sensor networks will be installed by authorities to
manage resources better, such as dimming and brightening street
lighting depending on when it is needed most. Jeroen Beekmans,
partner at Golfstromen, a creative agency based in Amsterdam, works
with Phillips to explore how intelligent technologies, such as
Internet accessing smart-phones, can shape cities. He believes
citizens may manage public functions like street lighting in future.
“Now we all have a smartphone, but in ten years we might wear
innovative glasses that turn the city into an operating system,” he
says.
Another
technological development to watch is 3-D printing. Using blueprints
stored on the Internet, 3-D printers can print out objects like
chairs and door knobs using plastic or metal powder as 'ink'.
Scientists are looking to bring down costs so we can have 3-D
printers at home to print out smaller objects, and machines in high
street premises to produce larger pieces. If realised, this
technology will speed up the demise of traditional retailing which
has been battered by on-line shopping, leading to fewer shops on our
high streets. We may also see buildings constructed with 3-D
printers. Loughborough University has developed a machine to print
out wall sections with cavities for cabling. If the machine becomes
commercially viable, then construction of buildings will become
faster, because developers can install 3-D printed sections, rather
than fabricate walls on site.
The
Internet is enabling more people to work from home, so companies will
need fewer offices in future, which means fewer and smaller office
districts. In place of offices we have work hubs appearing in
suburban and central city districts to accommodate home workers who
want to work outside of the house part of the week, mainly so they
can enjoy human company. Operating like gyms, these hubs have desks,
phones, printers and even cafes and libraries for users who pay
monthly membership charges. More people working from home means fewer
people commuting, so the relentless expansion of roads and commuter
railways could ease up in many cities, possibly stop and even go into
reverse, assisting another trend, pedestrianisation.
On
New York's Manhattan Island, a three kilometre long stretch of
overhead railway has been closed and turned into The High Line Park
pedestrian walkway. In central London, Braham Street, a previously
busy four lane road, has become Braham Park, a quiet, green oasis.
London is following the example of the Netherlands by turning some
roads, like Exhibition Road in Kensington, into shared spaces that
cars and pedestrians both use. It slows down traffic and is safe, but
irritates drivers, because they have to negotiate pedestrians in
their path, leading some of them to leave the car at home.
Reducing
traffic in cities is part of a wider drive to make them Greener, so
too are low carbon building projects which are appearing in greater
numbers. In Helsinki, British engineers and designers, Arup, leads an
international team master-planning a Dhs272million low carbon
housing, office and retail complex called Low2No on behalf of Finnish
development partners Sitra, SRV and VVO. Intended to be a role model
for other low CO2 schemes, the 22,000 square meter project will have
energy efficient buildings made from sustainable materials like wood
and an off-site wind farm to offset carbon emissions.
Some
new eco-districts are being named after the company that builds them,
so we may expect some future urban landscapes to become branded
products just like groceries. For example, Masdar City in the UAE is
named after Masdar, a renewable energy subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi
government-owned Mubadala Development Company. When fully complete in
2025 the city will be home to 40,000 people and a showcase for
renewable energy and clean industries developed by the company's
recently built Masdar Institute of Science and Technology.
London
studio, Foster + Partners, is designing Masdar City to be energy
efficient. Buildings are being constructed close to each other to
create wind canyons and to ensure the sun only shines for one hour a
day in these narrow pedestrian corridors, a passive cooling system
for buildings and pedestrians that reduces the need for active
cooling systems like air conditioning. This design follows the
pattern of traditional Arab cities which maximised shady areas. This
means future cities may provide opportunities for design ideas from
the past to make a come back.
However,
not all schemes come to fruition. In China, developer SIIC had plans
to build Dongtan, an eco-city near Shanghai. The first phase was
scheduled for completion in 2010, but it remains un-built and so does
the remainder of the city which was intended to become home for
500,000 people. Arup master-planned this city, but implementation has
been postponed indefinitely by the developer with no explanation
given.
Unrealised
dreams like Dongtan have led some architects like Austin Williams,
director of the Future Cities Project, to argue that the current
emphasis on sustainability and low impact architecture has resulted
in poor quality design and urban planning.
Usually,
we think of cities getting bigger, but some could shrink. Some
already are. In the US city of Detroit, 12,000 homes have been
abandoned by people escaping economic decline for better times
elsewhere. Those houses that don't fall down are knocked down. Civic
authorities are attempting to consolidate who and what is left behind
into a smaller, manageable unit, so homes are no longer separated by
acres of “urban prairie” as exists in some parts of the city now.
Of
course, the Detroit authorities might want to consider taking
advantage of this enforced ruralisation to adopt the Roman principle
of rus in urbe,
of deliberately bringing the countryside into the city to make it a
greener, healthier place. This principle exists in the British city
of Bath where sheep graze in parks within the city centre, and in the
London suburb of Richmond which has a dairy farm open to the public.
Cowboys in Detroit? It may happen.
