OVERVIEW We are experiencing an unprecedented era in the history of urbanisation. How we manage the pace of urban growth will be one of the defining challenges of the 21st Century. It is predicted that by 2050, three quarters of the world's population will live in cities. To ensure we can all live sustainably and efficiently we need to start start designing smarter urban environments to cope with increased urban growth. How can sensor data, digital simulation, automated fabrication, augmented reality and synthetic biology create buildings and future cities that are more adaptive, regenerative, and alive? SPEAKERS David Benjamin, Founding Principal, The Living Now We See Now Cities are living, breathing organisms. In the context of new technologies and new urban challenges, there is a great opportunity to create new living, breathing design ecosystems. These design ecosystems will link complex flows of people, resources, data, and energy. They will involve work on multiple scales simultaneously. They will anticipate and welcome rapid change. Within these new design ecosystems, architects and technologists will have to embrace design with uncertainty, design with shifting and unknowable forces, and design without complete control. This talk will explore examples of these design ecosystems. It will describe a series of projects and prototypes that draw on sensor data, generative algorithms, digital simulation, automated fabrication, and synthetic biology to create buildings and cities that are more adaptive, regenerative, and alive. Melissa Sterry, Design Scientist & Futurist, Bionic City Beyond Material Boundaries Exploring the city as more than the sum of its material parts, Melissa will question some of the most fundamental assumptions commonly made about future cities. Drawing on her research into the city as a complex regenerative and adaptive system that mimics biological resilience strategies to worst-case natural hazard events, she will present how the ilk of big data, 3D printing, synthetic biology and self-assembly could enable a city that exits far beyond current material boundaries. Melissa will discuss how leading-edge science, technology and thinking could contribute to manifesting some of the most radical future city visions of the past, before presenting an overview of her Bionic City® project and some of the models she's researching and developing within it. Neil Spiller, Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Construction, University of Greenwich The Surreal Sustainable City of the Future The City is a massive engine of chance, we are at once infatuated with it, inebriated by it, entertained by it, scared and scarred by it. We are cast, like drunken sailors, in its vagrant geometries, its sublime vistas, its random street life and its astounding possibilities for personal experience. We navigate the City and our lives in constant negotiation with other people, animals and things. These negotiations are spatially multi-dimensional. Equally, we have to keep our wits about us, for the City is a bewitching, feral lover where love and death call in equal measure. Cities don't just occur at the anthropomorphic or the super anthropomorphic scale, they happen in rooms, within carpets and in mouths, they also might happen across galaxies. This kaleidoscopic perception of the City was recognised and pursued vigorously by the Surrealists, who explored its magnetic desires in paintings, graphics, sculpture, prose, poetry, performance but oddly, relatively few examples of architecture and building. However, I believe these surrealist researches and a lot of what was inspired by them subsequently, have much to teach us about the possibilities of contemporary architecture and how we might educate the architects of the twenty first Century. Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, Founders, ecoLogicStudio Sythesizing Renewable Energies into Food & Power The Bio Urban Design Lab promotes a non anthropocentric understanding of the urban landscape, intended as a territory of self-organization and co-evolution of multiple systems, and prefigures a future bio-active city able to synthesize renewable energies into food and power as well as wastes into raw material for construction and growth. On one side we research bio-mimetic models of self-organization to develop adaptive urban planning strategies, while on the other we investigate the integration of bio-technological and digital communication systems for re-metabolising the urban fabric. The lecture introduces how social insects like ants can become valuable models of bottom up and adaptive design of new urban agriculture networks, and how urban microalgae can be grown in a new breed of digitally augmented "cyber-Gardens", installed in London, Paris, Milan and the Osterlin region of Sweden.

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