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race.” In a similar way, over the past
decade, digital technologies have
begun to blanket our cities, forming
the backbone of a large, intelligent
infrastructure.
At the heart of smart cities are intel-
ligent buildings. These are buildings
which contain systems which talk to each
other and are able to sense and respond
to different factors, such as changes in
the weather and in levels of occupancy.
Technology as liberation
But are smarter cities inherently more
livable cities? “In the end all of this is
not about technology,” says Ratti. “It’s
about how technology can help us live
in a different, more flexible way. Five or
ten years ago we were chained to a desk
or computer and couldn’t move. This
is about how can we use this liberating
power of technology to live or work in a
better way.”
Top down or bottom up
Pollalis believes the only way to create
a truly smart city is from the top down:
provide the infrastructure and the
operating environment to enable the
applications to enhance quality of life.
He was the concept
designer of the infor-
mation infrastructure
in the new administra-
tive city Songdo, in
South Korea. It was
dubbed the “happy
city” before the foun-
dations had been
laid, by Koreans who
assumed the people
living and working in
the eco-friendly, high-
tech community would
be happier. Opened in
2012, and expected
to house half a million people by 2030,
political wrangling led to the EUR 15
billion project being scaled down.
Other high-profile new smart cities
include Masdar in Abu Dhabi, which is
built on a huge podium, with the smart
infrastructure underneath, including
magnetic lanes for self-driving cars. All
the big top-down smart city projects
have run into difficulties – political,
financial or simply a lack of people
wanting to live in them – which is
perhaps not surprisingly given their
ground-breaking nature.
An architect and engineer by
training, Professor
Carlo Ratti
practices in Italy and teaches at
the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where he directs
the SENSEable City Lab. His
projects range from a digital
water pavilion in which all the
walls are “made from” running
water, providing a flexible, multi-
functional space, to tracking the
volume and frequency of phone
calls made between different parts
of the world to produce a better
understanding of the production
and flow of information between
global networks of cities. His work
has been exhibited worldwide
at venues including the Venice
Biennale, the Science Museum
in London, and the Museum of
Modern Art in New York.
The Dutch capital has set up the Amsterdam Smart City initiative,
a good example of an existing city getting smarter.
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