Future Cities: Will Technology Transform Urban Spaces?

1999 ad more than a generation away and yet dreams travel faster than light and even now scientists and planners are shaping the lives of our children who will live in the 21st century how will they live perhaps in a honeycombed structure like this hexagon modules that grow with a family size and interests all pertinent information about this family its records its tastes and reference material is stored in the central home computer which is secretary librarian Banker teacher medical technician Bridge partner and allaround servant in this house of tomorrow what's next the things you've seen are techly possible it remains only to apply what we now know to fulfill these dreams of Tomorrow the world of 1999 and Beyond is limited only by the boundaries of our imagination today welcome to Future human the series the podcast where the team here at silicon Republic explores the future of everything I'm ano D in this episode we're thinking about cities of the future and how we can use new tech to design cities that are resilient healthy and sustainable this series is made possible by our presenting sponsor Hayes that's ha Ys is the world leading expert in Recruitment and Workforce Solutions specializing in the professional and Technical sectors and skills thanks to their support the rest of this episode will be totally adree to access great advice and insights visit Haz technology.com blogs what do you think about when you imagine the city of the future what would be important to you how does the built environment look what is the layout how do we move around how do we interact for me personally I think about things like green spaces and trees roof Farms local markets clean air worldclass public transport segregated cycle and walking paths accessible health care and great public arts and culture cities are complex systems that evolve over decades and centuries and so imagining their Futures is also going to be complex so Jenny Dar from the Silicon Republic team spoke with someone who's an expert in exploring the future of complex systems Melissa steri is a designed scientist and a systems theorist and takes a unique approach to thinking about the future of urban spaces Jenny spoke with Melissa about how we can design and shape cities to be more resilient especially to the impacts of climate clate change here's their conversation as a researcher I research developing resilience to major natural Hazard events focusing on wildfire and the lens that I look through is looking at how Nature has already done it tell me a little bit about how you envision the kind of the role of technology in Innovation and how that might shape you know the built environment of the future and what what our future cities would look like well I think when we think to the future city it's really important that we think about ecosystems and we think about diversity the resilience that we see in the natural world is all because of biodiversity it's all because Solutions are fit for the particular environment one of the great problems that we currently face is the fact that with the Advent of modernism and really more generally with industrialization we took a one-size fits-all approach to architecture and the built environment and we essentially replicated that across very very different environments around the world and that is generally performing very poorly because the modernist architectural narrative if you like the materiality the overall design and form it's what I call very lazy architecture so it is not very good at keeping the heat out it's not very good at keeping the heat in and the only way that we've really survived with these lazy buildings if you like is because we've augmented them with basically fossil fuel based systems with heating with air conditioning and so forth so it's failing from if you like a resources point of view and also from usability perspective but also with that we've got the fact that these industrial replicants if you like also struggle more generally to deal with the natural hazards earthquake engineering is something that we actually do very well and that does have General applicability but when we look at things like flood resilience Heatwave resilience drought fire resilience and so forth architecturally and at The Wider Urban scale we need very very different approaches materially and in terms of design to accommodate for these and particularly in the places where these events are extreme so I'd say that you know looking looking to diversity is is a key thing so when we think about technology when we think about the RO of technology technology can help us in all sorts of ways it is very good at helping us to quantify what we need it's very good at number crunching effectively massive amounts of data we now are able to feed in literally millions of data points of information to create what you call constellations of data that give us a very clear picture of the sort of problems that we're going to be dealing with and then we can use that to inform the designs that we create both at the level of the systems and materially but also we can monitor the environment in real time and that's critical because to be frank there are some natural hazards that you're talking about energy loads you're talking about events that are so so big that we can't always save people so we've got to get them out of the way so it's really critical that we improve and enhance our early Warning Systems our evacuation systems and that's really where artificial intelligence and supercomputing all of these things are really coming into their own and all of the major organizations that are concerned with disaster preparedness and resilience are working with these and the speed at which they're developing the if you like the computing power is scaling all the time so that's sort of one example I think at the sort of day-to-day level obviously we've already got a lot of tech in our cities we've already got a a lot of things like monitoring of energy flows and I think we're going to see a lot more of that we'll see a lot more monitoring of the flows of material things and resources in general but I think some of the sort of things you see in the press that sort of present the idea that it's all going to be a bit sort of 1950 sci-fi and everything's going to be smart Tech and you know we're going to be living in this full blown Singularity where your fridge tells you what you need for the shopping and your every facet of your home configures to your precise needs having read your brain