From Urban Planning to Urbanetics Willy Müller / Marc Montlleó

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Implementing Advanced Knowledge

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In the field of urban planning, the shift from an industrial city to an information society encounters one of the greatest challenges we face as a civilisation. If we understand the city to be one of its major inventions, the way we understand and build cities stands at a crossroads that exceeds the magnitude of the challenges posed by technological change.

The word “urban planning” itself, defined as a science by Cerdà around 1850, is the solution to social and economic organisation in the realm of the industrial society. Simplifying a great deal, it is a practice based to this day on a spatial and formal interpretation of the ratios that are available, whether or not in equilibrium, with a speculation of different and overlapping signs related to economics, production, identity, etc.

In recent years, we are witnessing a simultaneity of seemingly complementary models, the real city defined by the rules of an increasingly complex and corrupt urban planning practice, together with the advent of the concepts of smart or advanced cities from advanced service companies.

These concepts, which have unfairly seeped through from the major debate over the city model to the banality of some product more typical of the television commercial format than of the realms of scientific discussion, are revealing the enormous challenge we have to tackle, i.e. how advanced or information societies manage to establish new rules that surpass the welfare city model, which is the last stage of the post-industrial city, created in post-war Europe and which will partly end, as we have known it thus far, with Europe’s economic recession today.

What is the breaking point and point of no return for the two models that have existed side by side up till now?

On the one hand, that of the post-industrial welfare city based on the complex and manipulative rules of urban planning, in which the acts of the physical city are still capable of controlling ratios as an equaliser, transferring decisions of all kinds from one scale to another, and on the other hand, smart cities, which subversively introduce more efficient, more profitable, more environmentally-friendly and more sustainable management models, based on precisely the opposite of the previous model, introducing real-time data as the scientific basis of their city model.

Are we moving from Urban Planning to Urbanetics?It is in this field where advanced companies’ aspirations for market share

confront major challenges or radical change in the operating system.Is it now possible to design a street, not in terms of mobility ratios based

on the accumulation of long-term information, but according to a small amount of binary information in lapses of three seconds?

From Urban Planning to Urbanetics(This article has already been published)

Can we conceive a city not out of the capacity to accumulate memory to come up with standard answers but out of the capacity to have information, which specifically adapts itself, expire every three seconds?

Will we be able to design the urban habitat, shifting the responsibility for the physical as a depositary of all information to an urban habitat in which all the responsibility for informing and being informed lies in what moves, whether people, capital, values, materials or objects, and that constantly issues new information that overrides the previous data?

Figure 1 - Real Time Data, Carlos RattiCover - Willy Müller at Clour9 installation

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One of the most educational examples of this change in model can be gauged with an object that bears the same age as urban planning, for obvious reasons of common genealogy between the railway and the industrial city: the traffic light.

Needless to say, nowadays we have massive and cheap technology to make the basic rules governing mobility work in an urban grid based on self-management. The concept of traffic light has dissolved into mobility, in the format of GPS, Bluetooth, or NeverLost, and is progressing every day in new systems, in the same way that intelligence has dissolved into materials, or paraphrasing Neil Gershenfeld from the MIT Media Lab when he compared home automation with the media house: the sugar cube next to the coffee, which represents the model of concentrating intelligence in an external element, dissolved in the coffee in tiny quantities. Minimum information but information that is expansive and networked.

If this is the challenge we are facing, how can we organise a research programme capable of resolving the evident problem of fixed materiality inherent to a city and its infrastructure, in new designs for cities where smartness is measured by the capacity to dissolve information in small interconnected amounts whose transmitted information expires every three seconds?Figure 2 - Port i Fungus, Ahmad Derhalli, Aron Biro

We are heading towards a fl exible city, but we do not have the technology to build a mechanical city. We have technology that boosts effi ciency but does not alter the model upon which we live. In the professional fi eld, these challenges have evident consequences in the manner in which problems are addressed and which tools we are equipped with in order to simultaneously tackle the generic city that is heir to traditional urban planning and the specifi c city that puts forward the new paradigms of our time.

