SYM: Responsive Cities

The first edition of the Responsive Cities Symposium, chaired by Areti Markopoulou, with program chairs Chiara Farinea and Mathilde Marengo, has just closed its doors establishing itself as a major event in the architectural debate.

Fifteen outstanding keynote speakers, fifty-four international panelists and more than 400 visitors animated the two-day gathering, held in Barcelona CaixaForum on the 16th and 17th of September 2016 and followed online by more than 700 spectators.

Download: D2.1 > report IAAC Symposium Responsive Cities

Download: Symposium Proceedings

Questions addressed

Programme for symposia

Over the last decades a new generation of cities and new city-planning paradigms have emerged. Urban development leaders and governments throughout the world has begun to consider innovative systems driven by information and communication technologies to be critical drivers with which to face today’s urban challenges. Cities have started to invest in technology through the implementation of new transport management systems, water and contamination monitoring systems, smart energy grids and energy efficient buildings, to name a few. The intelligent systems and devices formed a new hidden layer enhancing performances but basically remaining separate from the city’s materiality and spatiality. This hidden layer took the name of Smart City and it is the expression of the Information Age, a period  dominated by information accumulation, organization and transmission through desktop computers. During the Information Age the role of architects and urbanists in generating visions for the city’s future has started to fade, and the Smart City began to be theorized, described and developed by IT companies. Today’s advances create a scenario where technology has started to be embedded in our everyday life in such ways that it is becoming part of our bodies and surrounding environment, hence overcoming the desktop era. Wearable and VR technologies allow us to interact with each other and with the environment at augmented levels. Objects are interacting with us, building skins are becoming interfaces and architecture is becoming a series of evolutionary organisms, able to react, in real time, to multiple agents such as the environment, time or user needs. It seems that the Information age is giving way to the Experience age, characterized by a high level of physical interaction and emotional involvement. In this context, the Urbanism in the Experience Age Symposium claims a renewed active role for architects: the objective is to go beyond the limitations of the “Smart City” vision,  investigating “Advanced Urbanism”, intended as the practice of designing and planning  receptive and reactive spaces, rather than the mere application of technological systems. Such a vision requires to rethink our design tools and planning processes, as well as the invitation to revise the educational models surrounding urban sciences. The city planned following the Advanced Urbanism paradigm is a Responsive City that, through new communication protocols and design approaches, becomes an adaptive, emotional and experiential environment, able to hyper-connect and process information, changing its shape and performance according to the contingencies.

Download: Responsive-Cities-Programme

Videos of speakers

For those of you who missed the event, here you can find the video streaming of the two days:

• Friday 16/09 Part One
• Friday 16/09 Part Two
• Saturday 17/09 Part One
• Saturday 17/09 Part Two