By Ahmed Sari
Architecture professor Rachel Armstrong, consultant Suzanne Livingston, and transport designer Paul Priestman discussed how people will deal with the growing complexity of future cities at last year’s Dezeen Day conference. The panel of experts discussed the positive and negative effects of technology on cities and the difficulties of navigating these increasingly complex urban places.
Armstrong, professor of architecture at Newcastle University, said: “I think there are some serious ethical challenges in the way we move forward from here, and the world has suddenly become more complex.” He added: “There is no good or bad decision.” “We need to stay present in decision-making, whether in terms of the impact of technology or how our cities will deal with it.”
Paul Priestman, Rachel Armstrong and Suzanne Livingston discussed the future of cities at Dezeen Day
Livingston, who represented AI: we find that we have more than just an exhibition at the Barbican Centre in Britain, said that determining the impact of technology in a building that will have a positive effect, or a negative effect, is extremely difficult.
She said, “There is an effect from our culture of classifying the effects of technology in planning and design and saying these technological developments are either good or bad.” “The truth is that I feel the effect of technology is good and bad at the same time, and we have to learn how to navigate this field and avoid the negative effects.”
According to Livingston, this makes it difficult to make broad decisions about the actions that should be taken as cities develop. She said: “We must follow technological developments in society, as we have to remain continuously informed about what is going on around us.” “It is difficult to make broad decisions at the moment to see the cities of the future.”
Armstrong said there are “some serious social challenges” ahead, and many designers are trying to find solutions that allow people to live and move around these complex cities with ease.
Priestman, founder of PriestmanGoode, who has designed many transport projects including a concept for a citywide drone delivery system and the Hyperloop passenger system, said, “We try to look to the future, and how to make things work better and solve problems,” such as designing a driverless train for the London Underground. “I think cities will become more enjoyable to live in because of the way you travel around the city. I think there will be more walking.” “I think transport will become, in some ways, almost like building cities. So in the future, when you move around the city, you will meet people regularly in the same way that you interact with your food delivery driver.”
Livingston said that cities will be “smart ecosystems”
As cities become more complex, they will also change the people who live within them, according to Livingston. She said: “Cities will be highly intelligent ecosystems.” “What I am most interested in is that smart cities will reshape us too.”
She continued: “It is extremely easy for us to look at these design systems and say that they are changing in this way or that, but we ourselves will change.” “We will change physically and mentally because of these environments.” “For me, it is evolution on both sides. It is the evolution of the city, and the evolution of the physical spaces that come to life, but we will evolve so that we forget that we are also an evolving species, but the world is not fixed, and we are not fixed.”
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