Redefining our Urban Spaces
Isn’t it strange how we’ve bought into the world view of the car in it’s present form as an infinite continuum… and by default, the car as the premium constraint on our future cities. Currently I’m working on a marketing plan for the Hobart CBD as a part of my marketing management unit at the University of Tasmania and I’m wondering how we’re going to redefine our urban spaces without seriously thinking about who we intend to become in 20 years time.
Hobart City Council has a 2025 strategy to become a more multicultural and community supporting city. My interest is in the emerging technologies, and in particular the disappearing technologies – including the internal combustion engine. Does the electric car future simply mean our current paradigm of the gas guzzler, only silent? And will that be electricity from coal or nuclear? I’m skeptical about it being more of the same – my guess is that we’ll get innovative about the relationship between our urban environment and the way we use it and see it will evolve accordingly. I’m more of the mind that along that path we’re going to be reinventing things a little, we’re going to be realising urban interactions are about the people of the inner city district and not the mechanisms that move us in and out of them.
General Motors and Sedgeway have announced the Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility Project (P.U.M.A) which is rethinking the landscape of urban traffic from a number of angles. I’m obviously not the only person who looks at the current motor vehicles and wonders about the waste of space, energy and resources allocated per person. No the P.U.M.A. isn’t your interstate transit tool, but please tell me where an inner city worker, for example, really needs to consume the current amount of energy, a massive car and engine, and the associated road wear and tear plus parking overhead.
TechCrunch have an informative post and a later update (which includes video footage) well worth checking out.
The urban vision of 2025 should take into the equation the technological world and the environmental realities of 2025. We definately won’t be driving V6 combustion engine sports sedans with fully plastic interiors, and we will be living with more green and sustainable technologies across the board. We will be more efficient, because if we don’t we’ll perish as a species – we’re close to the tipping point in several areas. We’ll rethink the meaning of business success and discover that it’s not just about maximising profit without an equal value on maximising social value. We will start to realise making enough money for enough lifestyle is enough – because in the last 100 years we’ve trashed the potential resources of this planet in an entirely unsustainable pattern of chaotic industry.
We will rethink the urban landscape and make it become something other than a conduit for traffic… or at least not in the sense of a gazillion cars per day piling into the inner city of 2025. We’ll have more ubiquitous environments and probably an effect of that will be a more observational government structure. We’ll have the One Web, not the Internet as we know and love for it’s 6,000 day old idiosyncracies. In 2025 a personal robot will be relatively normal, at least for the rich, and we’ll have implants and other biometric devices doing all manner of sundry medico-invasive annoyances.
That will be the world of tomorrow – not more of the same. If we can rethink our current industrial age paradigms about social spaces and urban interaction we are going to be a whole lot smarter than many people expect of us.
Remember 2025 will be a time where about half or more of the edible species in the oceans would have already become extinct, and our current mass extinction will have had another 16 years progression, including depletion of rainforests in the Amazon and everywhere… it will be an entirely new and exciting world in many ways. No petrol… no oil so no plastic and no tyres and all the other petro-chemicalia we’re addicted to in manufacturing. We’ll have hit critical population and fresh water issues long before and either sorted it out responsibly or made our peace with lots of people dying from war or famine or pandemic. Oh and there will be major storms and so forth from global warming, and the tide will have covered all those lovely beachfront rich mansions… or at least the pool and backyard.
The lamest thing we ever do as humans is transpose our today paradigms directly across into tomorrow’s vision, but we do. It makes us feel comfortable… it makes us feel like the Internet will always be the way it is today, for example, only faster. Just website silos… that are faster.
Here’s an example of how we see the future versus how it happens in reality. In 1980 did anyone (bar a few scientists MAYBE, and only maybe) have any idea about the true potential of computers on the way we interact as a species? On the way we organise? Did we envision the Internet and social networking applications and the World Wide Web? Did we believe that everyone would want a mobile phone or that we’d even want to SMS little hard to write messages to everyone? Yet it happened. It was the world of tomorrow. And I’ll leave you with that food for thought about the city of Hobart in 2025 and it’s potential.
