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Carlo Ratti on real-time cities and omnidisciplinary design
By Francesca Birks
June 13, 2016
As the physical and digital worlds converge, how will the designer's role evolve? How should today's architects and engineers think about building tomorrow's cities? Carlo Ratti, director of MIT's Senseable City Lab, has spent his career exploring these questions. His new book, The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life, will be released later this month.
I spoke to him in May.
You're trained as both an engineer and an architect. What do you consider yourself?
Let me tell you first how I think of design. I like to use the definition given by Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize winner and a great researcher and sociologist from the past century. He once said, "Design looks at how the world could be, as opposed to science, which looks at how the world is."
If that is your definition, you can't really say, "I'm going to look at design as an architect, as an engineer." You really want to look at the complexity of the world and then bring together different disciplines to explore what tomorrow could be.
You really want to […] bring together different disciplines to explore what tomorrow could be.
You're also a prolific inventor and writer. How do you see the connections between these activities?
I see them as different hats. One hat is research, which is what we do at the Senseable City Lab. One hat is design, which is what we do at Carlo Ratti Associati. And then the third is ventures: products and start-ups that develop products. There's also a little bit of writing and dissemination.
There's also a new exciting space between architecture and computer science: the Internet of Things. I like to explore this from different points of view: research, products, projects, and also public discussion. This notion of the public intellectual is very important. Unlike in the 20th century, when architects were convinced they already had the solutions, today we're not the ones to make the solutions. We can discuss solutions with the public, and then it's important to nurture that discussion with writing.
Why do you think that transition has happened? Why are today's architects interested in being facilitators?
The architect can be more than a facilitator. We discuss this in our book Open Source Architecture. The architect can come up with ideas, but those ideas should explore the potential of the present, and then the public has to respond. It's a more collaborative way to make decisions.
Not all architects today think this way; some people are still anchored in the 20th century mentality. But this is dissipating. Some of the tragic mistakes of 20th century architecture are still very much with us — the negative aspects of the Modernist and International styles. A lot of that came from the idea that just one person could make decisions for all of society. Cities are too complex for just one person to make the decisions. We should be very careful about thinking that we can still impose solutions on society.
The zeitgeist now is really much more collaborative. That's what we've seen over the last 10 years.
Cities are too complex for just one person to make the decisions.
Picking up on some of your talks online, can you tell me what a real-time city is and how designers need to think differently in order to design for it?
The real-time city means we can interact with the city through real-time data. That radically changes everything.
The way we interact with another animal or with an environment outside ourselves is based on a real-time exchange of information. We see each other, we sense each other; there's a constant feedback loop in our brains.
Traditionally, architecture has not been like this. We would interact with it, but it wouldn't move, it wouldn't respond. The same with the city. More and more, city architecture will behave like a real-time living system. It will respond to us in a dynamic way.
When you've got real-time data, that means many things. It means you can find the closest Uber to drive you from point A to point B; you know when there's a traffic jam and which way to go from A to B. But it can also mean many different things inside buildings. For instance, our design office is doing some of the largest coworking spaces in Europe right now, and we're developing this idea that these office spaces can respond to you. They tell you if you have available seats, sort of like a car-sharing system. If there's nobody in the room, the room will go on standby, pretty much like your computer. People will know where others are in the building — they can come together in an easier way. It becomes this dynamic relationship between humans and the environment.
You describe the Senseable City Lab's approach to designing cities as "omnidisciplinary." How is this different from how things have been done in the past?
I think it's related to the definition of design I mentioned before: a way to look at the transformative potential of the present. If you take that as your starting point, you want to bring together all the disciplines you need without any limitations.
A few months ago we launched a project called Underworlds that engages with people from planning, architecture, civil engineering, computer science, artificial intelligence, and most importantly, biological engineering. We're looking at DNA sampling in the city. We didn't bring together so many different disciplines just for the sake of it; it was really a result of thinking, "What is the objective?"
The beautiful thing today is that disciplines are coming together more easily because the internet allows knowledge to flow more freely.
I'm sure it's still not always easy or comfortable to work with such a varied group, though.
I think one of the causes of discomfort that can occur in these large teams is the artificial segmentation of the disciplines. Different groups talk in different ways; it's often difficult to understand each other.
But what's particularly exciting in the lab is that people that are eager to learn from one another. What brings them together is this idea of design: the transformative potential of what they're doing. That's the glue that keeps all the disciplines together.
But that artificial segmentation is changing as well. It was a necessity in the past, when access to knowledge was limited in space. When I was finishing my PhD at Cambridge in the early 2000s, just to get a scientific article you had to go to a specialized library and look. It would take hours. Today, with a click you could find it in seconds. Almost everything in terms of scientific articles and books is online. You can find information very quickly, and you can connect the dots between disciplines.
So those artificial boundaries are collapsing. If you look at Nature or other top scientific journals, two decades ago the most-cited articles were written by one person from one very well-defined discipline. Today, the articles with the largest amount of citations come from groups of researchers from many different disciplines. That is quite exciting.
So you can imagine that eventually the need for disciplines erodes?
I think it goes both ways. Of course nobody can absorb all human knowledge today. A few thousand years ago, you could dream of collecting all of human knowledge in a book — Saint Thomas Aquinas tried in the Middle Ages. Nobody can try to do that today, but you can create new connections between disciplines.
It's a little bit the idea of consilience that was proposed by the great biologist Professor Edward O. Wilson at Harvard. He proposed this idea of unity of knowledge, and the internet is making that a reality.
Questions or comments for Francesca Birks? Email email@example.com.


