Ideologies

Cities have come a long way in history that many different ideologies had governed the urban forms. In the past century, the industrialization, modernization, and globalization had created many problems in the urban environment. One the other hand, cities and urban areas had change dramatically in last century as well. There are so many important theories and ideas about how a city should be, or how are people should approach urban problems, came out of some masterminds. Some of them are extremely influential in terms of urban development of cities in the world. But here I am going to talk about some of theories and ideologies that are influential to the concept of this project.

In early 2016, the artificial intelligence AlphaGo beat the Go world champion Lee Sedol, meaning the final frontier of human brain has been taken down. Many people thinks that computers are the screens on desktop that helps people for data processing, but the recent development of artificial intelligence blew their mind. In SciFi London 48-hour film script writing competition, a competitor entered thousands of previous Sci-Fi movie script into an AI; and the AI output a full film script after a few seconds of processing and learning from the thousands of scripts, and finally won the competition against hundreds of hard scratching heading. This event contradicted the traditional impression of computers; instead of repeatedly processing what we input, they are able to think, learn, and even create.

Just like the machine taking over labor intensive work for human after industrial evolution, the AI is going to gradually take over more complicated work, and then follows the dramatic change of existing city infrastructure. Large factories and data centers that requires no human are going to appear at deserts and farmland where the land price is lower, and take over most of people who works in the office towers, especially in data processing and financial field. Office towers are going to gradually empty out, and there will be vast amount of space left over in these towers.

In China, most large real-estate firms are still investing in super tall buildings and hopping to turn them into money making machines just like what they did at economical booming a few years back. The central government is planning new districts like UNO City in Vienna and La Defense in Paris in order to give the economy a kick with transforming factory-leading economy into office-leading economy. At this moment, everyone wants the hot money in this new development opportunity, but without a broader vision, these new districts are going to turn into ghost towns. The difference between current low land price and possible future high renting price attracted thousands of development and constructions, which directly led the large overflow of office space. Up until now, the vacancy of offices in the city of Chengdu, one of the major cities in China, is 74%. And the vacancy of its development district Tianfu District and Hi-Tech Zone is over 90 percent. China has the largest population in the world, and 80% of its terrain is mountainous. With all these empty towers in the cities, there lies a large opportunity for transforming the spaces again. The question is how do we do it in this large urban scale?

Technical speaking, large amount of space transforming will provide more jobs for design related professions such as architect and interior designer. However, 3D printing and Virtual Reality has lowered the bar for professional designing. Archi-

tects’ ability of spatial imagination is taken over by the powerful 3D generated virtual space that people could walk in. Also, the expertise of building assembly is taken over by 3D printers and robotic arms. With the structural limitation in the space generation software, clients are able to design the dream space they want without architects or construction contractors. As a profession that turns clients’ imagination into reality, architects are not as much needed in the future. So the question here is: How do architects take advantage of the current trending sharing economy? And what are architects going to do next?

With so many questions asked and so many problems addressed, ideas and solutions should be examined for attacking them.

Throughout the history, there are countless urban problems that was extremely difficult to solve. However, many architects and planners manage to solve these problems through their ideology of what urban environment should look like. Some of them were really successful, some are positively influential, and some made us understand something more about cities.

Together, these previous influential ideology are going to foreshadow the later and more advance theories that could make urban space more ideal.

One hundred years ago, Jane Jacobs’ asked the right question in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and largely influenced current city grid after the industrial evolution. One hundred years later, at this turning point of times, what is going to be changed in the cities that allows us to adapt the future?

In this rapidly changing world, where do we place ourselves? To look forward, we need to understand the past, to understand the ideologies that current cities built upon.

Foreshadowing Ideologies

In the past century, the industrialization, modernization, and globalization had created many problems in the urban environment. One the other hand, cities and urban areas had change dramatically in last century as well. There are so many important theories and ideas about how a city should be, or how are people should approach urban problems, came out of some masterminds.

Some of them are extremely influential in terms of urban development of cities in the world. But here I am going to talk about some of theories and ideologies that are influential to the concept of this project.

