Cities In Civilization

"This is the masterwork written by the world’s greatest 20th century scholar and historian of cities. Peter Hall was a professor working mainly at University College London, but he travelled widely to learn and lecture on how cities developed and operated. This book details how cities of the past were innovative for their day, and how technology changed them. If anyone wants to understand cities of the future, our topic here, it’s critical to understand what future cities from the past can teach us. The ‘City of the Future’ is an evolving concept that’s predicated on evidence-based design and planning and a policy and regulation methodology that depends increasingly on data visualisation. Look at how everyone has become fascinated by the colourful and often dynamic graphs of statistics revealing the local and global progress of the coronavirus pandemic. Without those data visualisations showing the need to ‘flatten the curve’, governments simply couldn’t have persuaded so many of their citizens to stay at home. “The ‘City of the Future’ is an evolving concept that’s predicated on evidence-based design and planning and a policy and regulation methodology that depends increasingly on data visualisation.” Today’s cities leading the data revolution seem to include Barcelona and London; and American centres of innovation like San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Asia there are Tokyo, Singapore and Seoul. And in the Middle East, there have been considerable advances made in Dubai, but usually by imported architects, and now its seems Saudi wants to be the next heroic node of imported architecture. European geodata research is underpinned by Switzerland’s ETH university system and CERN; the European Space Agency and joint research centres in Italy, and various spatial surveying and planning research centres in the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia. City of Bits is the book that really kicked off my inquiries towards data cities, way back in 1995. It was one of the most important of a group of publications that showed the internet was going to rock our world. Bill Gates wrote one, and another notable book was the seminal Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, another professor at MIT Media Lab. I chose Mitchell’s book for its greater focus on the urban, and because it is beautifully written. The critical thing about City of Bits is its structure of subheads that reveal many dichotomies between the old world and the post-internet world. Some examples are ‘synchronicity versus asynchronicity’, ‘narrowband vs broadband’, ‘contiguous vs connected’, ‘human muscles vs robotic actuators’, ‘human brains vs artificial intelligence’ and ‘economics 101 vs economics 0 and 1’. In doing so, Bill literally reversed the meanings of many accepted situations, and thereby showed that ‘infobahn’ technology was a truly transformational episode in architectural history. And pretty much everything he wrote before the turn of this century has turned out to be correct."