Inaugural lecture of the UOC’s 2007-2008 academic year on Intelligent cities by William J. Mitchell
Posted by Isidoros Passas at 3 July 2008 in Intelligent Cities & Regions
University of Catalonya (UOC) Papers is an interdisciplinary electronic journal produced by the UOC which looks to publish original university papers that focus on the conflux of the subject areas dealt with by universities in the knowledge society. The journal also looks to act as a platform for the publicising of new publications relating to this same area.
UOC-Papers Edition 5 focuses on the subject of the city. The starting point is the inaugural lecture for the 2007-2008 academic year, which, under the title of “Intelligent Cities”, is given by Professor Williams J. Mitchell from the MIT. Two years ago, Professor Mitchell was made an Honorary Doctor of the UOC. In this paper, after showing how decisive the development of mobility systems has been in the evolution of cities and establishing the nature of the technological changes that have occurred in recent years, the author gives us the example of the clean urban car, developed by his laboratory at the MIT. The clean city car aims to tackle intelligent passenger transport by bypassing the debate between public transport and private cars to adopt a solution where resources – especially energy and space – can be managed and distributed more efficiently. This example leads the author to conclude, from a more general perspective, that in the future “the effects on the models of spatial use, building systems and their functionality, and the perspectives for long-term urban sustainability will be far-reaching – often in ways that are as yet unimaginable”. UOC lecturer Jordi Borja offers a counterpoint to Mitchell’s inaugural lecture, where he emphasises the value of chance as a creator of innovation, highlighting how it is in the density of exchanges afforded by the city that makes it possible for chance to act as a creative agent.
Inaugural lecture of the UOC’s 2007-2008 academic year on Intelligent cities by William J. Mitchell
Abstract:
Following a historical journey through the different physical structures of cities, we arrive in the 21st century, where cities have all the sub-systems that are needed by living organisms: structural skeletons, various layers of protective skins and artificial nervous systems. In this context, to create new intelligence in the cities, we need to combine software and digital telecommunications networks, ubiquitously embedded intelligence, and sensors and identifiers. The City Car is an example of the comfortable, cheap and sustainable contributions that a smart city can make to citizens’ personal mobility. This prototype is a clean, compact and efficient city car, which can fold and stack like a shopping trolley, and charge up on electricity in the meantime. If intelligent embedded technology starts to be used ubiquitously, vehicles and the different mechanical and electrical systems in buildings can become specialised robots able to respond intelligently to the surrounding environments in which they are integrated. Likewise, resources can be managed in more sophisticated ways, with unimaginable effects on space use models and building systems.
You can read the paper in this link