Maison Dom-Ino

1914-1915, Le Corbusier

Combined with the orders Le Corbusier discovered from classical architecture, he created the open floor plan structure. Responding to the housing shortage in the Europe after the war started, his structure was the prototype as the physical platform for mass producing and constructing housing units. Because the units could be aligned in a series like the game of dominoes, this system was named the Dom-Ino House. This system not only was extremely influential to modern building structures, it also became the symbol for an era obsessed with customization and participation.

The Era of Verticality

Late 19th Century

With the invention of elevator and modern sewer systems, as well as the steel frame building structure, architects finally were able to build tall buildings to accommodate the ever growing population. With the massive amount of housing built within short period time, the buildings were designed to contain same room units with regulated internal circulation. These housing units were mass produced in an efficient way, and they were the earliest model for the later innovation of modular housing.

Modularity and Composition

1947, Le Corbusier

Inspired by the transatlantic cruise ship Ocean Liner, Le Corbusier put his focus the programs of emerging trend of tall buildings. In his view, tall buildings could be much more than just simple repetition of housing units. The idea of modular units came to his mind that the placement of housing units and other programs, such as preschool and dining hall, can be intersect as long as they follow the same order, which was bounded by the modular parameter he created. For the practice of this idea, he conducted multiple Unite d’Habitation which were constructed in different locations, and their units follow the same order even in different buildings, yet the placement of different programs were different.

New Babylon

1957-1974, Constant

As a member of the CoBrA, and avant-garde movement located in Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, Constant had the idea of a city that could transform itself to the city of the future. Elevated from the ground level, the new city would not be effected by terrain, which gives infinite possibilities of its location. The city will eliminate the growing inequality by having all the population under one roof. Also, the has many movable parts that could aid people’s travel. As a shared space, the city is constantly remodeling its living area for adaptation. This design was on a planetary scale that could eventually inhabit the entire humanity.

Non-Stop City

1964, Archizoom Associati

The No-stop City is an instrument of emancipation, an ironic critique of the ideology of architectural modernism taking onto its absurd limits. Branzi explains: “The idea of an inexpressive, catatonic architecture, outcome of the expansive forms of logic of the system and its class antagonists, was the only form of modern architecture of interest to us… A society freed from its own alienation, emancipated from the rhetorical forms of humanitarian socialism and rhetorical progressivism: an architecture which took a fearless look at the logic of grey, atheistic and de-dramatized industrialism, where mass production produced infinite urban decors.” The City frees us with its blankness, its featurelessness, allowing us to be anyone anywhere. The Non-Stop City acknowledges that people are the essential element of cities.

Ville Spatiale

1967, Yona Friedman

The Ville Spatiale is a multilayered structural skeleton on stilts sits over existing city parts that can be flexibly adjusted when needed. The structure is supported by stilts that are situated at an interval of 40-60 meters and which houses the accesses and facility networks. The base of the grid is 6×6 meter module that can accommodate various functions. The natural light can reach the ground level through the arranged free space in between. The inhabitants of the Ville Spatiale are capable of creating and positioning the living space they wanted. Through a program that enables them to self-planning and design their own dwelling without any architect. A Ville Spatiale can be fitted over less used areas in a city like railroad complexes. The goal is to expand the city within its boundaries without demolishing the existing buildings.

Metabolism

1959, Tange Kenzo, Kisho Kurokawa, and Kiyonori Kikutake

Metabolism was an architectural movement that began in Japan. The ideas of Metabolism progressed from being unrealized plans for futuristic cities, and it fused ideas about architectural megastructures with those of organic biological growth. The era of Metabolism includes a wide range of activities from conceptual city plans to experimental architecture like public buildings. In addition to architecture and urban planning, Metabolism became deeply involved in design and art via the term and ideology of environment.

“We regard human society as a vital process - a continuous development from atom to nebula. The reason why we use such a biological word, metabolism, is that we believe design and technology should be a denotation of human society. We are not going to accept metabolism as a natural process, but try to encourage active metabolic development of our society through our proposals.”

