Smart city in The Guardian: Do smart cities make dumb citizens?

 

Abstract

Many experiences related to smart cities seem limited to control the urban efficiency through the digital systems for the construction of a city where the adjective smart doesn’t necessarily mean an urban, architectural, or, generally speaking, a formal sustainability. The question should be: is still possible build beautiful cities as well as smart ones? The text identifies Lafayette Park designed by Hilberseimer and Mies van der Rohe, as possible ante litteram example of smart city to look in order to build cities, or parts of them, to make people’s lives easier and, therefore, to make recognition places for their citizens.

Article

The unstoppable globalization has completely changed the way of producing, learning and living: in other words it has radically modified the relationship between the individual and the society. All this has revolutionized different fields, including, in particular, the architectural one. Technological innovation, in fact, has a growing role in the evolution urban development, and, today, generally speaking, the city and its infrastructure are considered intelligent because they are controlled by digital device.

It seems that in these smart cities you can check the rate of air or noise pollution in places; monitor things such as the water level in reservoirs or dams, the fire risk for wooded areas or even seismic activity of areas; control the traffic produced by motor vehicles and the energy consumption of buildings. Do you think all these things are enough to make our cities more beautiful and make them places where life isn’t only easier but also richer?

In a recent article on the British newspaper The Guardian[1], among the ten things that architects should promise not to do in 2015, there is one called “Design dumb cities”. The text opens provocatively with the image of a city all made up of the same type of buildings that could be anywhere and basically they wonder if the smart city is really able to make its inhabitants something more than passive consumers of services and generators of data and information. Briefly, if it’s still able to turn people into citizens (img01). The most strange thing is the double possible translation of the term dumb that can be 'stupid' (as opposed to smart) or 'mute', that is, translated sub specie architecture, lacking in those features that make it possible for a community to recognize in the urban places. The fact that cities should be smart today, where all kind of efficient 'systems', should be granted: the reason why this should be an alternative or a substitute for, first of all, a sustainable conceived in formal terms it would be a short-sighted attitude. Today, the claim-conceit of many people that technologies, by themselves, can provide to give the right answer to all the city's problems can’t be shared because the shape of the settlement, the presence of meeting places, the relationship with nature conceived in terms of quality as well as quantity, the real identity of a city are also the essential factors of sustainability in terms of a recovered new humanism.

Img01 Smart city in The Guardian:

Do smart cities make dumb citizens?

So to have some directions on how to build, or rebuild, the contemporary city there are good examples from the past. The thesis here shows that the Lafayette Park, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer, can be read as a forerunner of the smart city, in its 'right way' to face many problems of the contemporary city, solved without sacrificing the quality that the past city has got us used to.

Lafayette Park in Detroit, realized in the 1955-1960 represents a model of urban combination of exceptional importance for its ability to have a realistic discussion on issues related to the settlement shape and the criteria of its transformation. Starting from a deep critique of the existing city, it essentially comes up with an alternative approach to the traditional city block as the starting point of the project. Different parts, repeated according to certain rules, compose a unity repeatable settlement with natural and residential areas. The block, the base element of the plan, has an elongated rectangular shape and, in particular, consists of five residential construction, natural areas and parking areas. Thanks to successive reversals, they form a set that generates a superblock, and together, repeated and juxtaposed in agreement with some principles, construct the general structure of the neighbourhood (img02).

Img02 Buildings, way system and green system linked to

block and superblock in Lafayette Park (F. Addario)

The structure of Lafayette Park, even today, contained all the necessary elements for a healthy social life[2]. The residence in its different types (high tower houses placed at the far ends of the plan and low houses, townhouses and apartments house, arranged on the sides); public services (located on the bottom near the road); collective services (placed on the green areas of the park) and natural places are thus the primary elements in the composition of the settlement. Moreover cul de sac streets and parking, set at a lower altitude, remove as much as possible the cars from view and serve residences without ever crossing the park. All this order allows to reach a high formal richness based on the research of reports and golden proportion[3] used to define sizes, distances and locations of each element (img03). Among his virtuous character, again, Lafayette Park is also indicated as an excellent example of climate sustainability thanks to its careful relationship with nature in the selection and reasoned placement of trees able to affect the environmental comfort. This necessity is basic if you want to talk about certain traditional theme such as orientation, lighting and natural ventilation as an alternative to the increasingly powerful plant systems that can solve, technically, the problems caused by the absence of a good reasoned project.

The founding principles of Lafayette Park - the unity of the whole, the proportion, the central role of nature, the traffic control, density, variety type-morphology, the definition of public spaces, the attention to energy and saving ground - can still be, certainly, the key for our future city. So it conforms, and is confirmed, thanks to the system thus described, a certain idea of city. Through a morphological variety is showed an order. The result is the thesis, already established, that urban design is an order work of different parts that make up the city where individual elements, buildings, weave relationships among themselves and with their surroundings.