through a direct chip implant or something like this that I think I have yet to see a single proposal for integration of smartness as we might dub it that is actually sustainable sustainable in terms of resource use sustainable in terms of security issues of course all of this stuff is hackable it all has inherent security weaknesses and also that accommodates for the fact that well some folks are happy to be teched to the nine some folks are absolutely want the house with all the you know all the gadgets all the switches all the singing and dancing most people like to live a pretty analog life I wanted to ask your thoughts on those sort of um the really smart cities that come up in the press and I know there's a big project that has received criticism in Saudi Arabia um neom I believe it's called so I'd love to your thoughts on that sort of striving to have everything connected the problem with the neon project it's not for want of ambition and it's certainly not for want of money but there are a few things I think it's really important to consider when we think about the future city all architecture all things we build um very much mirror what we're thinking and they in that process mirror our politics our values and our approach if you like to society whether we realize it or not you know there are subconscious decisions being made in the design process the first thing about the line is the fact that when you look at the communities of people that have been involved in the design of that particular project it's a very very narrow range it's narrow in terms of age demographic it's narrow in terms of wealth it's principally not exclusively but principally middle-aged white middle class men most of them very very established Architects to towards the end of their career not mid or early career and they have bought in what with no disrespect to them because some of them have made big contributions to the architectural and urban field I think they've board in ideas that in many cases are past their cell by dat and they don't reflect the level of complexity that you need to apply when you're thinking about designing something as complex as a city cities usually develop organically and as they develop organically there is an inherent logic basically people do something repe itively and then certain things like Road routes the situation of particular buildings and other facilities in the city come about they emerge because that's what if you like the collective intelligence has concluded to be appropriate the line is very emblematic of a lot of these sort of utopian new cities and that it's sort of plunked in the middle of nowhere it's in a completely illogical Place another problem with the line is that it's placed in a very environmentally hospitable place you know it is placed basically adjacent to a very very arid desert and there are all sorts of problems climatically with that obviously I think it would be obvious to anyone you know with sort of any idea about food security and water security that there is a very distinct lack of resources immediate resources next to the development and you know you could sort of theorize that oh you know you're going to terraform that environment and you're going to sort of create lots of growing land but the reality is saudi's running out of groundw desalination is very expensive and you know although there are some technologies you can use to actually for example extract moisture from the air through things like there are biomatic processes that are modeled on things like desert beetles that that have a materiality that basically attracts the Jew there are limitations of scale you know when we're thinking about the amount of water that could be harvested these kind of Technologies definitely have use but these are not things that are going to be able to fulfill the water needs of the whole city and all the agricultural needs and I think probably the biggest problem with the with the line is that it's almost as if it's sort of trying so desperately to be sexy so desperately to be this Monumental construction that is bigger and better than everything that it's actually forgotten the details it's forgotten the fact that the beauty is in the details in in cities it's not in the bigness of them or it's not in the sort of the Grandeur or or even the sort of newness it's in working out the often boring problems the things that are not very sexy things like the transport route I mean another obvious problem with the line the line is I would say a terrorist dream because when you've got your entire city transportation route in a straight line okay there might be a couple of Lanes let's say there's I don't know four or six LAN Lanes maybe eight but they're basically in a line you know all the terrorist Network's got to do or anybody that wants to dust disrupt the system they've just got to put a blockage or they've got to blow up one section and then boom your entire city is it's down whereas normally with a city obviously even if you've got let's say a burst water mains and you've got let's say three roots are taken out three major routs it's causing chaos because of the organic nature of the road Network you can find a way but I think the line is built on that narrative that you see in so many brilliant science fiction films of the 197s that you can't control everything you have to account for chaos I think it is a problem in terms of sustainability it has frankly an enormous carbon footprint the use of materials is is it's very outdated and I just really think of it as a case study in pretty much the worst concept you come up with on every level and I think it's so sad that there are so many really good ideas out there there are so many Fantastic places that you could actually do some very very interesting work with distributed resources and so many of these don't get enough funding and then you get big big amounts go to the line and of course we've got a number of tech billionaires are also wanting to build a city in their own image they they pop up all the time I've lost count of them now and I think there was one California forever I was reading about the other day and it's basically a bunch of Silicone Valley guys that imagine that with absolutely no knowledge of urban planning of architecture that they can somehow know better not only than all of the experts but then the community and they've bought up land and their plan is to sort of build this this big city that to their mind is going to be perfect but obviously there are people living there there are you know lots and lots