// AUGMENTED CITY - MAURIZIO CARTA Anna Schlarb
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Urbanization is one of the most transformative trends of the 21st century and hereby creates a variety of challenges like planning and managing housing, infrastructures, basic services, food, security, health, education, decent jobs, and natural resources and much more. According to Maurizio Carta we are still a long way from adequately addressing these and other existing and emerging challenges. To cope with those, urbanism can serve as a motor for achieving a creative, intelligent and resilient urban development. Carta says that we need to break with old urbanism by continuously questioning old habits and experimenting and need to develop a neo-anthropocene to bring earth and its natural systems back into balance. In the neo-anthropocene a renewed ethics of political responsibility and a more sensible urbanism focus on dealing more creatively with natural and cultural resources, be smarter in business, open to governance and to act intelligently in traffic. The keys to this are selfsufficiency, circularity, sharing and recycling. Since their occurence a few thousand years ago, the development of cities has always been supported by technology, first mechanical, then hydraulical, later electrical, and nowadays digital. In order not to lose the powerful vision of today‘s cities as a location-enhancing collective intelligence of the people. Carta pledges for a paradigm shift and proposes the Augmented City, as a spatial / cultural / social / economic platform to improve our contemporary lives, individually and collectively, informally and institutionally, an expansion of the urban space created by the effects of innovation. To do this it acts both on cultural,
social, ecological and economic components in order to activate human / urban regeneration. The Augmented City is an emerging paradigm that perceives the requirements of a society that is more networked and knowledge-based and that responds to the requirements of global change and new circulatory metabolism. Augmented City redefines urbanism dogmas, which we have often viewed as static and rule-based, and restores their prospective, incremental, responsive, and creative approach. Augmented City acts both on cultural, social, ecological and economic components in order to activate human / urban regeneration It is a project that is able to respond to four major challenges of the 21st century: the confirmation of the knowledge society and the expansion of the network society, the risks of global change and self-sustainability of the urban metabolism. Within this logical scheme, the Augmented City Circle works through its ten characteristics, each of which produces a specific answer in one of the main dimensions of development (knowledge, sharing, innovation, economic, cultural, circular, environmental, connective, metropolitan and incremental) The Augmented City needs a wide range of sources for acting knowledge-based and new values, skills and tools for renewing a knowledge based and solving oriented urbanism in a well-timed collaborative scenario. It needs to be sentient (1). The Augmented City needs a civic-tech-urban structural alliance to generate new public collaborative space to reactivate the constituent factors of urban life. It needs to be open source (2). It can generate an urban operational system for an advanced and responsive city planning and design.
