Augmented City - Maurizio Carta

// AUGMENTED CITY - MAURIZIO CARTA

Anna Schlarb

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.

The Augmented City needs to be intelligent (3). Cities need to reactivate their economic dimension for reconstituting an essential economic base of the city. The need to become productive (4). The Augmented City needs to improve the cultural dimension through the integrated use of culture, communication and cooperation to grow a new identity, quality and reputation. It needs to be creative (5). This is based on recycling processes and is guided by recycling principles calling for a transition of cities that not only reduce use, reuse their material and immaterial resources, but also design a new metabolic cycle – the Augmented City being recyclical and resilient (6 + 7). There is a need to accept the task for adaptive, circular and self-sufficient cities, to be resilient and to rethink porosity and fluidity as projective paradigms in the connective dimension of urban renewal projects. The Augmented City needs to be fluid (8). Reticularity as another characteristic means the process from a traditional ecosystem and gravitational model to a new and more effective reticular model based on the superorganism of the metropolises and the urban archipelagos (9). We need to build new alliance between public-civil society for innovative ways of implementation. The Augmented City needs to be strategic (10). Seven points form the framework for political and planning measures, for business and social activities, for economic and cultural life, which are able to transform the city through a new paradigm for urbanism. a) Realising a creative ecosystem: Connecting talent, education and training. Schools, universities, cultural centres and companies become creative centres and incubators of idea projects / b) Administration and services: Easily accessible to everyone at any time and from any location to increase openness, knowledge sharing and decision-making collaboration / c) Increase and spread of sensors and actuators: To enable appropriate and timely solutions in a sensitive and active city / d) Planning public spaces and services for different uses and for different users throughout the day to minimize administration costs and maximize efficiency / e) active citizenship: A common management between public -civil society to strengthen and spread the civic dimension of the enlarged city / f) Facilitate public-private partnerships: For the implementation of measures for energy efficiency, sustainable mobility, security and an environmental quality that improve the basic entrepreneurial dimension for the enforcement of the urban circular economy g) Facilitate growth: Digital manufacturing, repair and recycling of micro products at the neighbourhood level. According to Carta the Augmented City is not just a new definition, but needs his proposed paradigm shift and must collect several existing empirical evidence, traces of practice, or real experiment. The social, cultural and economic consequences of urban design and planning need to be further examined in order to enable the collective intelligence of their residents. There is a need to a new theory, understanding and connecting the role of cities and communities in the expanded Neo-Anthropocene. The Post City according to Carta is the city, augmented!