of people people who've been there for for many many decades that are really concerned about what in effect is an active imposition this is people with a lot of money coming in buying up land and they're not Consulting the community not bringing them in and thinking it's all going to go well and you you don't even you don't even need to look too much into some of the details of that to know it isn't going to go well the high-tech super smart cities Jenny and Melissa mentioned are the line neom and California forever and in case you're not familiar with them let's take a quick peek you may have heard Talk of the line the brand new city in s Arabia currently under construction the city is to be built as two parallel skyscrapers 200 M wide 500 M High and a cool 170 km long so you would have these two parallel buildings stretching from the Red Sea to the existing city of tabuk an open space between them the buildings would have a mirrored facade giving them an eerily minimalist presence in the desert landscape and they'd house 9 million people there'd be no cars and everything would be powered by renewable energy it sounds like something from a science fiction novel maybe even utopian in some ways but the concept for this Mega structure has already been described by others as an ecological disaster it had block the movement of animals be a collision risk for birds and it would require building materials to be transported over long long distances the line would be one of the first regions in neam a much larger urban area in the tabuk region but the ideas are difficult to grasp schools with holographic teachers theme parks with robotic dinosaurs and there's even plans to build a giant artificial Moon California forever is a city being built by Silicon Valley billionaires in salano County California the project promises walkable middle class affordable neighborhoods but there's plenty of suspition from locals the city will be designed around walking cycling and public transport rather than cars but many are criticizing the project for not even considering how people will commute to the nearby regions in the Bay Area you really do see how complex City Planning is when you look at groups trying to build them from scratch back to Jenny's conversation with Melissa just going back to sustainability a bit you mentioned that as well um and obviously there's Mass of sustainability issues with those types of cities but there's also I suppose a balancing act with adding technology even really really good technology into City Planning or into things like that because they developed their own carbon footprint but we're also moving into a more eco-friendly thought process so where do you think that Balancing Act is going to head in the future I think it very much depends on the city I think there's been a lot of red herrings in terms of what what's happening in the future there were a lot of assumptions about future po popultion there were a lot of assumptions about future population distribution and all of these are very very weak assumptions they are built on things like the assumption that you know we're going to be able to carry on increasing our food productivity and therefore increase food security not reduce it when the science is saying the inverse they assume that we're going to be able to sort of contain disease we're going to be able to contain the threats of pandemics among other diseases so we've got the threat of pathogens but then we've got horrendous Mental Health crisis around the world we've got an autoimmunity system crisis we've got an obesity crisis it's layer upon layer upon layer when it comes to health issues and so when we're looking at places we saw this sort of assumption that we would all universally and ubiquitously be moving towards very very particular images of future cities and ab in developments and the reality is we are starting to see far more diversity and when we think about about how we're going to actually make resilience and make CI sustainable we need to think very very carefully about their very particular Logistics we need to think okay in terms of the environment looking at the worst case scenarios what are they what are the sort of probabilities that they are going to not just arrive but arrive in fairly quick succession wherein you know humanity is great building back we don't we we're really good at building back but the caveat to that is that we only are able to build back when there is a relative relatively long gap between the disasters if we've got a disaster happening let's say every 500 years or or thousand years then you know that's not so much of a problem but if you've got a situation where a city is going to be facing multiple major natural Hazard events or even a town not you know on that kind of time scale but even at sort of the 20year interval I mean realistically we could be looking at much closer intervals than that then you've got the problem because then obviously there's not just the impact to the lives and property but to the livelihoods to the businesses the insurance models of the world are currently failing they're failing because the prices are coming too fast and the price tags Associated to those are coming too big for them the model as is to sustain so I think in the places that are in the very most dangerous if you like places in the world the places that are really right on the front line of climate change and these other environmental hazards I think those need to have some very very serious rethinks at the moment we're seeing a lot of tinkering around the edges and there are very few cities that are actually really thinking at the engineering level and actually asking the hard questions even things like in the worst case scenario and we've got to get everybody out how are we going to do a massive evacuation wherein we get everybody out and we then house them elsewhere for a sustained period of time and then bring them back or do we bring them back because we only have to look at human history to know that there are some disasters from which you simply do not recover so I think at the at the very harshest end there are some very very big and very serious challenges in terms of design engineering economics and so forth but there are other places that are relatively sheltered there are other places that because of their particular geography topography face a much narrower bandwidth of risks and we do have solutions to most of the sort of the natural hazards and to the catastrophes the problem is that of course most of our built environment is is already it's