Implementing Advanced Knowledge
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7.2.3 IAAC LECTURE SERIES: Alexei Novikov
Self-sufficient Platform
Habidatum is working on the idea of how can we use spontaneous big data generated by urban environment, like cell phones, social networks, credit cards… We were inspired by MIT Senseable Lab (Carlo Ratti), but our main point is how can we make this kind of visualisations useful, that’s to say, how visualisation can help and what type of visualisation can help. A couple of years from now we got interested in time. Time as the most underused asset in our urban life. There are already some years that we are dealing with real time data, and when you see all these flows and particles moving through the city, you understand that the key point of contemporary urbanism has to do with the coordination of these figures in time. Not in space, but in time. In this direction, we announced the project Chronotope City, and we started it by measuring time in many cities. Actually we could say that we are now living in a very interesting period, where the whole world is changing and moving from an economic growth to a saved wealth. Savings are now much more important than growth: you can have 0 growth but you can have increasing income just by reducing cost of operations, which is something that can be done in a number of ways. But to a larger extend, the coordination of our activities can reduce a lot of money even if we are maintaining 0 growth. It doesn’t mean that we will not see global growth, it means that our target now is to save. And in this sense, wealth is mainly about time use. But, why time is so important? There was a very famous geographer, Torsten Hagerstrand that some years ago invented a tool to understand the different tracks of people in time-space. 50 years ago, when Europe was an industrial society, there was no freedom: we were just going to work and to sleep, and that was always like that almost without deviations. Cover - Chronotope City, IaaC Archive Figure 1 - Chronotope City, IaaC Archive Figure 2 - Moscow Map, IaaC Archive 2
A couple of years ago, a group of french sociologist, found out that only 12% in Europe of our life of people is related to work. The rest of the time we are sleeping, in pension, at school, etc. That means that the rest of the time people are doing whatever they want to do. On the top of it, Jeff Morgan, consultant of Tony Blair, calculated that 35% don’t need to go every day to work, what means that they can spend their life in another manner. As a consequence, it seems obvious that the physical infrastructure of 30-50 years ago was developed for a completely different environment. Now it is very different and our physical infrastructure cannot support it anymore. In this sense, our current time-schedules seem chaotic, but they are not: we just have another logic. The arrangement around time is a very logical field, and that’s why we started looking at time.
Figure 1 - Urban Planning for a Self-Sufficient Neighborhood 4
Another problem that comes to mind when you analyse our current situation in the world is the real state price surge. There are many oscillations, which generally are related to certain speculations. What it creates is a very disturbing social environment where people with smaller incomes are being squized out of cities like San Francisco. People are blaming silicon Valley and Google, all those rich men that come to SF and squized local people, which is a global process that happens as well in Russia. Environment is becoming less and less diverse, and the same process is going on in countries placed in Asia and Africa. In these cases you understand that there is a very simple relation in between poverty and prosperity: where there is less diversity, there is at the same time more economy. Diversity goes down because only big firms can afford regular offices buildings in certain cities, and the rest end up out.
Figure 2 - Matter Cycle for a Self-Sufficient Neighborhood
Following this tendency, some cities are characterised by the high price and low diversity binomial, and according to it we developed our studies in 4 main cities: Atlanta, Moscow, New York and Washington. In the case of Moscow for example, by measuring every building in the city and 5 of its main streets, we realised that the percentage of time that the physical space could be used but it is not used is 40 per cent. It is a huge number. As we said, we are talking here about huge amounts of money and investments: Wasted conditions, wasted services etc. This leads us to the notion of the economy of emptiness, which consists in the management of
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spaces that cannot be used but should be there anyway. One of the most peculiar stories is one that takes place in a canadian city that had 3 parks, one overused, one not used and one well used. The mayor decided to close the one that is not used, and immediately next day he got a demonstration against these policies. The answer to this fact is people appreciates not just the factual use of a park, but as well the possibility of using it, even if finally it is not used: it has to do with the potential of using it, which it is as well a value. Habidatum now is working on this topic and trying to understand what exactly those kind of spaces mean. The number 40% is not a disaster but anyway seems to be too much. In cities like Washington is even more: 60%. In contexts like these ones, just a 5% could be an answer and be used. If you look at the power of economy in the world, you realise that 28 regions is 2/3 of global GDP, which signifies that around 45 trillion dollars are being produced in urban areas. The economist published that all urban regulations in USA cost 5% of economic growth of USA. If you abandon all the regulations (zoning), the american economy would be growing 5% faster per year. If you just take 5% it could be a fortune. All this reflection lead us to the notion of time-scrappers. Which would be the outcome of it? The problem is that while diversity is getting lower, the price is going up. Discussing it in our Habitatum group, we though about timesharing: Commercial space being shared with something else. We started looking at some examples, like churches that are opening galleries in open hours, and we even found a bank that looks like a community centre and provides also a lot of staff, agencies services etc. We need therefore to continuously look at 3 dimensions: price, activity and diversity of functions. Evidently, not every place in Manhattan can be use for time-sharing, but one of the main opportunities is focused in major intersections that are a little bit deserted because social infrastructure cannot afford being there. By analysing all these spaces through big data analysis, we can detect which spaces could be the subject of time scrapping. Instead of building more floors (sky-scrapping), we can try some sharing arrangements between functions (time-scrapping). The major obstacles are the zoning arrangement and our habits. For example, if you are a bank and the other services are some educational facilities, how can you transform that space? Minirobots that can reconfigure the space in minutes or hours in order to make it completely different? And exactly this is what architects should be thinking about, that’s to say, this is one of the crucial points that should frame the role of the architect in the XXI century.
Figure 3 - Chronotope City, IaaC Archive Figure 4 - Alexei Novikov, IaaC Archive
Copyright © 2014 Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia All rights Reserved. IAAC BIT 7 September 2016
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IAAC BIT FIELDS: 1. Theory for Advanced Knowledge 2. Advanced Cities and Territories 3. Advanced Architecture 4. Digital Design and Fabrication 5. Interactive Societies and Technologies 6. Self-Sufficient Lands
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