We are almost certainly in a similar era to the advent of electricity when the sophistication of the gas industry to provide lighting reached its peak. As occurs almost always in the change of operating model, the previous model in decline experiences a boom of innovation in its fi nal moments, which drives and accelerates change.

Part of this discussion will focus, on the one hand, on what part is “Smart” and what part is “City”, clearly diff erentiating between the operator, or manager, from the owner, where the business model and its profi tability will be at stake and, on the other, on what are the parameters on which to decide from a public point of view: the City Protocol, the evaluation criteria for indicators that allow us to audit ourselves, to know ourselves, to determine our strengths and weaknesses as a city, in order to have criteria of choice in a bargain market of smart cities.

Another part of this discussion bears a much more productive nature, because depending on whether or not we are able to move forward in the urbanetics defi nition of the city, new designs will emerge with a need for products, materials, building systems, regulations, software, etc., which will be the driving force for a new era of advanced industrial production.

Production chains in the industry are becoming more technologically advanced, the product is automatically moved through a tractor system and

Figure 3 - Sensors, Urbiotica UPC

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various arms facilitate the assembly that is carried out in an orderly and orchestrated process. Everything, from the traction system by way of which the product moves to the mechanical arms, work by means of sensors; they measure distances, colours and markings in order to act precisely and to make decisions.

This technology that is widespread in assembly lines has progressively exported its technology towards more open spaces, for instance, the case of logistical transport in the port of Rotterdam, where logistics technology concerning precision storage is applied, with merchandise and containers that weigh tons: the technology of packaging has been scaled up to that of containers, in the same way that the software of Formula One’s pit stop strategy have been scaled up to hospitals’ emergency strategies.

The smart transportation of containers is based on sensors, readers of colours that allow platforms to follow lines painted on the ground, or to read barcodes. This implies that mechanisms have the capacity to read, measure and to make decisions, on the basis of a datum. In a closed or controlled system like a warehouse, a dockland or a factory, dependence on a smart system in a controlled and designed environment so that computers can make decisions based on the input of a signal is already a tangible reality.

This type of technology already made the leap to the domestic world years ago, with robots that clean the floor of the home or recent ones that mow the lawn. They are all based on simple robotic sensor mechanisms. How do we tackle open, complex and dynamic environments?

The speed of response is the new stumbling block to implementing these mechanisms in the city. Most robots are found at domestic level, in very controlled, closed spaces; this is due to their capacity for analysis, their reception of signals and how many decisions they can make in a very limited unit of time.

However, we already begin to see cameras in cars with distance sensors that alert you as to the proximity of another car, or more recently the success of the first pilot test for a driverless car, something that might have seemed unfathomable twenty years ago, is another accessory many series models are already equipped with today. Or changing the field of logistics: Who hasn’t lost a suitcase in an airport? The systems are logistical, just that the type of package is a suitcase, barcode readers, belts, and diverters to direct the suitcase to the established location.

It is a question of mechanisms for reading and IP addresses, the ongoing transfer of minimum information, volatilising intelligence into thousands of items: this is the world we face from the perspective of urban planning, on a scale that will greatly exceed the current settings of street furniture design, delving right into the big discussion on the phenomenon of the city with zero emissions, which is self-sufficient and smart.

It would be nice to think that the real state model accompanying urban planning in its development and that, in the recent major economic crisis, played a fundamental role in the form of a bubble alongside its alter banking ego, were to become a new production model for fledgling companies that accompany the development of urbanetics, not only investigating new products for a new market, but that are also able to generate wealth within the city model that manages information and where a significant part of the business lies in providing services and management in the long term. Pay for use.

Note - The pictures here presented are a selection done by the editorial team.Figure 4 - “Gas project”, Roberto Díez in Emergent Territories Studio at IAAC

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