-- Metabolism: The Proposals for New Urbanism

Plug-in City

1960-1974, Archigram

Plug-in City is one of many vast, visionary creations produced in the 1960s by the radical collaborative British architecture group Archigram. Its form is a mega-structure with no buildings, just a massive framework into which dwellings in the form of cells or standardised components could be slotted. With interchangeable programs with experition dates such as housing, retail, office, and transportation constantly being replaced by the crane on top, the city is updating its systems with the advancement of technology, meaning the city will never grow old.

“The aesthetic of incompleteness, apparent throughout the Plug-In scheme and more marked than in megastructural precedents, may have derived from the construction sites of the building boom that followed the economic reconstruction of Europe.”

-- Archigram: Architecture without Architecture

Borneo-Sporenburg, Amsterdam

1993-1996, West 8

Located at the harbor of Amsterdam, this urban design project conducted by west 8 successfully transformed the docks into a living community. After examining traditional dutch houses, the architects came up with a more efficient design template with limited land use and sufficient space and sunlight. Instead of using this template to design houses themselves, they turned this template into a local zoning regulation, and then invited many other architects to design individual houses in this community they created. By repeating this template in a great variety of dwelling modes and with maximum architectural variation, an animated street elevation emerges with a focus on the individual.

Torre de David, Venezuela

Bottom-up strategies are one way to address prevailing urban scarcities. Torre David, a 45-story office tower in Caracas, was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer and a national banking crisis that crippled the Venezuelan economy in 1994. The housing shortage led to occupation of the complex by squatters led by ex-convicts in October 2007, beginning with over 1000 families, representing about 40% of Caracas’ “informal communities”, started to take over the center core of the tower. Neglected for over a decade, in it became the improvised home for a community of over 1,000 families living in an extra-legal and tenuous occupation that many called a vertical slum. Although the unfinished tower lacks basic infrastructure, these families managed to maintain living in a fairly poor condition. Interestiongly, originated as a slum for living, this tower is undergoing some increase of residents and many more programs. Thus, this informal community in the tower of Torre David becomes more like a vertical city.

Kowloon Wall City, Hong Kong

Kowloon Walled City was a largely ungoverned densely-populated settlement. Originally a Chinese military fort, the Walled City became an enclave after the New Territories were leased to Britain by China in 1898. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, China announced its intent to reclaim its rights to the Walled City. Then a large amount of Chinese refugees and outlaws took over the walled city. Since then, Kowloon Wall City became a urban settlement that falls completely outside of the government control. With the highest population density, the government’s numerous attempts of demolishing the walled city were almost never successful.

The reason why it is called Kowloon Wall City is because the settlement is almost completely separated from the outside. Within the settlement, there is a self-sustaining society. Also because there is no government control, the city became a is constant growing both in terms of population and size. Since the footprint of the city is limited, the only way to increase square footage is to increase its height. It is very obvious that most of its top levels are filled with informal add-on structures. These structures vary from one floor to sometimes five floors, which put a enormous amount of risk of clapsing original building structure.

It is very interesting that even in this highly informal community, everything was running smoothly. Due to the limited amount of resources and economic asset, the settlement is actually very efficient, and rational. Without macro-management, the place basically runs solely on the survival game of capitalism. For example, if there needs to be a barber shop in one section, there has to be one, or a resident would become one due to the demand. On the contrary, if it is not necessary to have a pharmacy in another section of the community, the pharmacy’s business will not sustain for long.

In conclusion, even the settlement’s social structure is highly informal, it’s development remains highly rational.

Olympic Village, Munich

Planned and constructed for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, the buildings and facilities of the Olympic Village were to be used intensively after the end of the Games themselves as housing units for local college students. The village was also intended to serve as a residential complex after the Olympics and a showcase for modern forms of residential construction and urban planning. With in the complex, each of the students is given one unit, and they are allow to express themselves on the facade of their own units. In this way, the individuality of each student could be expressed in an non-disruptive yet obvious way. Thus, massive amount of diversity was brought to this community, and so was new aesthetics.

Open Source Urbanism

Living in the age of the internet, no one questions where the internet exists or what the open source code does. The concept of free sharing and open source information is not strange to the public. It is very interesting that the terms “open source code” or “open source software” were very strange terms twenty years ago. Before 1990, computer giants like IBM and Microsoft dominated the software world. These companies kept their source codes very secretive because they were extremely concerned about people cracking or copying their systems. At the time, only a few pieces of software published by these companies, mostly business software, were able to run on home computers, which very much limited the power of these computers.

