Workshop on The Design of the Hybrid City of the Near Future

The Lift workshop on The Design of the Hybrid City of the Near Future that I co-organize next week with Nicolas Nova and Daniel Kaplan has now reached its limit of 24 participants. It will gather a pretty exciting matrix of m(researchers, designers, and thinkers) x n(students, professionals and entrepreneurs) to discussion new ideas, experiments and theories around the design of the city in the urban informatics era. Particularly, it will focus on extracting and critic the main transformation in design processes implied by the emergence of a) new urban actors (digital infrastructures, citizens as sensors, Google, online social networks), b) new urban interactions (real-time awareness of flows, access to shared resources, automated access, mobile access to geoinformation) and c) new practitioners practices (novel access to information on the society that make the city, its people, networks, culture).

We will engage the discussions on themes based on generic visions of the hybrid city of the near future (e.g. a bottom-up city, a zero-emission city, a sentient city, a city that bonds people) and try to extract

• their key factors for success and failures;
• the concrete first steps to aim for success;
• the difficulties to integrate these steps into current practices
• the implications to the design of these visions (examples and counter-examples)
• elements to prevent us from regretting the contemporary analog cities

See you at Lift!