Kent Larson: Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city

198,985 views ・ 2012-09-27

TED


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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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I thought I would start with a very brief history of cities.
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Settlements typically began with people clustered around a well,
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and the size of that settlement was roughly the distance you could walk
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with a pot of water on your head.
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In fact, if you fly over Germany, for example,
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and you look down and you see these hundreds of little villages,
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they're all about a mile apart.
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You needed easy access to the fields.
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And for hundreds, even thousands of years,
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the home was really the center of life.
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Life was very small for most people.
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It was a center of entertainment, of energy production, of work,
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a center of health care.
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That's where babies were born and people died.
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Then, with industrialization, everything started to become centralized.
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You had dirty factories that were moved to the outskirts of cities.
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Production was centralized in assembly plants.
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You had centralized energy production.
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Learning took place in schools.
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Health care took place in hospitals.
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And then you had networks that developed.
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You had water, sewer networks
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that allowed for this kind of unchecked expansion.
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You had separated functions, increasingly.
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You had rail networks
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that connected residential, industrial, commercial areas.
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You had auto networks.
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In fact, the model was really, give everybody a car,
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build roads to everything,
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and give people a place to park when they get there.
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It was not a very functional model.
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And we still live in that world,
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and this is what we end up with.
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So you have the sprawl of LA,
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the sprawl of Mexico City.
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You have these unbelievable new cities in China,
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which you might call tower sprawl.
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They're all building cities
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on the model that we invented in the '50s and '60s,
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which is really obsolete, I would argue,
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and there are hundreds and hundreds of new cities
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that are being planned all over the world.
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In China alone, 300 million people, some say 400 million people,
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will move to the city over the next 15 years.
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That means building the equivalent
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of the entire built infrastructure of the US in 15 years.
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Imagine that.
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And we should all care about this whether you live in cities or not.
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Cities will account for 90 percent of the population growth,
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80 percent of the global CO2, 75 percent of energy use,
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but at the same time it's where people want to be,
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increasingly.
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More than half the people now in the world live in cities,
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and that will just continue to escalate.
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Cities are places of celebration, personal expression.
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You have the flash mobs of pillow fights that --
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I've been to a couple. They're quite fun.
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You have --
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(Laughter)
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Cities are where most of the wealth is created,
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and particularly in the developing world, it's where women find opportunities.
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That's a lot of the reason why cities are growing very quickly.
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Now there's some trends that will impact cities.
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First of all, work is becoming distributed and mobile.
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The office building is basically obsolete for doing private work.
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The home, once again, because of distributed computation --
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Communication is becoming a center of life,
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so it's a center of production and learning and shopping and health care
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and all of these things that we used to think of
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as taking place outside of the home.
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And increasingly, everything that people buy,
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every consumer product,
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in one way or another, can be personalized.
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And that's a very important trend to think about.
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So this is my image of the city of the future.
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(Laughter)
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In that it's a place for people, you know.
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Maybe not the way people dress, but --
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You know, the question now is,
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how can we have all the good things that we identify with cities
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without all the bad things?
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This is Bangalore.
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It took me a couple of hours to get a few miles in Bangalore last year.
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So with cities, you also have congestion and pollution
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and disease and all these negative things.
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How can we have the good stuff without the bad?
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So we went back and started looking at the great cities
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that evolved before the cars.
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Paris was a series of these little villages that came together,
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and you still see that structure today.
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The 20 arrondissements of Paris are these little neighborhoods.
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Most of what people need in life can be within a five- or 10-minute walk.
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And if you look at the data, when you have that kind of a structure,
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you get a very even distribution
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of the shops and the physicians and the pharmacies
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and the cafes in Paris.
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And then you look at cities that evolved after the automobile,
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and it's not that kind of a pattern.
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There's very little that's within a five-minute walk
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of most areas of places like Pittsburgh.
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Not to pick on Pittsburgh,
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but most American cities really have evolved this way.
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So we said, well, let's look at new cities,
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and we're involved in a couple of new city projects in China.
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So we said, let's start with that neighborhood cell.
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We think of it as a compact urban cell.
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So provide most of what most people want within that 20-minute walk.
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This can also be a resilient electrical microgrid,
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community heating, power, communication networks, etc.
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can be concentrated there.
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Stewart Brand would put a micronuclear reactor
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right in the center, probably.
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And he might be right.
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And then we can form, in effect, a mesh network.
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It's something of an Internet typology pattern,
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so you can have a series of these neighborhoods.