In 1991, a freely modifiable source code called “Linux Kernel” was developed by Linus Torvalds. It was published and later used internationally, which broke the limit set up by traditional software packages that forbid anyone except for the publishers to modify or distribute the software. This breakthrough on open source codes made people realize the power of computers; the idea of open source laid the foundation of the information technologies that we have now. The concept of open source, unexpectedly, did not ruin the business of these large corporations, but instead stimulated their sales since computer products became much more desirable.

The existing real-estate market and the information technology market are extremely alike from a macro perspective. In the IT world, the electronic and software giants were the rule-makers of the game, and they did not want anyone to threaten their profit margin. Similarly, real-estate superpowers are trying to protect their interests the same way as the IT giants did. As a result, the cities are filled with large numbers of building projects that lack variety. By variety, I meant the variety of truly customized space for each individual and specific functions instead of the variety of building shapes and designs in city skylines. As a result, people are compromising a major part of their lives into these not –so-ideal spaces because they simply do not have more choices. Prices for housing in urban areas are skyrocketing because the limitation of density in city cores, so many people with lower income have been driven out of the cities.

What if we use the same idea of open source code that completely changed the computer world on the real estate market?

Early Computer and Its Operator

Most likely, there would be an even more powerful resistance form the real-estate market than it was from the information technology market.

Housing is more of a necessity for average citizens in most cultures, therefore the market for these real-estate monopolies is more stable. On top of that, an enormous amount of capital is invested in this ever-growing and profitable business. Thus, none of the business people in this game want to change the system.

The real-estate property differs from electronics and software products in that realestate often requires much more capital for purchasing. This gives the wealthy much more influence and power over the individuals. +

Plus, the government cannot predict how stable the new open source system is, so that a change like this could be a disaster to their administration. This make this existing market much less flexible to change for the governmental perspective.

However, because housing is more of a necessity, the general public could participate more in this urban movement -- unlike software coding in late 1980’s, which was only understood by a very small amount of elites. If open source code gave people who understood computer language freedom to create their own software, then open source urbanism is liberating every individual who desires to create his or her own ideal spaces.

What open source stands for here is more freedom of making and doing. Looking back at the history of urban design, cities have been constructed to fit the ideologies of small groups of elite. The ideology could be Robert Moses’ grand vision of New York City, Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, Oscar Niemeyer’s constructing of Brasilia, or a group of planners’ design of modern cities. These ideologies and designs are not wrong in nature. They are very well thought out and considerate about people’s needs, which are what planners try to achieve the whole time. Today’s cities reflect the ideology of city planners’ consideration for people’s life quality and the economy of the city. Planners try so hard to figure out people’s needs and try to design for them. They usually think that rationally planning for people is justice -- which is true in some way. However, the problem with designs today lies in the word “rationality.” When Corbusier designed the Radiant City, he was creating a better urban lifestyle for average citizens. In his design, it is obvious that he considered enormous amount of problems of existing conditions and tried to solve them. During its design, Corbusier even studied and experimented both the minimum and ideal space for each individual home. The residential quad became the essential part of the city to emphasize and celebrate human life. Considering the health for the citizens, heavy industry is separated from human activities. Also, a large amount of green space was designed around residential towers. For each unit, cross shaped tall buildings maximize the sunlight. Even though this design fits all the ideal urban models at the time, and it could have been the perfect city, it never ended up getting built for various reasons. The fist one is that it did not feel like a city that people are used to anymore. Human nature is very complicated: what people want sometimes is not what people need.

A famous example is the story of Nokia and how their rational decisions doomed the leading cellphone company. For many years, cellphones around the world are getting smaller and more complex in terms of functions. Nokia was very successful on the track of getting their new models slimmer and more complex for quite a while. By 2008, Nokia invested heavily on the new project that fits all cellphone users’ desire: it has a super thin bodywork, a full keyboard for typing, and eyeful different

gadgets on home screen looking just like a personal computer. However, Nokia’s new model did not sell as well as they expected. Why? Because the trend was completely altered by a new revolutionary product: iPhone. Apple computer’s new vision of what cellphones should be like was eye-opening for everyone and soon gained its extreme popularity. Except for making rational decisions, there was nothing wrong that Nokia did at the time. The new model did combine every desirable feature and even made them better as a whole. Logically speaking, it should have been the best seller as a result. However, again, we are unpredictably irrational in nature.

