cars wand malen
translator: joseph genireviewer: morton bast i thought i would startwith a very brief history of cities. settlements typically beganwith people clustered around a well, and the size of that settlementwas roughly the distance you could walk with a pot of water on your head. in fact, if you flyover germany, for example, and you look down and you seethese hundreds of little villages, they're all about a mile apart. you needed easy access to the fields.
and for hundreds, even thousands of years, the home was really the center of life. life was very small for most people. it was a center of entertainment,of energy production, of work, a center of health care. that's where babies were bornand people died. then, with industrialization,everything started to become centralized. you had dirty factories that were movedto the outskirts of cities. production was centralizedin assembly plants.
you had centralized energy production. learning took place in schools. health care took place in hospitals. and then you had networks that developed. you had water, sewer networks that allowed for thiskind of unchecked expansion. you had separated functions, increasingly. you had rail networks that connected residential,industrial, commercial areas.
you had auto networks. in fact, the model was really,give everybody a car, build roads to everything, and give people a place to parkwhen they get there. it was not a very functional model. and we still live in that world, and this is what we end up with. so you have the sprawl of la, the sprawl of mexico city.
you have these unbelievablenew cities in china, which you might call tower sprawl. they're all building cities on the model that we inventedin the '50s and '60s, which is really obsolete, i would argue, and there are hundredsand hundreds of new cities that are being planned all over the world. in china alone, 300 million people,some say 400 million people, will move to the cityover the next 15 years.
that means building the equivalent of the entire built infrastructureof the us in 15 years. imagine that. and we should all care about thiswhether you live in cities or not. cities will account for 90 percentof the population growth, 80 percent of the global co2,75 percent of energy use, but at the same timeit's where people want to be, increasingly. more than half the peoplenow in the world live in cities,
and that will just continue to escalate. cities are places of celebration,personal expression. you have the flash mobsof pillow fights that -- i've been to a couple. they're quite fun. you have -- (laughter) cities are where mostof the wealth is created, and particularly in the developing world,it's where women find opportunities. that's a lot of the reasonwhy cities are growing very quickly.
now there's some trendsthat will impact cities. first of all, work is becomingdistributed and mobile. the office building is basically obsoletefor doing private work. the home, once again,because of distributed computation -- communication is becominga center of life, so it's a center of productionand learning and shopping and health care and all of these thingsthat we used to think of as taking place outside of the home. and increasingly,everything that people buy,
every consumer product, in one way or another,can be personalized. and that's a very importanttrend to think about. so this is my imageof the city of the future. in that it's a place for people, you know. maybe not the way people dress, but -- you know, the question now is, how can we have all the good thingsthat we identify with cities without all the bad things?
this is bangalore. it took me a couple of hoursto get a few miles in bangalore last year. so with cities, you also havecongestion and pollution and disease and all these negative things. how can we have the good stuffwithout the bad? so we went back and started lookingat the great cities that evolved before the cars. paris was a series of theselittle villages that came together, and you still see that structure today.
