Urban Futures Designing the Digitalised City

Given the rapid evolution of concepts such as smart cities, who are the architects riding the wave of new possibilities for urban design? How do contemporary agencies find pathways to understand the challenges and opportunities presented by evolving urban technology, and how does architecture engage with the expanding pool of associated disciplines? How should schools of architecture and urban design engage with radical digitalised urbanism?

This issue of AD claims that this is contested territory. The two-dimensionality of planners’ urban construct is as limited as engineers’ predilection to zero-in and solve problems. Urban Futures contends that society needs a much broader professional brush than has been applied in the past: interdisciplinary urban design professionals who can reach across the philosophy and mundanity of urban existence with a creative eye. The issue identifies a selection of internally resourceful visionaries who combine sociology, geography, logistics and systems theory with the practical realities and challenges of mobility, sustainable materials, food, water and energy supply, and waste disposal. Crucially, they seek to ensure better urban futures, and a civil and convivial urban experience for all city dwellers. 

Contributors: Refik Anadol, Philip Belesky, Shajay Bhooshan, Jane Burry and Marcus White, Thomas Daniell, Vicente Guallart, Shan He, Wanyu He, Dan Hill, Justyna Karakiewicz, Tom Kvan, Areti Markopoulou, Ed Parham, Carlo Ratti, Ferran Sagarra, and Bige Tunçer.

Featured architects: Arup Digital Studio, Guallart Architects, Space10, Space Syntax, UNStudio, and XKool Technology.

Mark Burry is the Founding Director for Swinburne University of Technology's 'Smart Cities Research Institute', where his role is to lead the development of a whole-of-university research approach to helping ensure that future cities anticipate and meet the needs of all. He is a practising architect who has published internationally on two main themes: putting theory into practice with regard to procuring 'challenging' architecture, and the life, work and theories of the architect Antoni Gaudí. He has been Senior Architect to the Sagrada Família Basilica Foundation since 1979, pioneering distant collaboration with his colleagues based on-site in Barcelona.
In 2001 Mark Burry founded the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) at RMIT University before establishing the Design Research Institute (DRI) in 2008. He held an ARC funded Federation Fellowship in 'Complex Architecture and Convergent Design' 2007-2012. He joined the University of Melbourne in 2014 as Professor of Urban Futures at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning where he helped develop the Faculty's capacity to consolidate research in urban futures, drawing together and augmenting expertise in urban visualisation, urban analytics, and urban policy.

Chapter 1 Better to Make a Good Future than Predict a Bad One

Chapter 2 A Socially Attuned Future: Memory, Geography and Urban Project – The Case of Metropolitan Barcelona

Chapter 3 Resisting Arrest: The Evolution of UNStudio

Chapter 4 Data-Informed Design: A Call for Theory

Chapter 5 Seeking an Urban Philosophy: Carlo Ratti and the Senseable City

Chapter 6 Perturbanism in Future Cities: Enhancing Sustainability in the Galapagos Islands through Complex Adaptive Systems

Chapter 7 Diving Deep into Unknown Unknowns: People, Cities, Technology, Architecture and Architects

Chapter 8 Augmenting Reality: (Big-)Data-Informed Urban Design and Planning

Chapter 9 Homes, Communities and Games: Constructing Social Agency in Our Urban Futures

Chapter 10 ‘Small Pieces, Loosely Joined’: Practices for Super-local Participative Urbanism

Chapter 11 From Digital Cities to Biocities: Harnessing the Power of the Digital Revolution to Reinvent the Urban Ecology Model

Chapter 12 Synaesthetic Architecture: A Building Dreams

Chapter 13 Data-Driven Urbanism: The Balance Between Spatial Intelligence and Design Craftsmanship

Chapter 14 Urban Experiment: Taking Off on the Wind of AI

Chapter 15 A Perennial Practice: Designing Between Urban Landscape and Urban Network

Chapter 16 Architects Without Architecture: How Transdisciplinary Studios Reposition for 21st-Century Challenges

Chapter 17 From ‘T’ to ‘π’ (pi)-shaped people: Better Urban Practice through Dual Depth in Architecture and Planning Education

Chapter 18 Smart Who? Collective Intelligence Urban Design Models

Chapter 19 From Another Perspective – Cyberspace: Speculative Futures of the Recent Past
 
Contributors

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