The NOW Institute: Smart City

The IDEAS Urban Strategy Studio with The NOW Institute treads the combinatory line between accentuating pre-existing urban relationships and reshaping them for new use cases. Projects range from residential to city-scale thinking and explore topics as diverse as sustainability, contemporary culture, artificial intelligence, autonomous mobility, sensing technology, extreme environments, and media-enhanced experiences. This past year, the studio explored three distinct issues.

Smart City
For the past twenty years, discussion of the Smart City has minimized the agency of the architect or planner. Rather, a new group of data strategists conjoined with policymakers have become the new planning entity. In a bid to reclaim the relevancy of architecture and physical planning, we have taken on the issue of defining what exactly it means for a city to be "smart". Our students have highlighted the progression of the Smart City concept over time and analyzed both its successful and its failed instances. In the throes of defining a smart city initiative, we are designing two demonstrative planning proposals for a district in the new Capital City of Sejong, Korea and Xingtai, the most polluted city in China.