HOW TO DESIGN A SMART CITY

BY SAMUELE SORDI

Case studies from recent Pininfarina projects highlight what a designer thinks about while developing a smart city and what results from a holistic and integrated approach.

How do you design a smart city? First, we need to understand what a smart city is. A smart city is generally perceived as a place where sensors and cameras monitor everything and everyone to help cities to run smoothly. But, as Rem Koolhaas said, “It’s at least questionable that intelligent urbanism can come just from data collecting, sensors, and autonomous vehicles.” There are many concerns about the unpredictable vulnerabilities of managing the complexity of smart cities—like data privacy, the short lifespan of new technologies, and the affordability for cities to hire new tech staff or outsource to tech companies.

Also, many analog cities in the world work very well and even perform better. Our parks, public spaces, and communities are made by people, not just technology. To become smart, cities and technologies should look to ancient technologies and architectures to promote sustainable and resilient infrastructure.

There’s no clear definition of what can be a smart city, so there’s no clear definition of how to design one. As architects, urban planners, and designers, we should have a holistic approach to put people’s needs first. To deliver this seamless urban experience, we should take a holistic approach to how we live, work, learn, move, and connect with each other.

The Way We Live

The Light Towers in Merida, Mexico, were designed around how nature interacts with us, how it can blur the boundaries between outdoor and indoor environments, and how urban forestation can help fight climate change and decrease the overall carbon footprint of our cities and the energy needs for cooling and heating buildings.

The Way We Work

Workspaces are changing. Employees are demanding more. We are talking less about work and more about connection and collaboration in a healthy environment.

The Way We Move

The mobility of the future will be electrified, sustainable, and seamless. We see a huge opportunity in how this shift can change our lifestyles and how we enjoy cities. For instance, for future gas stations: How can they be transformed into a kind of urban oasis where people connect, gather, and experience different activities while waiting for their cars to be charged?

The Way We Learn

For Lithuania’s National Concert Hall, we didn’t just design a cultural hub; it’s more around the liberation of how technologies can expand access to culture, art, and education. We envisioned a system of pods that can be connected to the live event in the theater to regenerate and revitalize different city locations and democratize or decentralize art, culture, and education.

The Way We Connect

We proposed a futuristic and energy-efficient hub for the C40 event in Dubai. It’s surrounded by activities, co-working spaces, art galleries, exhibition spaces, and a food court with local products. It is a hub for people to meet, but it’s more a promoter of sustainable lifestyles with a low impact on the natural environment but a strong impact on the nearby community.

Beyond Community, Well-Being & Sustainability

What are the pillars for our cities to transform into better places to live? It’s everything around this idea of having a strong sense of community, enhancing the well-being of people, and promoting social, economic, and environmental sustainability strategies.

For example, we are developing a project in Tulum, Mexico, where everything is designed around the idea that architecture can create a sense of community. The design is inspired by its unique rich biodiversity. We intend to reframe the meaning of community, fostering interaction and collaboration. One of the main features of the development is a livable and shared system of streets where roads grow and mix out of nature to stimulate creativity and the interaction between different cultures, experiences, and people.

Another example is the Urban Lounge, a climate-responsive structure we unveiled during Design Week in Milan. It’s about how the public space can react to maximize people’s comfort, how public outdoor space can help mitigate climate change, and how it can be set up to respond and react to specific local climate conditions. The Blu Loop is another master plan we are developing in Jiashan County, China, in an ecological corridor southwest of Shanghai. It’s one of the most populated areas in the world, but it’s also one of the most fertile areas in the country. Lakes, rivers, and streams feed its unique rich biodiversity. Everything is around water. We envision this kind of ring around the city that we call Blu Loop that will be the infrastructure where people will meet, run, and have different urban experiences, where water will be what we call the city’s “liquid urban catalyst.” For us, this represents a kind of paradigm of what can be the future city, where people can make clean industry, do sports, enjoy the parks together, research, and live the innovations in a multimodal mobility system to encourage cycling, biking, walking, use of renewables, and creating energy from waste to merge the rural heritage city with the most advanced urban planning system.

Samuele Sordi Chief Architect Officer, Pininfarina

Florida

Samuele Sordi is a member of the Register of Architects of Florence and leads the architecture department of Pininfarina, where he has worked since 2013. Before that, he collaborated with Zaha Hadid Architects in Rome and Studio Archea’s international Italian architectural office. He is also active in international design and financing competitions and has experience in planning private and public housing, manufacturing and commercial buildings, and interior and industrial design. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of Florence’s School of Architecture.