bright lights / big city: a love letter to cityscapes and the urban form
There is nothing static about New York City; it is a constant ebb and flow of shifting gears and moving parts. I have observed the city as it lives and breathes as its own organism. Cities are dynamic, kinetic, and ever-changing: they bleed people and passion.
My heart is in New York City. I have seen my neighborhood grow older and mature as small businesses shutter close and undergo dramatic cosmetic changes to become tall residential buildings. I have watched rusty old payphone booths on street corners become supplanted by silver-polished internet hubs, beacons of technology that create an interconnected network of people and devices.
In the past, cities were the products of geographic or economic circumstance. Now, cities are a conversation that adapt to the adapt to changing times and developing needs; we watch cities as they live and breathe as their own organisms. Technology, transportation, and infrastructure must meet the needs and demands of an ever-changing city climate. As cities spread out, our resources spread thin. Progress starts with sharing internally within communities and externally with other cities as the world globalizes at varying rates. After that, I think of the future of smart cities and how technology can be used to power and connect cities that also involve significant tradeoffs with citizen privacy.
The future of cities is still an open question: concerns about scaling sustainability, the burden of affordability and accessibility, and the sometimes scary. sensory-overload implications of building a “smart” city. It is a delicate balance and nobody has quite figured it out yet. Incubators like Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs or the New York-based Intersection are envisioning the future of urban innovation that we must invest in and listen to. Cities are for people and the people must mobilize and respond in turn.
In 2015, WIRED magazine published a feature titled “Eight Cities That Show You What the Future Will Look Like.” The feature named places from Los Angeles to Shanghai to Nairobi with smart design decisions that best exemplified cities of tomorrow. Once upon a time, cities used to grow by accident.
Now, the design of future cities are the exact opposite. There are no accidents here, only an infinite number of choices and dependencies and opportunity for the new urban form to take root.
A city shouldn’t just happen anymore. Every block, every building, every brick represents innumerable decisions. Decide well, and cities are magic.