the 20 arrondissements of parisare these little neighborhoods. most of what people need in lifecan be within a five- or 10-minute walk. and if you look at the data,when you have that kind of a structure, you get a very even distribution of the shops and the physiciansand the pharmacies and the cafes in paris. and then you look at citiesthat evolved after the automobile, and it's not that kind of a pattern. there's very littlethat's within a five-minute walk
of most areas of places like pittsburgh. not to pick on pittsburgh, but most american citiesreally have evolved this way. so we said, well,let's look at new cities, and we're involved in a coupleof new city projects in china. so we said, let's startwith that neighborhood cell. we think of it as a compact urban cell. so provide most of what most people wantwithin that 20-minute walk. this can also bea resilient electrical microgrid,
community heating, power,communication networks, etc. can be concentrated there. stewart brand would puta micronuclear reactor right in the center, probably. and he might be right. and then we can form,in effect, a mesh network. it's something of an internettypology pattern, so you can have a seriesof these neighborhoods. you can dial up the density --
about 20,000 people per cell,if it's cambridge. go up to 50,000 if it's manhattan density. you connect everything with mass transit and you provide most of what most peopleneed within that neighborhood. you can begin to developa whole typology of streetscapes and the vehicles that can go on them. i won't go through all of them.i'll just show one. this is boulder. it's a great exampleof kind of a mobility parkway, a superhighway for joggers and bicyclists,
where you can go from one endof the city to the other without crossing the street, and they also have bike-sharing,which i'll get into in a minute. this is even a more interesting solution in seoul, korea. they took the elevated highway,they got rid of it, they reclaimed the street,the river down below, below the street, and you can go from one endof seoul to the other
without crossing a pathway for cars. the high line in manhattanis very similar. you have these rapidly emergingbike lanes all over the world. i lived in manhattan for 15 years. i went back a couple of weekends ago, took this photograph of these fabulousnew bike lanes that they have installed. they're still not to where copenhagen is, where something like 42 percentof the trips within the city are by bicycle.
it's mostly just because they havefantastic infrastructure there. we actually did exactlythe wrong thing in boston. the big dig -- so we got rid of the highwaybut we created a traffic island, and it's certainly not a mobility pathwayfor anything other than cars. mobility on demand is somethingwe've been thinking about, so we think we need an ecosystemof these shared-use vehicles connected to mass transit. these are some of the vehiclesthat we've been working on.
but shared use is really key. if you share a vehicle, you can haveat least four people use one vehicle, as opposed to one. we have hubway here in boston,the vã©lib' system in paris. we've been developing,at the media lab, this little city car that is optimizedfor shared use in cities. we got rid of all the useless thingslike engines and transmissions. we moved everything to the wheels, so you have the drive motor,
the steering motor, the breaking --all in the wheel. that left the chassis unencumbered,so you can do things like fold, so you can fold this little vehicle upto occupy a tiny little footprint. this was a video that wason european television last week showing the spanish minister of industrydriving this little vehicle, and when it's folded, it can spin. you don't need reverse.you don't need parallel parking. you just spin and go directly in. so we've been workingwith a company to commercialize this.
my phd student ryan chinpresented these early ideas two years ago at a tedx conference. so what's interesting is, then if you begin to addnew things to it, like autonomy, you get out of the car,you park at your destination, you pat it on the butt, it goesand it parks itself, it charges itself, and you can get somethinglike seven times as many vehicles in a given area as conventional cars, and we think this is the future.
actually, we could do this today.it's not really a problem. we can combine shared useand folding and autonomy and we get somethinglike 28 times the land utilization with that kind of strategy. one of our graduate students then says, well, how does a driverless carcommunicate with pedestrians? you have nobody to make eye contact with. you don't knowif it's going to run you over. so he's developing strategies
so the vehicle can communicatewith pedestrians, so -- so the headlights are eyeballs,the pupils can dilate, we have directional audio,we can throw sound directly at people. what i love about this project is he solved a problemthat doesn't exist yet, so -- we also think that we candemocratize access to bike lanes. you know, bike lanes are mostly usedby young guys in stretchy pants. so -- we think we can develop a vehiclethat operates on bike lanes, accessible to elderly and disabled,women in skirts, businesspeople,
and address the issuesof energy congestion, mobility, aging and obesity simultaneously. that's our challenge. this is an early designfor this little three-wheel. it's an electronic bike. you have to pedalto operate it in a bike lane, but if you're an older person,that's a switch. if you're a healthy person, you mighthave to work really hard to go fast. you can dial in 40 caloriesgoing into work
and 500 going home,when you can take a shower. we hope to have that built this fall. housing is another areawhere we can really improve. mayor menino in boston says lack of affordable housingfor young people is one of the biggestproblems the city faces. developers say, ok,we'll build little teeny apartments. people say, we don't really want to livein a little teeny conventional apartment. so we're saying, let's builda standardized chassis,
much like our car. let's bring advanced technologyinto the apartment, technology-enabled infill, give people the toolswithin this open-loft chassis to go through a process of defining what their needsand values and activities are, and then a matching algorithmwill match a unique assembly of integrated infill components, furniture, and cabinetry,that are personalized to that individual,
and they give them the tools to go through the processand to refine it, and it's something like workingwith an architect, where the dialogue starts when you give an alternativeto a person to react to. now, the most interestingimplementation of that for us is when you can beginto have robotic walls, so your space can convertfrom exercise to a workplace, if you run a virtual company.
