Antonio G. Quintela

Antonio G. Quintela

Data Scientist/Physicist. Intrepid explorer of the highest peaks and deepest pits of life.

New society means new urbanism

6 minute read

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Cities and villages were usually spatially organize in order to optimize different types of variables as: distances to the main work places, or to the main market places, or to vectors of social interaction as the religious places, or family houses… by natural dynamics of the day to day life organization. In the equation of that optimization problem not only enter labour, habitation and leasure places but also the common spaces to connect them and reach them by building paths, streets and roads.

The new changing world and the Industrial Revolutions allow the humanity to be able to organize and live in more greater urban spaces in which the organization of spaces started to be important. Voices as the one of Ildefons Cerdà (1859) appeared to claim that a new science to study and organize cities would be needed. A science strongly related with other fields of knowledge, specially in social sciences [1].

That process of industrialization accelerate in the next century and some organizations claim that as a result of the slow but unstoppable deruralization and urbanization process the urban population surpassed rural population before 2010s [2]. A fact that made urbanism even more important since that times.

The changes in technology also were been highly important in the design and living standards in the city. Specially the ones related with transport systems. The main old cities of Europe were build thinking in transportation by walking or riding horses. The ones built in North America and some cities in South America (e.g. Brasilia) were built thinking in transportation by driving cars. Different transportation systems forces different designs.

But the urban spaces are not only that; the city planning not only reacts to a set of conditions in the mobility of its inhabitants but also interact and change incentives in their lifes. More compact cities make likely the life in community and sharing moments with other people in the squares and parks. More sprawling cities promotes more familiar and digital life styles. Ones incentivates sympathy and social awareness the others promotes individualism and tribalism.

As we see, we can explain long-run changes in a bottom-top explanation, but we cannot forget that there is a strong inter-relationship betweeen the current urban plan and the lifes of the people living under it. Top-bottom influence are clear and undeniable. That’s why the role of urban planning is so important and critic.

Technology, Internet and the death of distance

The last years we come up with new technology of communication in which it is easy to send data wireless (without any costly structures) from one point to another. From the arise of the Internet we started to change our day life routines (buy, communicate, consumption of entertainment…). There was a day that some scientist though we were watching the death of distance [3]. Who need to move to another place if you can communicate from your home? Most activities of your day life can be done from home. Distance do not matter anymore… But it seems it is not true. Demographic data shows the one biggest migration rates from rural to cities in history, and it seems it is not going to stop soon (just having small rest with the pandemic). Living in physical world made us a spatial animal, which we are still conditioned and explained by our spatial neighbourhood even having this new trending aspatial technologies in our hands.

But what is true is that even considering ourselves spatial animals, our relationship with our surronding spaces has changed. Environment of work changed with new possible jobs and home office is starting to be normal (specially with the push of Covid-19). The way we get entertained has changed. Streaming platforms are offering wide catalog of content ready to be consume from home. You can now even play with friends all around the world with the e-gaming. Now the common spaces are the virtual rooms. But still, people gather in physical spaces, friends keep going to bars, meetups take place in offices, and even there are presential competitions of e-gamings, the e-sports events.

Will the new generations of technology be able to change that relationship?

New concecpt of spaces

The new advances in mobility are promising us improvements in the usage efficiency of our transportation network. But not only human transportation is what determines our relationship with our physical surrounding space. With new improvements on that regard we will face the compromise between human mobility and goods mobility. That could bring with better efficiency in how we use the shared spaces.

We started sharing cars, bikes and other transportation vehicles. But what about our other spaces? What about shops which can only open during the day? Or what about businesses that can only operate during a specific season? Schools, administrative buildings, offices… Now, all of those buildings are closed and ununsed during high amount of time. But also in your own home. There are spaces that you will use them in different ways depending on your needs at specific moments. We will interact with reactive spaces [4][5]. Spaces which can change furniture in an easy and free-of-human way. Spaces that can be adapted easily to multiple specific desired uses. That will be only possible due to sensorization of the spaces and new level of gadgets which will help us to communicate in a different way with this sensorized spaces (some of them without us being concient of it).

More reactive ways to consume and interact with spaces are coming. We go to experience a time of connected spaces or what some people called smart spaces or reactive spaces.

Efficience use of space

Space in urban places is becoming a very valuable asset.

Conclusion

Spatial features still matter and with new spatial data we have to be aware, for the good and the bad, how powerful it is to predict and categorize human behavior. In the new hyper-connected world, freedom could be an issue, and due to the lack of degrees of freedom and the physical bounding of the natural laws, we are even more exposed to that lose of freedom in our day life activities outside the virtual world. Wihout being dramatic, a bad city plan can worsen the situation of lack of freedom making us choose between the efficiency of certain spatial decisions or the cost in time or money of that decisions.

Bibliography

TALK ABOUT DENSE SPACES CYCLING…