built we we've got what we've got so as Melissa says most of the time when we're thinking about designing smart cities we're actually thinking about integrating new tech into existing cities these may be cities with a long history with lots of existing infrastructure and the remains of past infrastructure without the space or resources for a massive redesign so in cities where we've got what we've got how can technology help us improve on public transport systems that we've relied on for hundreds of years other than you on foot or bicycle which can only used under certain conditions rail is one of of the not not the most environmentally friendly way of moving both people and Freight so there is going to be more of a focus on rail going forwards I think the carbon aspect of looking at a new system being built will actually get a higher and higher profile as we look forward into the future Andrew Smith is a rail industry expert with Bentley a company that develops software for infrastructure we wanted to speak with Andrew to get his perspective on how new technologies are being applied to Classic pieces of engineering like rail systems so what that actually means with in Bentley is that I'm responsible for looking at the overall solution through the life cycle of rail projects from requirements conceptual design detail design construction into operations and maintenance there's been a massive transformation firstly even regardless of technology in rail in particular looking at the evolution of the art of the possible within only technology if we go back you know 30 years ago actually but slightly more than 30 years ago the kind of power of processing you had from a computer back in those days that Wast was actually they were military Secrets they were you know borderline on you needed Expo license to get them you now get that in children's toys is the it really is the level of transer you know games machines are measured in trillions of instructions per second which is just a different world and if you then compare that to the rail world for example there tends to be in rail itself there has been transformation but it hasn't been as rapid we still use to a large extent the same technology it's still you know two pieces of metal sat on top of sleepers with steel whe vehicles running over the top and there have been advances in signaling and advances in automation that have taken place but that underlying technology hasn't changed so there's been a challenge of how we actually adopt to be able to use some of these new it Technologies to actually apply them to what is in many cases 1502 even year old asset so how can technology help us design Innovative Transport Systems on top of previous generations of Roads Railways tunnels and so on what we're trying to do with a there many things we're trying one of the key things we're trying to do in this process is rather than identify that we've got a problem or a clash or an issue in construction we want to pull that back where we can into detailed design or construction sequencing and where we can pull it back into conceptual design and where we can pull it back even to the requirements so we can identify and change those as early as possible so that by the time we go on site and we're doing our construction the actual construction work and then going into operations we're not it's not no surprises cuz something's always going to come up but we're Trying to minimize the risk and minimize the changes that we're applying in there in particular that uh a lot of cities globally are looking at building or expanding the Metros they've got because they're getting more and more congested more and more people are coming into them and a Metro System rather than the Greenfield sites in the middle of nowhere where you can just you get a roller and draw your line through you're building on top of a city that's probably been there for centuries in turn with variable level of Records in terms of what what's actually in the subsurface as well um there's huge numbers of existing services that are in place and you've got to weave your way through all of that as well so they're extremely complex and again that means it it goes back to data so the focus is on do we have the data about what is underground what you know what do we got what are we likely to encounter that we can then view together with the design to help us to optimize that design process that we working towards there are a few reasons I think trains are such an interesting lens to look at the future of urban transport they're reliable they're sustainable a lot of the infrastructure already exists so we're mostly thinking about how we can expand and optimize rail networks but they also highlight an important role for humans even as AI or artificial intelligence becomes increasingly able to predict and potentially manage systems like this tends to happen certainly in for example rail operations and maintenance you automate part of the process and you can use technology to actually improve efficiency automate data import automate data validation things like that but there comes a point always in the process where the computerized system conf hit the pause button and says I'm going to show this to an operator and the operator is the one who actually makes the decision on what's being done and the computer system is simply giving them the information to help them make a more informed decision so by showing them the entire environment the context the information rather than just part of the data that's in place but still that person is there and they're the one that's actually responsible they're the one with the the safety level actually sits with them I suspect personally it's going to be a while before we get rid of that side of things and fully automate not because the technology can't but do it but because of the the legal implications and the risk implications associated with it automation is likely to become a major component of urban transport but also other systems in our cities like those that energy and water so we need to talk about AI again in episode 3 we talked about generative Ai and how much potential it has as long as it is developed ethically and responsibly so what about AI as it applies to City systems and architecture I spoke with Jeff McAn from Dell Technologies about digital and data Tech that might transform how we organize and manage our city systems the interesting statistics around the growth of urbanization I think they're talking about almost 70% of the global population will be living within Urban