Current urban design is a lot like making a Nokia cellphone, planners carefully gather people’s opinions for a better living environment. On the contrary, collective rational decisions might not end up with a great design. Therefore, the idea of open source urbanism could lead to more urban experiments and design conventions. Plus, the city will be able to provide more for their people if people are given more freedom of making their own input in the urban environment they live in.

According to the speech on Lendlt Forum 2017 by Thomas J. Curry, director of Office of the Comptroller of the Currency under U.S. Department of the Treasury, there are only two things in the world cannot be avoided: tax and regulation. This means within the framework of tax and regulation, everything else could be determined majorly by the market force, which makes the system much simpler. One other great thing about the market is that a majority part of the market is consumers. Since consumers are the most powerful force in the market, average citizens will be given more power in terms of make changes in the cities. Jane Jacobs once said in the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When everyone is empowered in contributing to build the cities in their own imagination, the cities would be truly humanized and diversified.

This seems like an extreme populous idea. Of course there will be worries about this idea of letting the majority of people taking control of the cities, and letting the society be governed by the market. In fact that the involvement of current state government in people’s daily life is actually not as much anymore: The government agencies set up the regulations and boundaries to protect the interests of majorities. Beyond that, they are as a part of the market as every other individual private entities. The collapse of Soviet Union was a great example for the failure of state ownership and lack of free market in the post-industrial age.

In contrast of the political power, the market force plays a significant bigger role in terms of the development of our civilization. For example, the online shopping corporation Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1996 mostly to extract profit from the existing retail market by providing online shopping service through existing shipping network. However, what Amazon had accomplished was much more than that: it imbedded the idea of online shopping into people’s mind and established whole new industries for e-commerce. Since then, the total revenue for e-commerce is doubling every three years. The possibilities that online shopping brought completely changed many people’s lifestyles that 75% of global population had shopped online before, and it had a great impact on global economic structure. It was projected that by the end of 2017, many groceries stores across America will provide online shopping and ordering service. Looking back to the founding moment of this tech company, its initial intention was to survive in the global market and make profit, but its service had a great impact on our civilization’s development. Not only Amazon is positively influencing our civilization, but many other corporations such as Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb are also finding their own way of changing people’s lives. They are all products of the global free market under the common framework of tax and regulations. Plus, privatized hospitals and prisons are making so much profit in the United States that many law enforcement and fire departments are going to be privatized in near future. In conclusion, the economic force created by free market and consumers are playing an extremely important role in our modern society, and it is possible to hand over the city governance to the market under certain regulations and framework.

Under the same framework of tax and regulation, private ownership is revolutionizing under the concept of sharing economy. Integrated with real-estate and architecture industry, the idea of open source urbanism can offer so much more based on People’s decisions. In this case, cities will possibly be even more diverse. Spaces that architects and planners can never think of could be created.

Sharing Economy in Urbanism

The architecture and construction industry has always been developing and changing. In the past few years, there have been numerous breathtaking projects and notable events in this innovative field: the CCTV building was built, 1,715 submissions were sent to Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition, and the Amager Bakke incineration plant in Copenhagen completed its construction. These amazing projects and events are directly related to architecture and design. However, the most important event among them all, although it is not directly related to architecture, is the booming of an online website: Airbnb.

Airbnb is the product of the concept of sharing economy, which is based on the internet of things. Incubated by Y Combinator in 2008, Airbnb is an online community and marketplace for anyone to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world. The hosts of homes are able to list their rooms or vacation houses for both short term travelers and long term renters. In just a few years, Airbnb has grown into a giant platform with more than 150 million people in more than 65 thousand cities around the world. Thanks to the internet and sharing economy, Airbnb generates billions of dollars in revenue each year. It is altering people’s perceptions about private properties and complete strangers. Moreover, Airbnb is gradually increasing its influence on the global real-estate market, which directly effects the architecture and construction market as well.

