Cities of the Future : Essay for the IFJ 100 Year Edition

Our Cities of the Future

What does it take to fit something the length of an average shark into something one-tenth the thickness of a human hair?

Anyone who’s struggled with a laptop charger could guess ; a lot of planning and imagination. Yet, our beloved doublehelical strand of DNA effortlessly and spontaneously folds and squeezes itself into this very size, deep in the nucleus of our cells.

If the entire DNA in our over 100 trillion cells was unwrapped and laid end to end, a string is created that could reach the moon no fewer than 6000 times.

If you lined up all the Neurons in your brain it would create a semi-intelligent string 965 Km long. Your veins and arteries, when lined up, can encircle the globe more than twice.

Our bodies contain organs and systems of fantastical sizes, all packed into unbelievably efficient formats within an inconspicuus shell, that somehow also work incredibly well.

Mind boggling statistics of this kind exist in almost every organ, fundamentally changing how we look at ourselves.

We are Finite shells concealing our Infinities in every part.

What came first? The impossibly long stretches or the indescribably minute sizes? The miles of neural highways or the need for memory?

I believe that a 'predisposition' to Compaction came first, and all of Life followed this principle; slowly achieving its myriad variety of forms.

A culture of compaction defines our very existence, where impossibly large lengths, areas and volumes are miraculously accommodated into impossibly small spaces.

What came first? The impossibly long stretches or the indescribably minute sizes? The miles of neural highways or the need for memory?

I believe that a 'predisposition' to Compaction came first, and all of Life followed this principle; slowly achieving its myriad variety of forms.

If the tendency to Compact is implicit in the way we organise ourselves, it makes Cities our natural mode of inhabitation.

The culture of compaction is Endemic, and the City is its manifestation

Bombay

The evolution of Bombay, from a string of disjointed islands, to the infinitely complicated, corrugated beast that exists today is a perfect example of this principle at play.

It may seem fairly obvious to the casual onlooker that the City generates compaction, by its limited confines, by the millions of people jammed together, by its clogged roads and processes.

But the City is a Womb.

It stretches and contorts, lovingly accommodating the almost grotesquely crammed foetus within it, stretching, folding and reaching its breaking limit, but never yielding.

All this struggling and squeezing forms the core of our city experience, a common lament, a collective sigh that defines our non-conscious environment. There’s always a little more space, a little more wiggle room till the end birthing moment.

Then it all slides out.

Eventually, places take on the energies people bring to them.

The Ka’aba becomes holier with each pilgrimage.

Gods become more powerful with each prayer.

Shahrukh Khan becomes more adored with every imitation haircut.

Our common fears, adorations and worships shape the universe and our interactions with it, and the city experience is no different. Compaction culture fundamentally changes the way we behave as citizens.

In a city like Bombay, where space to live is a resource like any other, to be maximised and used preciously, sensible directions come from exploring the potential of tiny spaces.

Across the world, hyper-designed environments are creating responsive, multi-functional formats for living.

Studio apartments fold up, walls slide, beds descend, balconies emerge and a lavish lifestyle co-exists with a very real space crunch.

What if the city phenomenon emerged spontaneously from a predisposition to compact itself ? What can we understand from this, and where can we draw our future visions from ?

Take a long hard look at yourself.

At 3 weeks, you were the size of a Pinhead.

No Big Deal.

At 8 weeks, you managed to squish your Mother’s bladder to a fraction of it’s size before you arrived in her belly.

You bequeathed her the constant urge to pee.

When you were 12 weeks old, you wrested room for yourself by squishing her intestines around.

Halfway through your uterine existence, you managed to push her stomach upwards by almost 45 degrees.

You gifted her constant heartburn.

By your 31st week you contorted her entire torso, squeezing out room for yourself between her liver, lungs, stomach and intestines.

You made it hard to even breathe.

Compaction creates Hierarchies.

Locality becomes more important that lavishness. Lavishness of space tends to become meaningless, looked upon as obscene. Lavishness is rejected by the Human body, no organ occupies more space than it needs to.

The large-scale waste of space is then as criminal an offence as the largescale waste of water or food.

The large, double volumed bungalows we’re all nostalgic for are replaced by new, harder working formats, where shifting use and the time of day will increasingly define what your home looks like.

The large, double volumed bungalows we’re all nostalgic for are replaced by new, harder working formats, where shifting use and the time of day will increasingly define what your home looks like.

Everything is scrutinised.

Everything is required.

Everything is performative.

Lets look closer at your own Algorithmic backbone.

Your DNA.

Consider the paradigm of algorithmic trading, a method of executing a large order using automated pre-programmed trading instructions accounting for variables such as time, price, and volume to send small slices of the order out to the market over time.

Algorithms are exceedingly good at massive dispersal and subsequent reorganisation.

A single gram of DNA has the capacity to hold 700 Terabytes of data. DNA Algorithms report mistakes as low as 1 error per Billion in bacteria.

