Soft(er) City – How flexible logistics affect planning of the cities of the future
In the beginning, temporary cities grew around points of resource or along paths of trade, creating networks of impermanent nodes which became the focus for a largely nomadic populous.
Eventually, more permanent, ‘hard’ cities grew around these resources creating service, offering logistics, or fortifying defense.
The industrial revolution solidified the city further, moving populations to where industries needed workers, building accommodation, factories and mills at the intersection of human and material resource. These cities grew and sprawled along infrastructure, consuming each other, creating suburban zones for living, and periurban zones for light manufacturing and farming.
In the postindustrial age, some cities have become dormant. Entire towns lay empty. Once populated rich cities created to serve a single use, are vacant. Their mills converted to luxury condos, their broken factories used as images voicing the fear of industrial decay. In contrast, megacities are being created across the world at an unprecedented rate. Cities learn to adapt, or they quite simply die.
But the city in which we live today isn’t the buildings, or the roads; nor is it the stores, venues or landmarks. The city in which we today live is much softer than that, and much less permanent. This ‘soft city’, as Jonathan Raban called it, is comprised of the hopes and dreams and fears of the population. The city is the interconnection of millions of minds and human interactions united around a set of common purposes.
Our cities are becoming softer, as in their inception in the days of the Silk Road. Urban rezoning is becoming more commonplace, and urban transformation is becoming continuous. Cities have become the truest digital network, responding like a living being to the ever changing need of the population they serve. Maybe cities will become what they once were – just concentrations of people and concentrations of need.
If we agree with the premise that cities are becoming softer, why do we still choose to build them so rigidly? At best our cities are permanent, at worst they are unadaptable and unscalable. And as the soft city grows, the needs of the population change and our permanent rigid cities fracture, creating urban decay, inner city slums, poor zoning and uninhabitable spaces which amass debt.
When we build the cities of the future, they must be built for change with logistical infrastructures that can scale and adapt. For instance, according to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association it costs between $2,000,000 $5,000,000 a mile to build and maintain a road for a year, yet a road can quite easily become the disused railroad track of the future. A road is a fixed decision, and we must stop building permanent solutions to shifting problems. We must never again create permanent routes to places where people no longer intend to go.
Instead, let’s choose to build cities around people; around their changing and shifting need. That’s what we imagine at Matternet, an infrastructural solution which thrives on change. We’re building a network of autonomous vehicles that can adapt and grow to the demand and need of a population, at any scale. We’re committed to designing solutions that are adaptable to need, rather than permanent.
The sometimes impermeable and invisible aspects of the Softer City will become more apparent and legible when serviced by systems which are built to adapt. We are able to build ’Skyroads’ that can become wider and deeper in response to increased traffic. We can plan disaster response by placing hospitals at the center of greatest need rather than where zoning permits. We can cache goods and resources where there is most demand, rather than where the price per cubic foot allows.
By connecting data and need to a flexible and adaptive infrastructure, we can create more intelligent cities; intelligent cities where emergency routes become more direct, where much needed goods become more readily available, where distances become shorter where a population becomes older and less able, and where critical diagnosis happens without delay. In this modern city, information can become more legible as population increases rather than less.
Choosing to live together rather than apart in open space isn’t the easier option. We all give up certain liberties in an admission that we can achieve greater things together. Living in a city is a personal commitment to a common cause. We should design a solution which fits that intent.