Cities are pretty much cities throughout history, and tomorrow’s urban centers won’t differ so greatly physically from today’s in the more obvious ways. There will probably be some new infrastructure to try to deal with rising sea levels and occasionally something like phone booths will come and go, but the buildings will still look like buildings. 

The real changes will be more subtle, so quiet you won’t even hear a hum. In the same way driverless cars will carry on “conversations” with one another and all types of gadgets in the cloud, the Internet of Things will allow a city’s skyscrapers and furniture to communicate with its inhabitants and collect endless information about them. Much of that new reality will be beneficial, helping to ease traffic and lower crime, but it will also place all of us inside of a machine with no opt-out button. 

In a Curbed interview conducted by Patrick Sissons, MIT’s Carlo Ratti, author of The City of Tomorrow, discusses smart buildings, among other topics. An excerpt:

Question:

One of the topics you discuss in your book is this idea of buildings being more reactive and smart. How interactive will architecture get, and how will it change the look of our cities?

Carlo Ratti:

I think it’ll be very interactive. But overall, the interaction will happen through people;  our lives will change a lot, but public space won’t. A city from Roman times doesn’t look terribly different from a city today. The shift is more about how our human life and interactions in the city will change, not the shapes of buildings. That’s where we’ll see a lot of transformation.

Question:

It’s not really as much about infrastructure changes, but how we interact with the infrastructure.

Carlo Ratti:

Yes. The city will talk to us more. We’ll have new buildings, new materials, and more interactive facades, but overall, the key components will remain the same. Buildings are about horizontal floors for living, vertical walls for partitions, facades that protect us from the outside, and windows that give us a view of the outside. They were like that a hundred years ago, and they’ll be there tomorrow and in the future.

Question:

What are some great examples of these new types of buildings and architecture?

Carlo Ratti:

The project we did at the World Expo in Zaragoza, Spain, the Digital Water Pavilion, offered a vision of digital, fluid architecture. Think about a park; there are so many things you can do, between interactive lights and more responsive technology. This coming technological change is like the internet. That transformed so many parts of our lives, and the upcoming Internet of Things will do the same to our environment and cities. For instance, the city of Melbourne successfully developed an “internet of trees,” which allows residents to visualize and map urban forests.. It’s a platform, like an open street map for trees, that will help them grow, monitor, and measure, and help people take care of their parks, and compare them against those of other cities.•