This mind boggling process takes place with fork speeds of up to 1000 nucleotides per second, with bacteria replicating their entire genome in less than an hour.

An Algorithm can detect market trends and makes decisions in a matter of milliseconds. As parcels of information, resource and money become tinier and transactions become faster, humans are progressively left out of the system.

In this hyper-speed world of petaflops and quadrillions of computations, we have a very dim, and even more diminishing understanding of even what is going on.

Errors and blips appear and disappear faster than our primitive Ape minds can comprehend.

Currently this tech is being used by the more progressive fields, at the cutting edge of medical research, to predict weather and protein folding, amongst other powerful applications that require the assitance of these powerful minds.

The power of Algorithmic recombination will eventually trickle down into the plodding fields of Design and Architecture.

And it will fundamentally change the way we build and inhabit our Cities.

Imagine a city where even it’s tiniest components contain Metadata.

Each window, each brick, each plant and each appliance comes pre-tagged with intelligent source code.

City Municipalities then deploy vast server farms capable of maintaining a real-time inventory of this huge mass of moving parts. Imagine the chance of a zero-waste, circular ecosystem of materials and objects that can enter new configurations on demand.

Our minds are not equipped to even visualise the short term evils of our actions, and our city policies arent being framed and written by the brightest bulbs in the pack.

We pour Concrete with impunity, and ascribe values like "Honesty" to it.

We conveniently forget that it's creating more pollution than all the trucks in the world combined.

Algorithmic processes may well be our only chance to quantify and understand our own impact, and in supervising recombination, allow us a shot at creating a sustainable future.

Future Cities

The key is to introduce ethical, open-source, inclusive and intelligent Metadata into each component of our cities, to be housed in a sovereign cityspecific server.

The server then uses this data to create a repair and maintenance schedule, a building roster, a demolition schedule and movement of labour for the city.

The Algorithm will unclog its arteries, tapping into traffic data and schedule dismantling.

It will account for citizen health, monitor air quality, raise timely alarms and move usable resources into pressing areas of demand, real-time.

What if your city-server could tell you where to get 1400 panes of Toughened glass from 22 different locations for your new project in less than a week’s time?

Those panes form part of a constant flowing inventory of materials and components that are processed through the city’s Algorithms, allowing parts to be re-allocated real-time.

Carl Elefante said, "The Greenest building is the one that is already built".

Demolition and salvaging guides now become as important as building and construction codes.

We would see building afterlives, and introduce a surgeonlike precision into the act of disassembly.

We will hire specialised dismantling contractors, powered by a machine-learning algorithm, who will take apart, warehouse, recombine and distribute the organs of the Future city.

We take apart sensitively, to eventually build sensitively.

With distributed ledgers, the Internet of Things, emerging sensor-tech and powerful diagnostic tools all climbing fast towards deployable efficiencies, the way we conceive of Products and Architecture will undergo profound change.

We will be made carefully aware of our ecological footprint at the very early planning stages.

By definition this kind of Architecture has to be modular and scaleable, with components being added or subtracted based on technological upgrades and downgrades.

Each material accounted for, each extra transportation mile scrutinised, each step towards a circular economy incentivised.

We will dance an elegant tango with the Algorithm.

While entering this new age of a hybrid man-machine practice, the Algorithm may become the most valuable intelligence in the office of the Future.

To make sense of this Future world, each of us will use an AI Centaur, and bring the Algorithm into our Design process as early as possible, to navigate this hyper-fast new reality.

Visualising complete ecosystems and the ripple effects we make through informed design decisions will be the greatest deployment of raw computing power.

Vast inter-connected predictive networks would design fail-safes within which progressive policy can be framed.

The regulation Algorithm of the Future will define how regressive or progressive a society we become.

For maybe the first time in Human History, we will see real-time results of our mundane actions.

In a Future where these maps are quantified, accessible, and deployed real-time, our definitions of social justice and equality cannot be left unchanged.

Like Neural nets, the more maps we create, their usability increases exponentially. The City then regulates its own resources, transparently and responsively, with the power of overview.

So what does this all do to Our Practice ?

Its not all downhill for human intelligence.

I believe the partnership with the Algorithm will help us overcome our very human myopia.

Our profession offers us validation in twisted ways.

We compete with each other for page-space in the glossies, likes from fake profiles on social media, and nods from our patrons, clients and benefactors.

Our deep pre-occupation with achieving purely "aesthetic" goals, and environments of escape offers us fleeting and ephemeral benchmarks.

We congratulate ourselves on the perfection of the escape.

We back-slap ourselves with retrospective exhibitions of our own work.

Eventually, we fade into irrelevance.

The Algorithm will lay things out in the data-driven bright light of performance.

We will see the deep violence of our profession, Architecture as a source of social inequity, the failings of our human planners and policy makers.

We will finally be able to see our buildings and cities Perform.

In a hostile world, the confines of our own bodies offer the only place of refuge.

In entering this new era of man-machine collaborations, we may yet have a stab at surviving on a planet that evidently hates us.

Welcome to the Recombinant Future.