Future Cities - People, Machines, and the Environment in Greater Synchrony

Small and distributed computers have become an integral part of our lives. With the ubiquity of wireless connectivity they now recombine with our physical environment. Information about urban conditions can be captured in real-time, processed, and fed back into cities, enabling new ways to monitor, understand, and experience them.

This talk will address some of the pressing issues of urbanization and how the are impacted by this new wave of distributed technologies, with a particular emphasis on citizen participation. Cities are facing unparalleled opportunities now that distributed technologies are becoming an integral part of the built environment. We can view this as a new type of human computer-city interface, through which individuals and organizations can create and connect with new urban services, and which opens multiple avenues for innovation to make its way into our cities.

Projects that explore different angels of this new condition will be presented: how a new type of urban operating system can allow entrepreneurs to write apps that service our cities, how real-time maps that use the nascent data within communication networks can improve public transportation, how the flows of locatable trash can help minimize environmental pollution, and how mobile applications that automatically track an individual's CO2 output can promote more sustainable modes of mobility.