Building futures with cities
Pablo Martinez Diez
/Mar Santamaria Varas
Building futures with cities
Pablo Martinez Diez /
Mar Santamaria Varas
It is urgent to approach the planning of cities under a radical vision of the future, that faces the short and long-term transformations needed to preserve the habitability of our planet. We must look at cities as survival strategies putting together collective interests and needs. Cities are not the problem but the solution.
The concentration of population and the consumption of energy, goods and food in urban areas means that cities are the places where the challenge of collective survival can be addressed - while con'guring the resulting social order governing our lives.
Contemporary socio-economic disruptions arising from the digital transformation have dissolved the hierarchies imposed by space, challenging us to understand how they invalidate previous urban regulations and their implicit social pacts.
Again, we must look at cities and redraw them in order to understand the origin and effects of these profound transformations. We need to expand the 'eld of action of urban planning under the perspective of health, well-being, urban quality, prosperity, climate change and governance.
During the visiting studio, we will explore several scenarios of urban transformation based on a vocabulary of futures to rethink cities along with the disciplines and tools that ultimately shape them.
Today, a new information ecosystem is available (open data from public bodies and big data generated by the use of information technologies) to generate complex diagnoses and inform urban planning. Furthermore, quantitative data must be complemented with qualitative visions of the city co-produced and supervised by citizens.
Public leadership ensures that urban planning is based on transparency and digital sovereignty. We must avoid the creation of information gaps (as many urban issues have yet to be digitized) while ensuring that data infrastructures remain public and they are not dominated by big tech corporations operating in cities.
Urban visions must be built upon external disruptions (cultural, environmental and technological) while, at the same time, they should include the perspective of inhabitants. They can contribute in the different steps of the planning process (from diagnosis to the 'nal proposal), developing and making future visions alive.
We propose complex ways of intervening in the city: from diagnosis and planning to other strategies (including management and evaluation of results). We need to 'nd novel tools (from the public policy to the app) to measure, analyze, design and readjust.
The aim of the seminar is to make a short proposal through a complex diagnosis. The students will work with different tools that will allow us to analyze and extract meaningful information from large amounts of urban data.
We will address the process of capturing and interpreting information to develop a research and a project that responds to the identi'ed challenges
We asked the students to quantify scenarios of change in Genève as a case study. Through the lens of a particular part of the city (that they have visited during a 'eld trip and data collection exercise), they have identi'ed a topic of research and future transformation.
The exercise has been divided into two parts. The 'rst one aims at analyzing the urban characteristics of a selected site (different for each student). Informed by data and cartography, the analysis is a transversal description starting from formal and functional aspects (urban morphology and uses) and adding the perspective of behavior sequentially.
The 'nal proposal focuses on developing an urban transformation both at the scale of the city and the selected sites.
LINKS
- Collection Studio Santamaria Martinez:
livingarchives.epfl.ch/projects/?author=976&type=Project&sort=date▼