The Knight Foundation has just announced $1 million in support to the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a multi-year, multi-city, and applied research effort that they are calling the Future of the American City. The program will start in Miami and Miami Beach, but the plan is to expand to Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles.
As part of this initiative, the GSD will embed faculty and urban researchers into the local community, as well as organize three design studios that will build on each other every year. In the case of Miami and Miami Beach, the 3 themes that will be explored are urban mobility, affordability, and climate change. As you know, these two cities are center ice for the problem of sea level rise.
This sounds very similar to a design studio that I took at Penn, which was centered around water and housing issues in Bangladesh. It was a multi-year research studio (5 years in this case) and we visited and got paired up with locals in Dhaka during the course of the studio. I think these types of programs are a great way to ground the research in reality.
And as a fan of Miami and Miami Beach, I am curious to see what the teams come up with over the next 3 years.
Photo by Blake Connally on Unsplash
Below is a short video that was created by the MIT Senseable City Lab, World Economic Forum and TomTom for a study on how people move in 100 cities around the world. They call it the Global Mobility Index.
It shows congestion levels (using real-time traffic data from TomTom), commute times, and an estimate for the percentage of trips that could be shared if people were willing to wait up to 5 minutes.
In the case of Toronto, they estimate that 99% of trips could be shared and that it would increase average speeds by ~7.9 km/h and reduce overall traffic levels by ~44.09%.
Their solution to solving traffic congestion is a cocktail that involves car-sharing, bike-sharing, and public transit. It’s about developing a “mobility portfolio.” Seems sensible.
I found myself wanting more information and data after watching the video. Still, it was interesting to see what the authors describe as the “pulse of our cities.”
Steven Johnson has a terrific piece in New York Times Magazine called: Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble. Here is a snippet:
The only blockchain project that has crossed over into mainstream recognition so far is Bitcoin, which is in the middle of a speculative bubble that makes the 1990s internet I.P.O. frenzy look like a neighborhood garage sale.
But the point of the article, as its title suggests, is to talk about what all of this craziness could mean for the future of the internet and how, in some ways, it could be a return to what the internet was always intended to be.
The real promise of these new technologies, many of their evangelists believe, lies not in displacing our currencies but in replacing much of what we now think of as the internet, while at the same time returning the online world to a more decentralized and egalitarian system. If you believe the evangelists, the blockchain is the future. But it is also a way of getting back to the internet’s roots.
Some are calling this new, decentralized internet version 3.0. We are currently living with internet 2.0. Practically speaking though, what could this shift really mean for us?
One example that is given in the article has to do with urban mobility – a topic that is particularly relevant to this audience.