Img03 Interpretive studies of proportional relation
recognizable in the plan drawing of Lafayette Park (A. Del Bo, 2011)

Lafayette Park teaches us that our focus of designers should relate to, once again, what is the essence of the city: the architecture. The main purpose of architecture is, as always, to represent the values of a civil society according to a concept of utility that is by far, a naive functionalism. For this mission, architecture can’t betray its foundation, producing objects that are on the market like any other thing you could buy.

The skyline of many smart cities feeds instead of this amazing aspect of architecture, now so much in vogue. Reduced as an image into the marketing and exceeded the 'human' scale, architecture took on the disproportionate size in view of a growing unprecedented architectural bigness[4]. So today, as Vittorio Gregotti said, the architecture has become a landmark, so the current research on the reasons of the building[5] is based on who will be able to build the tallest skyscraper, the curviest, the bandiest (img04 ).

Img04 City Life in Milan:

The Tall, the Curved, the Bent Skyscrapers.

All this has led to flattening forms, no longer able to return to the city effect, because they are unable to build hierarchies in the fabric settlement for the improper communicative function of which the architecture itself is echoed. Approved architectures, then, more and more similar one to each other. What kind of picture could come out, then, for the cities of the future? From magazines, none in particular. They are too much alike, too aseptic, too foreign to what they have around: they are dumb cities. We should contrast to this model another one made of alternatives to the globalization, utopian maybe, but which ideally look at and credible with no fashionable architectures. Recognizable city whose perceived image underlines in a clear and coherent way its spatial organization and the reason of aggregation of its parts. Rational city, then, looking at the history of architecture as a field of possible choices. then Only one is the immovable data. Never losing the overall general view, considering a form for the city that, even if not accomplished on the whole as the historic city, could return, even for parts, an accurate idea of ​​ city.

The smart cities’ experiences remind us, in some ways, of the spectacular character of the futurist experience, in controversy with the past and in favor of an understandable iconography for all people, showing remarkable similarities with the contemporary technological society, urban and consumerist. Currently a lot of people continue to call futurist every manifestation of art too far from our traditionally schemes understood. So futurism, likely as a vanguard of our day, should be understood not as an anticipatory action but as a radical act of breaking socio-cultural[6], the same that powers nowadays, in the writer's opinion, much of the smart cities’ phenomenon where it seems that the quality and architectural identity of urban values have become quite secondary. Today, due to the virtualization of each field, there is too often the renunciation of architecture to build real and livable places in favor of a public idea unable to see 'small' and dazzled by the charm of greatness. Surely, in this great uncertainty of the foundations and rules it is necessary to reevaluate the importance of context and adhere to the principles through which building shared beliefs, not according to the convenience, which, without any sort of communication, becomes just advertising.

An objective planning is a matter of education. Things improved through examples. If there are no examples people only talk. Talk about things that they really don’t know and this way they can’t judge the difference between good and bad [7]. We talk about sustainability and an urban technological efficiency, important but certainly not decisive for designing cities. You can’t believe that it's necessary to give up efficiency to waive to some cornerstones of composition linked to urban design. Building efficient cities does not mean building beautiful[8] cities, for which, in this case, the beauty concept refers to order, harmony and proportion of the parts. Instead building beautiful cities can be the base to achieve, certainly, through targeted choices, more efficient cities.

Biography author:

Born in Naples on the 25^th February of 1989. In 2011 she graduated in Architecture at the University of Naples "Federico II", with a thesis in Architectural Design, supervisor Prof. Arch. Antonio Lavaggi, achieving the result of 110/110. In 2014 he graduated in Architecture, at the same University, with a degree in Architecture and Urban Design, professors speakers Profs. Archh. Federica Visconti and Renato Capozzi, with a score of 110/110 and the right of publication for it. Since October 2014 she collaborates with her professors speakers in exhibitions, lectures, conferences and educational activities and also with a professional architectural office.

Name, Surname: Francesca Addario

Department: Dipartimento di Architettura

University: Università degli studi di Napoli "Federico II”

Address: Via Toledo 402, 80134 Napoli

Telephone: 333 3135683

Mail: francesca.addario@hotmail.com

Reference:

HILBERSEIMER L., Mies van der Rohe, Paul Theobald & C, Chicago 1965

(trad. it Mies van der Rohe, Clup, Milano, 1984 con un’ introduzione di A. Monestiroli)

SCOTTI F., Ludwig Hilberseimer. Lo sviluppo di un’idea di città. Il periodo americano, Lampi di Stampa, Milano 2008

SCOTTI F., Lafayette Park, Detroit. La forma dell’insediamento, Libraccio, Milano 2010

DEL BO A., Architettura e costruzione della città: il caso di Lafayette Park a Detroit, in Monestiroli A. e Semerani A. (a cura di), La casa. Le forme dello stare, Skira editore, Milano 2011

DEL BO A., La costruzione di un’idea di piano, in Malacarne G. (a cura di), La casa. Forme e luoghi dell’abitare urbano, Skira editore, Milano, 2013

CAPOZZI R., Mies van der Rohe: dalla città aperta alla casa a patio all’aula, in Cafiero G. e Capozzi R. (a cura di), Tracce antiche e Habitat contemporaneo, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli 2014