Bill Mitchell on ‘smarter’ cities
[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 1, No. 4
30 April - 14 May 2007 ]
Outdoor and semi-outdoor space can be enormously useful in a city with a good climate like Melbourne.
Professor Bill Mitchell – a University of Melbourne Architecture (Honours) Graduate – is the head of the Smart Cities research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The group focuses on using new technologies to enhance urban design and transport systems. Professor Mitchell holds a Master of Environmental Design from Yale and a Master of Arts from Cambridge. He has honorary doctorates from the University of Melbourne and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Visiting Australia recently under the University of Melbourne’s Miegunyah Fellowship Program he spoke to Voice writer David Scott.
Q Your work focuses a lot on ‘Smart Cities’ and the smart use of space. But aren’t our cities already pretty smart and still evolving?
A Well, no they are pretty dumb and they need to be a lot smarter. It’s worth putting this into a broad historical context. Early cities before the industrial revolution were essentially skeleton and skin. They provided shelter, they held up the floors and kept you protected, but there wasn’t much more to them than that. Then the industrial revolution came along and the cities got artificial physiologies – water supply systems, sewer systems, gas systems, electrical systems.
What’s happening now is that cities are also evolving nervous systems. It began in the 19th century with telegraph systems, which became telephone and wireless systems. Then along came digital networking and the implementation of the world wide web, and now we’re moving into an era of really ubiquitous networking and telecommunications, where there is intelligence embedded everywhere and everything’s connected. And this enables cities to operate in a much more coordinated and intelligent fashion, just like living organisms.
Q So the role of the city is changing?
A The role of the city has changed, yes, although ‘smart city’ is a kind of shorthand. Cities are really an overlay of all sorts of different things from different eras. A city is obviously built incrementally, not just built and suddenly rolled out like a new automobile.
One of the very fundamental changes which has happened in recent years around Melbourne is wireless connectivity to laptop computers. You can work in an office if you want, but you can work in public places too, you can work in cafes, you can work at home. And this changes the fundamental distinction that used to exist between work space and home space and recreational space. For example, I am sitting in an office which is not, in fact, my office, but I can just plug in my computer and it’s mine. It really makes very little difference whether I am here or at MIT. I’m still connected.
Q What’s the biggest area our cities can dramatically improve on to make them smarter?
A To take one obvious example, if you look at traffic flow around Melbourne and other cities, it’s still controlled very crudely. Drivers don’t have much information about what’s the best way to go in the traffic, they don’t have real time traffic information, they don’t have information coming into their cars. It would be possible with ubiquitous sensing and much more intelligent automobiles, to organise something as fundamental as traffic flow in a much more intelligent way.
Q You have done a lot of work to help MIT make more effective use of their space. What could the University of Melbourne do on a similar scale?
A I think it’s going to be very important for Melbourne to look at the new pattern of work and socialising – not just extrapolate the old kinds of needs, but think about how students and staff work in the 21st century and try new things.
The other thing about Melbourne that’s different from Boston is the climate. By and large Melbourne has a pretty good climate, and this means that outdoor space and semi-outdoor space can be enormously useful. Wirelessly connecting not just the interior of buildings but also the outdoors as well should be a top priority.
Q So people should stop looking at four walls as their office or home and start looking at space as a flexible domain?
A Yes. One of the things we have noticed at MIT, and I think this is going to be very relevant to building space here in the near future, is that the use of private office space has actually dropped off a great deal. Meanwhile the demand for ad-hoc unassigned space, things like café tables and little nooks and crannies, even outdoor space on a good day – all of this wirelessly connected – has grown enormously. So if you imagine a building like this (the University of Melbourne architecture building) having fewer private offices and significantly more highly differentiated and pleasant public space, it would be a very different building.
Q What do you think is the best example of design in the city of Melbourne?
A For me it’s an urban space, and not one by a singular designer but by multiple people, and that’s the way urban spaces work. It’s the corner of Federation Square, which has the square, the cathedral (St Paul’s), Flinders Street Station and Young and Jackson’s. So you have incredible diversity and energy and you have buildings from different eras. You also have different functions and a sense of really being at the heart of the city, and that I think is the best space.
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