Introduction to the Future
- Mar 1, 2018
- 3 min read
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At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, networks of urbanized centers are the predominant framework of life in Europe, the United States, South America, and Oceania. While in Africa and Asia, a majority of the population does not live in formal cities, but often in traditional and sustainable ways. Yet, in also those areas, the urban population is expected to exceed the rural population by 2050. Worldwide, in the coming decades, more than 2 billion people will need a new place to live and work in the city. As a consequence, the urban theme has moved to the top of the agenda of universities, governments, and industries. In Singapore, for example, the future and availability of the city
has become one of the central national themes. The urbanization of the rapidly emerging countries of the 21st century as a societal, scientific, and development phenomenon
urgently needs fundamental research.
This is the main reason why ETH Zurich has founded in 2010 the Future Cities Laboratory as an integrated and multi-disciplinary design and research center in Singapore and Zurich. The Future Cities Laboratory is looking for realistic approaches, techniques, and methods to increase the sustainability of cities. It integrates research results from science, city builders, and city managers. The goal is to answer questions like, which methods can increase the sustainable performance of a city? And how can we develop a new curriculum of urban science? First, we need to understand the city. For this, we use the model of the urban metabolism, the concept of stocks and flows, and complex systems theory. The research operates on three integrated scales: Small - the building and building technology, medium - the neighborhood and the city, and large - the hinterland and the territory. Ten research modules and three assistant professors work on essential parameters, such as space, energy, materials, people, capital, water, and information. From this experience, we know that in urban design theory, experiment, and simulation need to work hand in hand. Theory entails research on the reality, the planning, and the implementation of the city. Experiment includes the conduction of design research studios with the city as a living laboratory. And simulation is needed to make the invisible visible and to test and visualize future scenarios.
The cities of the future will differ from each other much more than those of the present because they emerge in a globally networked knowledge of the importance of livability and sustainability. Future cities increasingly will take into account the active participation of people, as well as the climatic and economic context. This requires new urban planning and design curricula, which take into account much stronger the dynamics of future cities. Therefore, the goal of the course is to better understand the city as a whole by going beyond the physical appearance and by focusing on different representations, properties, and impact factors of the urban system. We will explore 10 topics regarding the understanding, making, and managing of cities.
The topics will start from the understanding of Information Architecture as a new concept. Information Architecture leads to the concept of the Information City. We will present different techniques in building construction, from sustainable traditional techniques, to robotics. On a larger scale, we will introduce you to the simulation of future city scenarios. You will understand the impact of energy supply and demand in cities and territories. You will learn the fundamental concept of stocks and flows, the view of the city as a complex urban system, and the concept of the Information Territory. We will also explore how urban infrastructure connects parts and functions of the city, and that the final result of combining this knowledge in urban design will be resilient future cities. At the end of the course, you will understand the contributions of citizen science and the merging of architecture and information space. You will be up to date on the latest research and development on how to understand to make and manage future cities for a more resilient urban world.
Knowledge is a result of connecting data and information. It is not entirely clear how data and information are combined in the cognitive process into knowledge, but in any case domain knowledge and domain independent knowledge build on data and information.
INFORMATION Architecture describes metaphors and principles of physical architecture applied to digital data and information, to create an architecture of information, with the use of information as raw material. INFORMATION architecture describes the architecture OF information.
Source: edX - Introduction to Future Cities (ETH Zurich)
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