This book collects part of the academic results of the two visiting seminars held at the School of Architecture, Civil & Environmental Engineering from EPFL (EPFL-ENAC) during the academic years 2021 and 2022. The seminar ‘Designing Futures with Cities’ (directed by Mar Santamaria and Pablo Martínez) aimed at updating the toolbox to observe, analyse, anticipate, simulate, design and evaluate urban strategies.
Today, our capacity to work with the inherent complexity of urban systems is proportional to our ability to describe them. In the last decades, this complexity has evolved along with the tools and information we use to analyse and interpret urban matter. Indeed, our capacity to address urban complexity is mainly fueled by the unstoppable datification of the world. Today, big data sets provide information about buildings, inhabitants or the characteristics and uses of public space -collected by networks of sensors, administrative procedures or the use of mobile devices.
In this context, we invited the students to embrace this way of describing the world, organising theoretical and practical knowledge acquisition to recreate realistic case studies in the city of Geneva. The seminar was organised in three main phases. Starting from the data-gathering process (including digital collection and on-site observations), the students have developed a quantified analysis and a subsequent proposal that explores a transformation scenario.
Marked by COVID-19, this period forced the students to make the home a refuge, looking abroad with a desire to socialize. At the same time, this impasse has catalysed discussions about the city and its future. This same period has fostered the construction of a critical point of view on the part of the seminar’s students, which they have evolved and grown until creating inspiring proposals for the future city expressed through cartographic and quantitative scenarios that support the yearnings for a new desired urban environment.
The present is not as we imagined
Europe is once again a continent at war, in which the countries’ tolerance for slaughter is proportional to their dependency on fossil fuels. Dramatically, energy shortages have accelerated the desired transition of our energy model in the last months. Today, fear arises not only from the possibility of frigid winters but also from increasingly severe summers both in southern Europe and the nordic countries, where they never had to face high temperatures. Climate change is present clearly and forcefully amid a geopolitical crisis.
Both crises are widening the social differences that hinder the progress of society. They benefit investors while social inequality boosts and minimum poverty levels are optimized to sustain the efficiency of consumption processes -for instance, human development has regressed this year to 2016 levels. Consequently, the reduction of emissions and the consumption of fossil fuels requires a radical change of model as improving the effectiveness of processes is already insufficient.
This profound transformation must deal with the existing. We need to understand how the current model operates to dismantle it carefully and build a novel paradigm. For the first time, we are no longer proposing to make mobility more efficient but to reduce the number of daily trips. Instead of researching how to generate clean energy, we need to understand how to consume fewer power resources. On the waste side, recycling is as important as not throwing away. Unprecedentedly, degrowth has become a way to promote human development, socially and politically acceptable.
Cities are at the centre of this transition. They host most of the world’s population while, at the same time, they are the main extractors of resources. Cities define the limits of rural areas and demand a vast layout of infrastructures that cross the territory to supply them. Over the centuries, the concentration of human life has proven to be very positive. However, today more than ever, urbanity is shifting into management problems, functional inefficiencies and undesired health impacts. (…)”
Promoters
