Visions of "Next Generation" Cities

A couple of weeks ago at the ICING (Intelligent Cities of the Next Generation) workshop my presentation followed the keynote by Ju Young Byun on the visions and projects in New Songdo, Korea (video of the project). While this Korean master plan is necessary to stretch our imagination, I could not resist in thinking that “Next Generation Cities” are about the “sustainable chaos”, a feature that New Songdo aims at eliminating with technological progress. Understanding the hybrid city of the future obligates not only a trip to the “ubiquitous city” of New Songdo, but also to observe the perpetually collapsing Naples. In other words, quoting Phil Hubbard in Hybrid City:

New technologies do not drive urban change, but are rather caught up in complex networks (or ’socio-technical assemblages’) which incorporate all manner of actants.

it echoes quite well with Mike Crang’s Urban Morphology and the Shaping of the Transmissible City (via Nicolas)

Indeed visions of the city in accelerated time-space very often assume the desirability of instantaneity and speed, in the ‘real-time city’. Robins (1997) has called for a revaluation of Byzantine complexity, and social complexity rather than transparency in thinking through the city – rather than the often unthinking celebration of ordered, purified digital space that is somehow friction-free and the assumption that the absence of dirt and disorder is a good thing.

Arguably Napoli is a symbol “Next Generation” city, in strong contrast to New Songdo’s polished vision. Photo courtesy of LHOON