Sharing economy, as it reads, is based on people who share their properties, or pretty much anything. It is a term that originally came from of the open-source community to refer to peer-to-peer based sharing of access to goods and services. The term is now sometimes used in a broader sense to describe any sales transactions that are done via online market places, even ones that are business to business, rather than just peer-to-peer.

Not only has Airbnb benefited from the new concept of sharing economy, firms such as Uber, WeWork, NeighboorGoods, and MoBike are getting more and more popular. These services are usually run by large tech firms. These firms usually mass manage these products and services through internet and big data, which requires very little human power and maintenance. Plus, while gathering more customers, the companies are collecting more data from everyone. Artificial intelligence and deep learning computers are constantly analyzing the data which shows patterns and habits of the general public that could potentially help these companies improve

Peer-To-Peer Rental: The Rise of the Sharing Economy (2013) The Economist

their services. Therefore, these services are getting better and better in short terms. Despite the aspect of big data and deep learning, the greatest thing about these sharing economy based services is that they dramatically increased the usage and efficiency of each property. Take Uber for example: the typical middle class citizen usually owns a car to drive to work. While the person is working, the car is sitting in the workplace parking lot for most of the day. When the person goes home, the car will be sitting in the garage for the rest of the night. Most of private car owners are only using their cars for less than 10% of the day, and during that 10% of driving time, car owners were very likely to run into traffic jams. Uber provides a solution: a convenient, inexpensive and safe taxi service with different choices of cars and customizable routes. Just with the touch of a button, the nearest private driver will pick riders up within minutes, and take them to their set destination with drivers’ own vehicle on demand. This service reduces the amount of personal automobiles on the roads, and largely increases the usage of those shared cars that are running. By having a somewhat smaller amount of cars constantly running for tasks instead of one car for each task, it eases rush hour traffic which would make these rides more efficient.

Sharing economy sure increases the usage of shared properties, and maximizes the efficiency of different resources, but one could argue that the concept of sharing economy contradicts the idea of the consumer culture based on private ownerships. Current economic structure is highly based on global consumerism and private ownership. When people start to share what they have, much less products and resources are going to be purchased. For example, about 40% of food in an American family’s refrigerator goes straight to trash. On one hand, it is wasteful and disrespectful for our resources. However on the other hand, the wasted supplies are a part of the drive for the trillion dollar retail industry. When people start to share various products and meals in the neighborhood as NeighborGoods envisioned, less food and daily supplies will be needed and wasted for each home. In the past, the unit of ownership for a power tool set or a baseball bat was usually restricted to one family. But in the near future of sharing economy, since everyone is sharing their properties, the unit of ownership might expand to an entire neighborhood as a community. Because the demand for products decreases, many manufacturing and mass production based industries are on the edge of disappearing.

With such a great impact on current society and economy, the sharing economy has a large influence on architecture and design as well. Despite Airbnb’s enormous influence on the real-estate market, which stimulated the field of architecture and interior design, the concept of sharing economy changes the way people socialize and the typology of urban communities on a more massive scale. Here, we have to talk about how people live their lives and socialize in a historical context. In traditional settings, cities are divided into units of families or villages where a smaller group of people could form a strong organization to protect their group interests. Stepping into the 21st century, the internet enables everyone to gather information from thousands of miles away and to communicate with hundreds of people on a single device. Average citizens are given much more power to coordinate an amazing amount of resources on a daily basis, and many of their trivial tasks are taken care of by artificial intelligence and automated machinery. Then, the concept of sharing economy made the world population reexamine private ownerships. Forward thinkers used to imagine the world of modular homes being plugged into different structures in different locations so people can have their private homes and all their belongings with them anywhere they go. What sharing economy promised is that people do not actually have to own anything. Under this new concept, people who like to travel could get a home experience anywhere, but with much less effort and expense. Based on the usage of trending apps such as Uber and Airbnb, people, especially from the cities, are accepting this new concept very well. In response, ar-

chitecture and urban design will adapt to this change of people’s perception of ownership. Storage space in homes will be reduced. Instead, more circulation and recreational spaces could be programmed in residential designs. Offices will have less cubicles for each person. Instead, a more open working environment will emerge. Traffic lanes in cities will reduce due to the increasing number of shared automated vehicles running on the streets. Instead, sidewalks will be widened, and even with strip parks and resting areas.

