The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers and the Future of Urban Life

"Another favourite book by MIT professors is The City of Tomorrow by Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel. Carlo was a student of Bill’s at MIT: They set up the Smart Cities Lab together and worked on a project called the City Car, a technologically advanced vehicle that could be parked in a tight chain, like supermarket trolleys, and could be rented, like today’s car-sharing services. After Mitchell died in the early 2000s, Carlo carried on pioneering sensor-enabled urban research experiments as head of what he called the SENSEable City Lab. I discovered his genius at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2006, where the Italian pavilion was filled with big, transparent screens showing dynamic maps of pedestrians and buses moving around ‘Real-Time Rome’. These floating, frameless, holographic screens were a gob-smacking sight in Venice – years before we saw them in Avatar – and still are fantastic visualisations of data from smartphones. Carlo’s videos culminated with these amazing crescendos representing crowds at the stadium, sending messages on their phones at the height of a soccer match or a Madonna concert. Carlo’s Real-Time Rome exhibit really galvanised my focus on researching and promoting data cities. I later organized for Carlo to come to a Metropolis (major city governments) conference in Sydney, where he gave an impromptu speech at the launch of a networking project that I had catalysed called D_City. This idea evolved into a report called D_City: Digital Earth | Virtual Nations | Data Cities that was sponsored by the Group on Earth Observations in Geneva in 2013. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Carlo is a great inventor and many other things but seems not a great writer, which I guess is why he collaborates on books with Matthew Claudel, the head of Civic Innovation at MIT. In The City of Tomorrow , they present some profound advances achieved in the first 10 years of what I call the data city movement. Carlo coined the term SENSEable City – alluding to human and artificial sensing. He suggests we don’t start with technology, that we start with the human needs, experiences and desires, and then use sensor devices to help deliver solutions. One of his latest projects is fitting sensors in city sewers to detect traces of drugs and other substances in human effluence. Government agencies can use the sensor data to detect where there is alarming use of prohibited substances or other indicators of health problems – including warning signs of a pandemic. The book includes some fascinating case studies. One thing about Carlo is that while he’s one of the world’s most advanced engineers and data scientists, he also comes from Italy’s strong humanistic tradition. He seems to imagine what humans need long before many people – and governments – are thinking about them. His experiments are always very civic-minded."