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The future does not belong to the cities. The future belongs to
humans, and humans love cities. What if we think about a new way to look
at cities, and a new way to approach the concept of modernity? We have
to overpass the idea of modernity we had in the XX century: “tabula rasa”,
destroy everything, get rid of everything. Think of Le Corbusier in the
1920s and his “Plan Voisin” for rethinking Paris: here we can see a picture
of an architect behaving like an omnipotent god calling forth the floods to
wipe the earth clean and build something new in its place. But architects
aren’t gods — and we can’t think like that anymore. We have to forget this
“rip it up and start again” attitude. Instead, my idea is to find a different
kind of modernity, to get into a better future.
So, what about the cities? People say that cities are growing,
but they aren’t growing uniformly. In Japan, Europe, and the United
States, cities are not growing — and the population is declining. So,
are cities booming? Yes. But not everywhere. When we hear about
new neighborhoods rising around the world, we do not hear of neighbor-
hoods, but slums or favelas. So we have to think about how cities
are growing, and what architecture as a profession can address their
needs as they grow.
We know the planet is spinning out of control, and what once
seemed to be problems for the future, are now problems for the present.
Temperature rising; overpopulation…
Let me give a little example — ever since I was a child, I would go to the
mountains, but these days I can’t bring myself to see how the glaciers that
dominated them are diminishing — in the last two years we lost as much
ice in the European Alps as the previous 20. These problems are acceler-
ating and architecture is at the core of that because it deals with the
built environment.
We know that cities are responsible for the majority of global
emissions, and we also know that the architecture that shaped them has
been part of the problem. I think that now architecture can be part of the
solution. What comes to my mind is what Richard Buckminster Fuller said
about “Utopia or Oblivion”. If all architects think about is designing door
handles, well, it’ll be oblivion. But if architecture properly confronts the
problems we are facing, then we could make a real difference.
Thinking about modernity also means to think about technology.
Do we have all the technology that we need, or do we need new ones?
The first thing I would say is that architecture is technology. But technology
is not the solution. As English architect Cedric Price asked in 1966,
“Technology is the answer, but what is the question?” His quip is just as
relevant today as it was then. We have all the technology we need, but it
is up to human beings to fix our problems. And climate change is a crucial
challenge, together with social challenges… and I don’t think they are just
about technology. They’re about us.
How do we start? By collecting information. Ildefonso Cerdà, the
visionary urbanist who designed and expanded Barcelona, hoped in
his 1867 book, the General Theory of Urbanization, that the future would
be something different — through data. Today, looking into data is part
of our daily routine. But this wasn’t the case in 2006 when we started
a project called “Real Time Rome” at our lab at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. In that project, we showed a different way to look at cities,
because data helped us to see not only the physical city — bricks, stones,
roads, etc. — but a city made of flows, of connections, of people. For
the first time, Ildefonso Cerdà’s dream was a reality. Analyzing data allows
us to understand and describe relationships and connections between
people as part of the complexity of cities, to design better ones.
I am not saying that data could solve everything. We know there is
a huge danger in collecting data. When we did “Real Time Rome” we had
less data than today. It’s no mystery that with a smartphone in our pockets, we
collect tons and tons of data every single day: where we are, what we are look-
ing at, how we are moving (by foot, by bike, by car)... information that goes in
servers in Silicon Valley, creating a “digital twin” of ourselves. How we allow
data to be collected is a big problem and we need to ask for a better way to
deal with data on a global scale (e.g. GDPR in Europe).
This discussion needs to be consistent, but I think many dangers
are not related to the study of city architecture. First of all, because we are
dealing with anonymous flows, and secondly, because this information
allows architects to see the built environment in a non-monolithic way.
There is a big group of people — in academia and architecture schools —
who want to bring nature into the building world. Others are looking to
open source to build a better environment. These two paths get to
the same point and I think the two approaches have to work together,
bridging the natural and the artificial.
What is a smart building but one that can respond like a living
thing? Thanks to sensors and artificial intelligence, buildings become like
living organisms. Furthermore, we can use nature as building blocks for
what we are designing. How can we get into a dimension that is a coevo-
lution between the natural and the artificial? The key point is the concept of
“intelligence”: the natural intelligence, the artificial intelligence, the collective
intelligence. It’s crucial to think of them not as different things but as a whole.
Many projects follow this idea. Projects that create smarter build-
ings, create energy, and also provide spaces for people to come together
and connect. Cities are about people, as I said in the beginning. When we
— as CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati — completed a big project in Singapore
called CapitaSpring we not only built somewhere that merged natural
and artificial, but we created a gathering space for people, in the tropical
forest we designed in the middle of the skyscraper.
We are also developing the Hot Heart, a system of floating islands outside
the bay of Helsinki, that will sustainably heat the city with batteries for
energy storage and a new public space. Gathering people in a place like
that allows them to learn about infrastructure, heating systems, and climate
change as well. The Hot Heart is the biggest urban decarbonization project
in Europe — so we have to involve people: the public dimension is always
crucial to fostering collective intelligence.
People need to come together. And we have proof that when
people come together, interesting things happen — and without that,
we lose those things. Before COVID we did an experiment at MIT: we
collected data from emails — anonymously, of course — to analyze networks
and connections in a public space. Then, when COVID struck, something
out of the ordinary happened: we were forced to remove the public space.
Networks and connections dramatically decrease when people do not
come together. Physical space is very important because it allows each
one of us to exit our personal “echo chambers”.