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You can dial up the density --
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about 20,000 people per cell, if it's Cambridge.
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Go up to 50,000 if it's Manhattan density.
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You connect everything with mass transit
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and you provide most of what most people need within that neighborhood.
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You can begin to develop a whole typology of streetscapes
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and the vehicles that can go on them.
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I won't go through all of them. I'll just show one.
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This is Boulder. It's a great example of kind of a mobility parkway,
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a superhighway for joggers and bicyclists,
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where you can go from one end of the city to the other
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without crossing the street,
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and they also have bike-sharing, which I'll get into in a minute.
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This is even a more interesting solution
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in Seoul, Korea.
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They took the elevated highway, they got rid of it,
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they reclaimed the street, the river down below,
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below the street,
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and you can go from one end of Seoul to the other
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without crossing a pathway for cars.
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The High Line in Manhattan is very similar.
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You have these rapidly emerging bike lanes all over the world.
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I lived in Manhattan for 15 years.
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I went back a couple of weekends ago,
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took this photograph of these fabulous new bike lanes that they have installed.
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They're still not to where Copenhagen is,
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where something like 42 percent of the trips within the city
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are by bicycle.
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It's mostly just because they have fantastic infrastructure there.
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We actually did exactly the wrong thing in Boston.
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The Big Dig --
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(Laughter)
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So we got rid of the highway but we created a traffic island,
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and it's certainly not a mobility pathway for anything other than cars.
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Mobility on demand is something we've been thinking about,
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so we think we need an ecosystem of these shared-use vehicles
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connected to mass transit.
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These are some of the vehicles that we've been working on.
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But shared use is really key.
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If you share a vehicle, you can have at least four people use one vehicle,
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as opposed to one.
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We have Hubway here in Boston, the Vélib' system in Paris.
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We've been developing, at the Media Lab, this little city car
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that is optimized for shared use in cities.
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We got rid of all the useless things like engines and transmissions.
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We moved everything to the wheels,
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so you have the drive motor,
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the steering motor, the breaking -- all in the wheel.
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That left the chassis unencumbered, so you can do things like fold,
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so you can fold this little vehicle up to occupy a tiny little footprint.
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This was a video that was on European television last week
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showing the Spanish Minister of Industry driving this little vehicle,
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and when it's folded, it can spin.
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You don't need reverse. You don't need parallel parking.
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You just spin and go directly in.
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(Laughter)
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So we've been working with a company to commercialize this.
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My PhD student Ryan Chin presented these early ideas
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two years ago at a TEDx conference.
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So what's interesting is,
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then if you begin to add new things to it, like autonomy,
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you get out of the car, you park at your destination,
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you pat it on the butt, it goes and it parks itself, it charges itself,
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and you can get something like seven times as many vehicles
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in a given area as conventional cars,
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and we think this is the future.
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Actually, we could do this today. It's not really a problem.
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We can combine shared use and folding and autonomy
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and we get something like 28 times the land utilization
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with that kind of strategy.
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One of our graduate students then says,
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well, how does a driverless car communicate with pedestrians?
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You have nobody to make eye contact with.
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You don't know if it's going to run you over.
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So he's developing strategies
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so the vehicle can communicate with pedestrians, so --
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(Laughter)
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So the headlights are eyeballs, the pupils can dilate,
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we have directional audio, we can throw sound directly at people.
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What I love about this project
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is he solved a problem that doesn't exist yet, so --
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(Laughter)
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We also think that we can democratize access to bike lanes.
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You know, bike lanes are mostly used by young guys in stretchy pants. So --
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(Laughter)
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We think we can develop a vehicle that operates on bike lanes,
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accessible to elderly and disabled, women in skirts, businesspeople,
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and address the issues of energy congestion, mobility,
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aging and obesity simultaneously.
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That's our challenge.
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This is an early design for this little three-wheel.
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It's an electronic bike.
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You have to pedal to operate it in a bike lane,
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but if you're an older person, that's a switch.
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If you're a healthy person, you might have to work really hard to go fast.
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You can dial in 40 calories going into work
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and 500 going home, when you can take a shower.
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We hope to have that built this fall.
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Housing is another area where we can really improve.
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Mayor Menino in Boston says
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lack of affordable housing for young people
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is one of the biggest problems the city faces.
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Developers say, OK, we'll build little teeny apartments.
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People say, we don't really want to live in a little teeny conventional apartment.
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So we're saying, let's build a standardized chassis,
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much like our car.