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The Butterfly Circus Trailer (2009)
At the height of the Great Depression, the showman of a renowned circus leads his troupe through the devastated American landscape, lifting the spirits of audiences along the way. During their travels they discover a man without limbs at a carnival sideshow. However, after an intriguing encounter with the showman he becomes driven to hope against everything he has ever believed.
Watch the official The Butterfly Circus 2009 trailer in HD below or find more The Butterfly Circus videos on Vidimovie.

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NEW bicycle lanes have been marked on some Mildura streets to improve safety for cyclists.
New lane widths have been established for cars and cyclists on Eighth Street, with intermittent cycle lanes introduced between Riverside Avenue and Canterbury Drive.
Mildura Council also has plans to linemark a section of Ninth Street between Riverside Avenue and Olive Avenue, as well as marking new bike lanes between Olive Avenue and Pine Avenue.
For more of this story, purchase your copy of Thursday's Sunraysia Daily 18-5-2017. To subscribe to our Digital Edition Click here


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Hartlepool, United Kingdom (PressExposure) July 17, 2009 -- France is currently the third most popular in the Property Abroad.com chart of the most popular destinations with overseas property buyers, according to their figures for June.
France has always been a very popular destination with overseas property buyers, but in recent months it had dropped out of the PA chart, but the increased interest isn't tending to translate into increased sales, but this is expected the change gradually throughout the year, according to Les Calvert, portal director.
"The established property markets of Europe, including France have suffered the most from the crunch, and people are out there looking for bargains. Unfortunately for France, property sales have only really declined in the last few months and prices have held pretty firm. Analysts on the ground think prices will start to fall later this year, at which point the bargain hunters will start to find what they are looking for," he said.
Meanwhile there is a lot of conflicting messages about the state of the French economy:
An article on a blog over at NuWire investor this week congratulated France for its efficiency in getting the money allocated for its stimulus package out into the pockets of the people, although it did note the controversial way they have done this; having all their monuments and castles given facelifts and polish-ups. And we have reports that French industrial output unexpectedly rose in May for the first time in 9 months.
On the other hand French unemployment is growing as fast as anywhere in Europe, in fact the UK and France are suffering worst in the employment stakes.
At the moment the people looking to buy French property are predominantly lifestyle buyers, who don't tend to care too much about the economy, so they will snap-up their bargains later this year regardless.
View property for sale in France View overseas property for sale


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Minster FM News
3:17pm 19th August 2011
Humberside Police have released an E-FIT image of a man they would like to speak to in connection with an alleged serious sexual assault in Market Weighton.
The incident occurred at around 2.30am on Sunday 14th August 2011, when two women accepted a lift from a man driving a small red car outside of the Netto store on High Street, Market Weighton.
The car was driven along High Street, before one of the women got out of the vehicle.
The man then drove the remaining woman along Holme Road where he switched off his headlights before turning left onto the A1079 and driving into a lay-by on the A1079 .
It is alleged that a serious sexual assault then took place.
The offender then drove the woman back into Market Weighton via Sancton Road and dropped the woman off on Spring Road sometime before 4am.
Officers investigating the incident have released an E-FIT image of a man they would like to speak to in connection with the incident.
Officers are also appealing for anyone who witnessed the vehicle in or around Market Weighton to come forward to assist with inquiries.
The man is described as a white, aged between 25 and 35 years with dark coloured hair and thick bushy eyebrows.
The only description of the car is that is was a red coloured small to medium sized car.
Detective Inspector Paul Kirby from Beverley CID said:
"The man switched off the car headlights whilst driving along Holme Road and the A1079, and I am hopeful that someone driving in the area would have noticed this vehicle.
"We also believe that the vehicle may have been driving erratically and at speed through Market Weighton before the incident occurred.
"The vehicle was parked in the lay-by for some time and I would ask anyone that who saw the vehicle at any point during the night to contact us.
"I am urgently appealing for anyone with any information, regardless of how small or insignificant it may seem to contact Humberside Police on 0845 60 60 222 quoting log 186 of 16 August 2011, or call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111."