Another topic we have to deal with is the way we use space in cities. Do we need
skyscrapers? How will we use empty ones? Let’s take two completely different cities:
New York and Barcelona. Which one is the densest? As Leslie Martin once analyzed in a
paper, when you imagine filling a plot of land with a building, you have two options.
The first option is a pavilion, when you build in the center of the plot with empty space
around. The second option is a courtyard, when you build around the periphery and leave
empty space in the middle. With simple geometrical analysis, you can see that given the
same amount of surface — the same amount of volume, the same amount of square
meters — if you build in the pavilion shape, you end up with a building that is very, very tall.
But then if you build in the courtyard shape, in the same amount of square meters, square
feet, or the same amount of people, with actually much lower rise.
This is an interesting example because the difference between Manhattan and Barcelona
is that the latter is organized in courtyards — Barcelona has more or less the same den-
sity as Manhattan, but while in Manhattan, you get very, very tall, very, very thin, and in
Barcelona the buildings are all mid-rise.
We can have a big density, a very exciting city and a lot of urban life, even with
low rise and Barcelona is one example of that. One other thing about the discussion over
a vertical or non-vertical city is what the great Jan Gehl wrote: the closer you are to the
street, the more you’re connected to public space. Once, there was a psychological
experiment, to verify how far you can live above the street and still feel connected with
the city — if you live on the 17th floor, or above... well, the connection is lost! The bottom line
is: stop measuring density with the high rise or low rise, sometimes you can be very
dense in low rise. Also, let’s remember the importance of connection with other people.
When you think about a building, you want to make it more sustainable.
To do this, you don’t need to follow regulations that sometimes force you to do some-
thing that’s not necessarily optimized. Things have changed in a smarter way in the last
50 years, but I don’t think we need a new set of rules. Adding rules is like generating
entropy: every time you add things, you remove degrees of freedom and you end up in
a condition where you are no longer able to do a lot of positive things. And this happens
because a new set of things, a different system, sometimes is dragged from
what comes from the past.
We have to work with what we have — with the buildings we have. Six months
ago, I wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times with my colleague Ed Glaeser, the
Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard. We called our idea “The
Playground City”. We started from the empty space in New York buildings and the fact
that people still want to come together. The towers are empty but life in the streets of
Manhattan is still really, really busy — because the city still performs its functions.
Cities were invented almost 10,000 years ago as a way for people to come together, but
cities changed so much over the years: they were markets; they were religious places;
they were industrial places. That’s why Ed and I think that we are at the beginning of a
tipping point. We will see the 20th century cities changing their skin once again, but they
will still be the magnetic force that bonds us together.
People today can work everywhere, but they still want to be in cities. A lot of
interesting things are still happening in cities, including interesting, spontaneous, unpre-
dictable conversations that can’t happen if we just connect via Zoom. According to
sociologists, you can pick all your connections and put them in two buckets that they call
“strong ties” and “weak ties”. What are they? A strong tie is a friend who’s also a friend of
your friends: I’m person A, you are person B, I know person C... and now B and C know
each other. If you draw this on a piece of paper it comes out as a perfect triangle. A weak
tie, instead, is a person who’s not a friend of your friends, but actually becomes a bridge
to another community. Getting back to our MIT research: when you remove physical
space, weak ties disappear. As you can imagine, weak ties are very important because
they are the one that exposes us to new ideas! If you’ve only got strong ties you get things
going around in circles and you reinforce your echo chamber. Weak ties bring creativity
and they can challenge our preconceptions. And this happens in physical space, like the
one we’re in today. You meet somebody you didn’t expect, and this person becomes a
bridge toward new ideas, creativity... And maybe this is the key function of the architecture
of tomorrow: bringing us together in a way that increases the randomness of encountering
new people, and new ideas.
This is why I think the modernity we’re looking at today is much more complex.
Modernity is more about networks and is more about something that will be similar to
natural evolution. Natural evolution never does “tabula rasa”: it is something that keeps
on evolving, trying things, making mistakes, doing things again, making new mistakes,
and so on. What we can learn from nature also is a process: a process that never throws
away anything but actually keeps on changing and looking at what works, and what
doesn’t work now is part of that.
Schumpeter once said that innovation is about doing things that don’t exist yet,
doing all things in a new way. And so I think the first thing I suggest to students is to
imagine cities as a canvas, a living lab where we can use all possible creativity. And I
know that what hasn’t been done before is much more difficult, but I also think it is much
more fun. Maybe that’s actually what remains to all of us in a world in which with a press
of a button you can collect all the prior intelligence and immediately turn it into a sketch
or tomorrow into plans to build a building.
Am I optimistic? I would answer in the words of the great Karl Popper, who wrote
optimism is a duty... and is a duty because the future is not predetermined.
CARLO RATTI IN CONVERSATION WITH JOANN GONCHAR.
NEW VISIONS, THE MODERNITY OF TOMORROW.
TalkingAbout 2023
NEW YORK, 08.02.24
An architect and engineer by training, Professor Carlo Ratti teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), where he directs the Senseable City Lab, and is a founding partner of the international design and innovation
office Carlo Ratti Associati.
A leading voice in the debate on new technologies’ impact on urban life and design, Carlo has co-authored over
500 publications, including The City of Tomorrow (Yale University Press, with Matthew Claudel), and holds several
technical patents.
Joann Gonchar, FAIA, LEED AP, is deputy editor at Architectural Record. She joined RECORD in 2006, after working
for eight years at its sister publication, Engineering News-Record. Before starting her career as a journalist, Joann
worked for several architecture firms and spent three years in Kobe, Japan, with the firm Team Zoo, Atelier Iruka.
She earned a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts from Brown
University. She is licensed to practice architecture in New York State.
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