While sharing economy revolutionizes city scape over time, the social structure starts to change dramatically as well. Professions with intensive manual labor and repetitive data processing will disappear. Much more work will be done either through computed machines or through socializing between people. Therefore, less people are going to work facing computers or machinery, instead, they will be facing other people. Before artificial intelligence completely replaces human beings, the amount of communication between people is going to escalate to a new altitude. Since people are essentially consuming less resources, and the production level is getting higher, the amount of time people have to work is going to largely reduce. Thus, people will possibly spend more time on recreational activities and socializing instead of working. In some sense, the future working class might not need to be working at all. Meanwhile, with the advancement of medical technology, the entire demographics will shift towards an older age. In an extreme case that author Yuval Noah Harari described, a whole new useless class will emerge when the artificial intelligence outsmart us, and people in this social class are essentially useless to the world. In this case, because tech companies are gathering so much data through sharing economy and humans’ massive amount of online activities, the artificial intelligence will be able to learn at its fastest rate. Very soon, they will be able to deal with everything much better than human beings, even better at dealing with human beings ourselves. When this AI revolution happens, the useless class will not be able to do anything better than the robots and machines. Even though this projection of Harari sounds ridiculous, it is unquestionable that the social structure is undergoing a dramatic change in the age of internet and sharing economy.

While the social structure and lifestyle changes, architecture and urban design will have to quickly respond and step forward. After all, architecture and cities are made out of humans; the other way around, architecture and urban design are about designing space for humans as well. The change of lifestyles, and how people inhabit these spaces, will change the functions of architecture and programs within it. On a bigger scale, the change of social structure will lead to the change of cityscapes.

The Post-Taylorism

What the social structure would be like in the age of open source urbanism?

As most of historians would refer to, the Taylorism emerged soon after the industrial revolution in Europe. Taylorism significantly improved the economic efficiency by specifying workers into different tasks in the production line. In this way, each worker is doing repetitive work of what they are very much used to and good at. The workflow under this type of management was extremely fast comparing to other productions types. Most of the jobs existing now are greatly impacted by this theory of management, and they somehow are still part of the Taylorist workflow.

However, when open source emerges, most of now existing jobs will not exist due to the rise of artificial intelligence. Human will no longer get stuck in any production related ocupation, even jobs such as data processing and information analysis. Instead, peple are going to engage more creative works such as art and sports.

The open source urbanism will escalate this change by bring more individuality and diversity to the social structure. Then, the humanity will enter a new era of posttylorism.

Open Source Programs

The Domino house system was such an extraordinary idea that could transform the entire building industry and even people’s perception of lifestyle evolving architecture. However, the projects following this idea was not successful. The architect Le Corbusier empowered himself to influence people’s lives in his own way, meaning people had to follow the lifestyle he designed. After years these houses was built, the residence had constructed multiple additions to each projects to accommodate their own different needs, and these houses looked nowhere near the original design.

In Koolhaas’ book Delirious New York, he explained that programs are the most essential elements for the buildings, no matter for skyscrapers or small shed. However, in the 21st century, new buildings are supposed to be able to change its program with people’s needs instantly to adapt to the ever changing political and social environment, as well as the fast-paced world.

In recent years, human race has experienced the biggest changes ever in human history. The technological advancement is never so fast that no one can accurately predict what is going to happen in 10 years, not even the top scientists and tech developers. It is the first time that human race has ever experienced the fact that everything we teach at school might be useless when they grow up.

Leading with technology, the world is constantly changing at a extremely fast pace. A person can not keep up with the society is he or she is isolated for more than 5 years. Even if the person does, it would take a very long time for he or she to get used to what had happened in just 5 years.

How do we build a building that will stand there for over one hundred years?

Yes we need monuments. But for everyday building, mostly function based, we want them to be interchangeable in terms of functionality, technology, programs, and even locations.

And yes, open source urbanism might be the answer.