you have guests over, you have two guest roomsthat are developed. you have a conventionalone-bedroom arrangement when you need it. maybe that's most of the time. you have a dinner party. the table folds out to fit 16 peoplein otherwise a conventional one-bedroom, or maybe you want a dance studio. i mean, architects have been thinkingabout these ideas for a long time.
what we need to do now, develop things that can scaleto those 300 million chinese people that would like to live in the city,and very comfortably. we think we can makea very small apartment that functions as if it's twice as bigby utilizing these strategies. i don't believe in smart homes.that's sort of a bogus concept. i think you have to build dumb homesand put smart stuff in it. and so we've been workingon a chassis of the wall itself. you know, standardized platform
with the motors and the batterywhen it operates, little solenoids that will lock itin place and get low-voltage power. we think this can all be standardized, and then people can personalize the stuffthat goes into that wall, and like the car, we can integrateall kinds of sensing to be aware of human activity, so if there's a babyor a puppy in the way, you won't have a problem. so the developers say,well, this is great.
ok, so if we have a conventional building,we have a fixed envelope, maybe we can put in 14 units. if they functionas if they're twice as big, we can get 28 units in. that means twice as much parking, though. parking's really expensive. it's about 70,000 dollars per space to build a conventional parking spotinside a building. so if you can have folding and autonomy,
you can do thatin one-seventh of the space. that goes down to 10,000 dollars per car, just for the cost of the parking. you add shared use,and you can even go further. we can also integrateall kinds of advanced technology through this process. there's a path to marketfor innovative companies to bring technology into the home. in this case, a projectwe're doing with siemens.
we have sensors on allthe furniture, all the infill, that understands where people areand what they're doing. blue light is very efficient, so we have these tunable24-bit led lighting fixtures. it recognizes where the person is,what they're doing, fills out the light when necessaryto full spectrum white light, and saves maybe 30, 40 percentin energy consumption, we think, over even conventionalstate-of-the-art lighting systems. this just shows you the datathat comes from the sensors
that are embedded in the furniture. we don't really believe in camerasto do things in homes. we think these little wireless sensorsare more effective. we think we can also personalize sunlight. that's sort of the ultimatepersonalization in some ways. so we've looked at articulatingmirrors of the facade that can throw shafts of sunlightanywhere into the space, therefore allowing youto shade most of the glass on a hot day like today.
in this case, she picks up her phone, she can map food preparationat the kitchen island to a particular location of sunlight. an algorithm will keep it in that locationas long as she's engaged in that activity. this can be combinedwith led lighting as well. we think workplaces should be shared. i mean, this is reallythe workplace of the future, i think. this is starbucks, you know. maybe a third --
and you see everybodyhas their back to the wall and they have food and coffee down the way and they're in their ownlittle personal bubble. we need shared spacesfor interaction and collaboration. we're not doing a very good job with that. at the cambridge innovation center,you can have shared desks. i've spent a lot of time in finlandat the design factory of aalto university, where the they have a shared shopand shared fab lab, shared quiet spaces, electronics spaces, recreation places.
we think ultimately,all of this stuff can come together, a new model for mobility,a new model for housing, a new model for how we live and work, a path to marketfor advanced technologies. but in the end, the main thingwe need to focus on are people. cities are all about people. they're places for people. there's no reasonwhy we can't dramatically improve the livability and creativity of cities
like they've done in melbournewith the laneways while at the same timedramatically reducing co2 and energy. it's a global imperative.we have to get this right. thank you. (applause)