environments by the year 2050 so that's going to put massive challenges on the urban infrastructure but one of the big challenges I think is transportation and being able to provide Aid driven Transportation models we all know of the stories don't go down that road to 3:00 because the schools are getting out okay understanding the different silos of information that are about there being able to bring these data sets together and I think this is where AI really takes over being able to draw in these different data sets to provide the capability to improve Transportation these huge amounts of data that we're now collecting off our vehicles you know as we drive through the pound today if we're using Google Maps being able to take all of those different data that's knowing where we're going knowing what traffic is out there knowing are there any roadblocks then also then looking at you know especially for emergency services and things like that if there's an incident on one Street then how do we effectively rot traffic to keep the traffic flowing and this is where AI can make these decisions you know in a very very short period of time we've spoken a lot about traffic and transport in this episode and if you haven't heard our previous episodes yet we look at the future of sustainable will travel in much more detail in episode 2 so I wanted to return to our built space and I asked Jeff how AI might be integrated into existing City buildings I know in Ireland at the moment we're hearing the radio adver saying you is it windy outside is a good time to put your uh to to put your washing machine on and I think that's a great and very simple example of uh how we can Beast martyr with energy usage all of these data sets are coming together and providing more information on the on on the built World on what we're living in today how can we leverage that to use power in a sensible way I think what has changed today is the capability to run those inference models on much smaller devices out at the edge of the network so being able to have a small device in the ceiling monitoring utilization monitoring ambient temperatures ambient light being able to then integrate into the building management systems to manage that in real time is the is the capability that we're now seeing with those new devices and the other thing as well is the price of the devices have come down drastically as well I think that's one of the big things that enables us to put in active sensors into every room and then be able to manage the the environmental controls in those rooms individually as we break the city down into its different systems we can see how new technologies might help make them more efficient and sustainable I asked Jeff about other projects that D are involved in to do with Healthcare and food supply we a few years ago worked on an interesting project looking at the weather data from around the city looking at smog at pollution and then be able to map that on to people with asthma and be able to give a warning you we we now see that government as a service Healthcare as a service your weather app now will give you a warning what you call High pollen counts and things like that you have these systems around how do we make a system of systems we've worked with a number of vertical farming organizations we the last few years and that's evolving as well that you we're looking at the capture of food waste and recycling of food waste moving that into fertilizer that can then be used in vertical farming so you can have fresh vegetables being grown locally so you're removing air miles you're removing transport miles our focus in this series is always on the human element of future Technologies and Innovations and cities are places where people live work sometimes struggle and so much more so before we finish up I want to go back to Melissa and an important thought she shared on the politics of Designing cities for the future London's got some big gritty challenges to face for example with the air pollution and so what is happening is obviously you've got these big schemas coming in right let's ban certain kinds of vehicles or let's you know bring in massive fees if you're going to use certain kind of vehicles but then of course at the level of the economy most of the people that are using these older vehicles they are the poorer members of society they the Charities they're the sort of the Freelancers the sole Traders they they simply can't afford an electric vehicle or whatever it is and they're getting hit hard at a time when they've been repeatedly hit hard for now several years and so in London you've got this this real division now you've got people that want to sort of ban uh certain kinds of you know transport in certain kind of places they want to thin out the traffic and so forth and then you've got other people saying well we can't live in the city if this is what happens because we can't sustain our livelihood we can't pay the mortgage we can't pay the bills and I think we're going to see more of that in cities and it's going to be difficult because of course you know you've got so manyon people that getting that consensus is nigh impossible and it's what we're seeing with politics as well and of course the whole situation is worsened because everything's being polarized everything's being weaponized and so it's very difficult sometimes for people to actually kind of sit down and and just really look through at some of the details and find a way forward so I think that sort of the politics of cities as one of the greatest challenges we face right now because of course though some places have consensus others don't so I hope this has been an opportunity to think about how technology might improve the lives of people who live and work in cities but it's also been an important reminder I think that cities are very complex shaped by Our Lives Health income jobs families politics and so many other human factors [Music] as we plan the cities of the future one thing is certain we must do it in collaboration with the humans who live in [Music] them this series is curated by the Silicon public team and produced by Shawn and Morris the interviews were conducted by myself and silicon Republic editor Jenny Dary the podcast is part of future human on Silicon Republic and for more great content from filmed fars side chats to Deep dive articles visit siliconrepublic.com future dhum thanks again to our series sponsor Hayes the experts in Recruitment and Workforce Solutions [Music]

2024-05-05 04:16

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