SENSEable cities
Assaf Biderman, co-director of the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory.
The MIT Senseable City Laboratory aims to investigate and anticipate how digital technologies are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale.
Description
The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure.
Studying these changes from a critical point of view and anticipating them is the goal of the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
General Information
The MIT Senseable City Laboratory aims to investigate and anticipate how digital technologies are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale. Director Carlo Ratti founded the Senseable City Lab in 2004 within the City Design and Development group at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, as well as in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. The Lab's mission states that it seeks to creatively intervene and investigate the interface between people, technologies and the city. Recent projects include "The Copenhagen Wheel" which debuted at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, "Trash_Track" shown at the Architectural League of New York and the Seattle Public Library, "New York Talk Exchange" featured in the MoMA The Museum of Modern Art, and Real Time Rome''Real Time Rome] included in the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
The Lab's work draws on diverse fields such as urban planning, architecture, design, engineering, computer science, natural science and economics to capture the multidisciplinary nature of urban problems and deliver research and applications that empower citizens to make choices that result in a more liveable urban condition. Among the Lab's partners are a group of forward-thinking corporations, including AT&T, General Electric, Audi, ENEL, SNCF as well as world class cities such as Copenhagen, London, Singapore, Seattle, and Florence. At present, 31 researchers are working on activities sponsored by these industrial and municipal partners.
credit
Industrial Liason Program
