SPECIAL REPORT ABITARE CHINA

Designing Urban Future: Illusion or Disillusion?

/ by Umi

Bjarke Ingels Group ... 20

Cloud 9 8 10

Stylepark 2030
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Alison Brooks

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Alison Brooks Architects

BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group

magining and designing the future city has always been a ma er of nding consistence between fairy tale and the reality. People from any given time in history have deliberately done so, and, as a consequence, making themselves fall in love with the future blueprint. As time goes, however, our own cultivation consciously resists such imagination, the future vision becomes outdated vision before future draws near. is is the dialectics of the fairy tale: once it is created and xed, it becomes old too soon. As that quality of the fairy tale makes it hard to transcend, we may only start from the reality and approach the point where future is almost tangible, yet we avoid de ning and xing it, in order that it doesnt slip away from our own hands. Curated by Stylepark, Audi Urban Future Award invites six remarkable, and by no means stereotypical, architects and rms to design the 2030 urban future. Mobility, architectural and urban development are particular issues addressed in the designs. O en concerning living situations in mega cities, the participating architects explore new energy forms and mobility strategies in a empt to draw a blueprint of the urban future. A er three months of development, the nal exhibition of ve architects and rms presents very diverse approaches. Alison Brooks Architects (UK) employs compact electric cars and smart phone-based digital dashboard for more personal and relaxed driving experience, and thereby releases spaces for community development in the city. e architect takes megacity Mumbai as a case, and proposes a sustainable urban extension based upon an existing transport infrastructure, integrating culture, infrastructure, political and social institutions in an orderly construct. Bjarke Ingels Group (Denmark) prophesies a future of driverless cars in 20 years time, based on a study of the Kurzweil curve. e

cars will drive us, each supervised by an omniscient transport system that enables best optimal ow without causing interference between cars and with pedestrians. is take on mobility option seems to go at the future in a doing-it-once-and-for-all fashion. Cloud 9 (Spain) invites a group aged 8 to 10, the future urban leaders so to speak, to join the process. ey present four core values, clean renewable energies, buildings as power plants, hydrogen technology and fuel cell and lastly smart grid, and insert them into urban prototypes, in a way not without fairy tale overtones. Houses with stems shooting out, automobiles and airplanes cast in bubbles are just some examples of this happy project. Standardarchitectures Zhang Ke (China) consider the road rst city development model, practiced throughout China, to be outdated, and proposed a subway rst model for the existing Beijing urban sprawl. Zhang Ke envisions a city circling the now Beijing, supported by vast subway infrastructure and containing extremely high density hybrid living and working spaces, the meta-mountains. In the inner city, he adopts tra c belts for individual and collective transportation, allowing more freedom and community activities even on the road. e roads no longer in use, recently freed spaces and facades of buildings are rendered green: the agricultural culture strikes back. In answer to the a itude toward future, Zhang Ke claims that 2030 is rather tangible and 2030 in China may be the equivalent of 2060 or even 2090 in western countries, for China will have to go through more dramatic transformation. Standardarchitecture builds upon a realistic base of current problems and challenges of the future. e future may be partly predicted with aid of statistics and deduction, the other part is le to uncertainty--an earthquake, for example, could prove to be a chance for a city to redevelop itself.

Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. ... Free your mind.Morpheus, in the movie e Matrix

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J. MAYER H. Architects

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2030 2060 2090 Jrgen Mayer H.

J rgen Mayer H. A.WAY augmented reality

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Alison Brooks Architects

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is uncertainty factor, however, may well be where the architects future vision and fairy tales are set apart. e last project, by German architect Jrgen Mayer H., also the winner of Audi Urban Future Award, tells ingly a fairy tale. A.WAY assumes that the individual is a node in an augmented reality system of the city, which not only allows trouble-free mobility, but also integrates all the information from users hobbies to habits in its intelligence, and make possible, in turn, for the user to interact with surrounding buildings and environment. Automobile becomes the ultimate sensorial experience machine, a platform of constant information and knowledge exchange. e concrete reality is brought to our ngertip, at the same time its form is challenged, altered by the layers of augmented reality at play. e digital augments but could also potentially replace physical forms. e prize winning of this project stirred a certain degree of distress. Do we want to hand out our future to an omniscient information system? Do we feel comfortable with our cities possessing no xed form and being a construct of data and information? Is physicality any relevant? Confronting these serious questions, Jrgen Mayer H. answered me later, smilingly: You know, the idea of a fairytale is that, A, it might be a pedagogical tool, B, highlights somethings that is exactly not reality, is a fairytale. So, I am very surprised that almost everybody read my project as my vision of the future. It is not. It is meant to highlight a tendency we see now, we live now, and project that one into some more years to come. By telling this story we can become more critical of the situation now, and make decisions that might help us to create a be er future. this whole cars are electric and will drive automatically, and sustainability and social media is the new big thing that will change society, is such a general rhetoric, that seems not to be discussed or questioned at all (think about what are the

interest groups behind this, the green bubble, and network empires), and our project takes this common agreement to a level where it becomes so obscene that it helps us to establish arguments now to understand be er what really is going on. In the end it is also a whole network of lobbies, interest groups etc., so, our pokeville story is a reading tool for today! e award winner is the only participant who has succeeded in distancing himself from the pitfall of de ning a future. Following a t of upset, his li le fairy tale proves duly heart-warming. Which reminds us, Truth is born of disillusion. e real is born of lack of imagination. (Jean Baudrillard)

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