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Let's bring advanced technology into the apartment,
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technology-enabled infill,
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give people the tools within this open-loft chassis
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to go through a process of defining
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what their needs and values and activities are,
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and then a matching algorithm will match a unique assembly
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of integrated infill components,
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furniture, and cabinetry, that are personalized to that individual,
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and they give them the tools
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to go through the process and to refine it,
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and it's something like working with an architect,
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where the dialogue starts
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when you give an alternative to a person to react to.
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Now, the most interesting implementation of that for us
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is when you can begin to have robotic walls,
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so your space can convert from exercise to a workplace,
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if you run a virtual company.
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You have guests over,
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you have two guest rooms that are developed.
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You have a conventional one-bedroom arrangement
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when you need it.
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Maybe that's most of the time.
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You have a dinner party.
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The table folds out to fit 16 people in otherwise a conventional one-bedroom,
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or maybe you want a dance studio.
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I mean, architects have been thinking about these ideas for a long time.
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What we need to do now,
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develop things that can scale to those 300 million Chinese people
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that would like to live in the city, and very comfortably.
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We think we can make a very small apartment
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that functions as if it's twice as big by utilizing these strategies.
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I don't believe in smart homes. That's sort of a bogus concept.
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I think you have to build dumb homes and put smart stuff in it.
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(Laughter)
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And so we've been working on a chassis of the wall itself.
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You know, standardized platform
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with the motors and the battery when it operates,
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little solenoids that will lock it in place and get low-voltage power.
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We think this can all be standardized,
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and then people can personalize the stuff that goes into that wall,
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and like the car, we can integrate all kinds of sensing
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to be aware of human activity,
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so if there's a baby or a puppy in the way,
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you won't have a problem.
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(Laughter)
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So the developers say, well, this is great.
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OK, so if we have a conventional building, we have a fixed envelope,
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maybe we can put in 14 units.
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If they function as if they're twice as big,
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we can get 28 units in.
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That means twice as much parking, though.
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Parking's really expensive.
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It's about 70,000 dollars per space
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to build a conventional parking spot inside a building.
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So if you can have folding and autonomy,
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you can do that in one-seventh of the space.
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That goes down to 10,000 dollars per car,
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just for the cost of the parking.
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You add shared use, and you can even go further.
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We can also integrate all kinds of advanced technology
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through this process.
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There's a path to market for innovative companies
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to bring technology into the home.
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In this case, a project we're doing with Siemens.
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We have sensors on all the furniture, all the infill,
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that understands where people are and what they're doing.
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Blue light is very efficient,
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so we have these tunable 24-bit LED lighting fixtures.
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It recognizes where the person is, what they're doing,
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fills out the light when necessary to full spectrum white light,
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and saves maybe 30, 40 percent in energy consumption, we think,
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over even conventional state-of-the-art lighting systems.
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This just shows you the data that comes from the sensors
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that are embedded in the furniture.
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We don't really believe in cameras to do things in homes.
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We think these little wireless sensors are more effective.
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We think we can also personalize sunlight.
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That's sort of the ultimate personalization in some ways.
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So we've looked at articulating mirrors of the facade
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that can throw shafts of sunlight anywhere into the space,
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therefore allowing you to shade most of the glass
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on a hot day like today.
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In this case, she picks up her phone,
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she can map food preparation at the kitchen island
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to a particular location of sunlight.
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An algorithm will keep it in that location as long as she's engaged in that activity.
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This can be combined with LED lighting as well.
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We think workplaces should be shared.
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I mean, this is really the workplace of the future, I think.
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This is Starbucks, you know.
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Maybe a third --
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And you see everybody has their back to the wall
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and they have food and coffee down the way
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and they're in their own little personal bubble.
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We need shared spaces for interaction and collaboration.
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We're not doing a very good job with that.
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At the Cambridge Innovation Center, you can have shared desks.
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I've spent a lot of time in Finland at the design factory of Aalto University,
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where the they have a shared shop and shared fab lab, shared quiet spaces,
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electronics spaces, recreation places.
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We think ultimately, all of this stuff can come together,
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a new model for mobility, a new model for housing,
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a new model for how we live and work,
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a path to market for advanced technologies.
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But in the end, the main thing we need to focus on are people.
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Cities are all about people.
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They're places for people.
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There's no reason why we can't dramatically improve
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the livability and creativity of cities
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like they've done in Melbourne with the laneways
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while at the same time dramatically reducing CO2 and energy.
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It's a global imperative. We have to get this right.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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