[10/10/2007]
Lecturer in architecture and researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), William J. Mitchell, is to give the inaugural lecture for the 2007-2008 academic year at the UOC, under the title of Intelligent Cities. With this paper, Mitchell, who is also an Honorary Doctor of our university, invites us to the virtual debate on the most immediate and distant future of the city within the information society. The Metropolis or Blade Runner? Imagining the urban future debate will be open from 10 to 22 October.
The intelligent city is the focus of the debate for the 2007-2008 academic year inaugural lecture
Mitchell's reflection on the future of cities attempts to distance itself from predictions and science fiction and aims to analyse the possible courses such as incorporating technology and imagining the design of cities. The lecturer leads us to debate a number of questions: How do we achieve this intelligent city? Or maybe we are already there? Is it a good thing to achieve? How can ICTs and imagination help us create a better city?. In the inaugural lecture, the author analyses the concept of the intelligent and interconnected city where, thanks to technology, the urban physical elements can be coordinated and make decisions to improve people's overall living conditions and manage their own resources more efficiently, such as energy or space. The lecturer considers this question from the idea of the city as a cyborg that is increasingly more intelligent as a result of improvements to digital communication networks which become its arteries; the integrated computers and devices that can be used from any location that make it intelligent; an increasingly more common software that gives it cognitive ability; and sensors and identifiers everywhere that act as sensory organs. By way of example, Mitchell refers to one of the projects run by the MIT about shared electric, folding, short-distance cars "with an initiative similar to the bicing in Barcelona" which can even be joined together into a network to improve their electricity consumption as well as helping improve mobility, the economy and sustainability. In addition to this, the university´s director of the postgraduate course in City Administration Jordi Borja is giving the counterpoint to Mitchell's article, under the title of Intelligent cities and innovative cities. The virtual debate space, which contains the text of the lecture, will be moderated by Pep Vivas Elias, lecturer in the Department of Psychology and Education Sciences, and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, lecturer in the Department of Economics and Business Studies. It also has animations of the vehicle prototypes projected by the MIT referred to in the lecture.Mitchell´s lecture is also the central article in issue number 5 of the journal on the knowledge society, UOC Papers, which offers a dossier that looks at the city within the information society with different articles reflecting on this point.
Information Society