Abstract
The automation of cities through both mechanisation and digitisation has had a phenomenal impact on our way of life and the design, construction and operation of our cities. This mechanisation has led to the deployment of robotics and 3D-printers on construction sites. Drones are now equipped with cameras that are used to measure the progress of construction works and monitor assets for structural defects. Simultaneously, our cities are increasingly filled with various sensors that extract data from our digital trails, accelerating the datafication of our urban environment. This chapter outlines the broad themes of the book, exploring the impact of technologies of automation on the city in three ways: the automation of the design process to provide optimised solutions to design problems. Second, the automation of construction processes and building maintenance programmes, including advances on how we collect and analyse sensor data. Third, how technologies of automation could potentially impact our way of life in cities, such as how we expand our cities, how we manufacture and fabricate what we need and want, how we utilise urban data to navigate around a city to transport people and goods, or use urban data to make trusted decisions about a city.
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Notes
- 1.
The designs for the hospitals were based on a prior hospital built to tackle the SARS-epidemic in 2003 (Ankel 2020).
- 2.
Autodesk’s Project Dreamcatcher states on its website that ‘Dreamcatcher is a generative design system that enables designers to craft a definition of their design problem through goals and constraints.’ The project aims to produce a computer system that can ‘generate thousands of design options that all meet [the] specified goals’. https://autodeskresearch.com/projects/dreamcatcher. See also: Sidewalk Labs’ recently announced ‘Delve’. https://hello.delve.sidewalklabs.com.
- 3.
For emotional AI systems, information collected on an individual’s emotional state could potentially be categorised as ‘sensitive information’ and treated in a similar manner to private medical information on an individual (Sedenberg and Chuang 2017).
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Wang, B.T. (2021). The Machine Metropolis: Introduction to the Automated City. In: Wang, B.T., Wang, C.M. (eds) Automating Cities. Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8670-5_1
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