Sustainable Everyday

Empowered places: planning new types of service We can imagine a new type of multi-service centre emerging, able to support various lifestyles in a fluid society that wants and knows how to be sustainable. These centres could be empowered places, enriched by special prostheses that, as in the case of ambient intelligence and tele-presence, lend them more and different properties than those traditionally attributed to a place, thereby moving them in the direction of what is technically known as ‘augmented reality’. Planning these empowered places is an enormous design challenge, not only because they are enabling systems for totally new forms of activity and organisation, but also because they could form the initial nucleus for the construction of a new kind of place.

Given the complex, hybrid nature of these local-global, real-virtual services, they could in fact become catalysers for other, wider phenomena. Particularly in the perspective of a multi-local city, they could be engines for a strategy of ‘bottom-up’ change where, by operating on a neighbourhood scale while being highly connected on a global scale, they could activate new dynamics in the economic and social fields, leading to the generation of new forms of community and identity. In short, if appropriately planned, they could contribute to the birth of a new sense of place and consequently to a new idea of the city.