Smart Design

Disruption, Crisis, and the Reshaping of Urban Spaces

Richard Hu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000475333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book tackles the emerging smart urbanism to advance a new way of urban thinking and to explore a new design approach. It unravels several urban transformations in dualities: economic relationality and centrality, technological flattening and polarisation, and spatial division and fusion. These dualities are interdependent; concurrent, coexisting, and contradictory, they are jointly disrupting and reshaping many aspects of contemporary cities and spaces.

The book draws on a suite of international studies, experiences, and observations, including case studies in Beijing, Singapore, and Boston, to reveal how these processes are impacting urban design, development, and policy approaches. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated many changes already in motion, and provides an extreme circumstance for reflecting on and imagining urban spaces. These analyses, thoughts, and visions inform an urban imaginary of smart design that incorporates change, flexibility, collaboration, and experimentation, which together forge a paradigm of urban thinking. This paradigm builds upon the modernist and postmodernist urban design traditions and extends them in new directions, responding to and anticipating a changing urban environment.

The book proposes a smart design manifesto to stimulate thought, trigger debate, and, hopefully, influence a new generation of urban thinkers and smart designers. It will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in the fields of urban design, planning, architecture, urban development, and urban studies.

1 Smart urbanism

DOI: 10.4324/9780367822453-1

Introduction

We live in a ‘smart age’—a buzzword that defines the world at this time and denotes both opportunities and challenges. The coming of a smart age is primarily driven by, as well as manifested through, economic and technological advances. These advances are shifting human society and the world in ways that not only are unprecedented, but also are unforeseeable. The smart age is one of increasing change and uncertainty, encompassing economic, social, environmental, and political transformations, and impacting almost every dimension of human well-being. The smart age collides with an urban age, one of the ‘triumph of the city’ (Glaeser, 2011), and they are jointly creating an emergent smart urbanism that remains unsettled in scholarship and practice (Marvin et al., 2016). Within cities, now inhabited by 4.38 billion people or 56 per cent of the world’s population (Ritchie & Roser, 2019), ‘smartness’ is a new normal, disrupting many aspects of our living and working, as well as our perception, use, and making of new urban spaces (Hu, 2019). These disruptions both prompt and compel us to revisit the modernist and postmodernist urban thinking orthodoxies that have been shaping how we understand, design, develop, critique, and manage cities since the early 20th century. The COVID-19 pandemic has now further disrupted the world, and raises many challenging questions about our urban environment and our relationship with cities and the globe (United Nations, 2020). This global crisis brings urgency to the task of reflecting, holistically and critically, on our traditional urban thinking, which took root in a pre-smart age; we need to question its ongoing relevance and validity in a smart urbanism, and call for a new urban vision.

Several interrelated macro processes are right under way, restructuring cities and reconfiguring urban spaces, and contextualising the need for a new paradigm of urban thinking and design approach. The global economy is city-based, knowledge-intensive, and fluid (Hu, 2017; Sassen, 2018). Information technology is revolutionising economic activities, globally and locally; it is accelerating the contemporary globalisation process and forging global cities as new urban forms (Sassen, 2001; Taylor & Derudder, 2016). These transformative forces are having profound spatial impacts, disrupting the spatiality of working and living, and are thus reshaping the ways we approach urban spaces (Hu, 2019). COVID-19 presents a compulsory circumstance under which we have to adapt to the disruptions the pandemic has created. It also presents an occasion when we have to reflect on the conventional approaches to places and spaces, and to seek new opportunities, perhaps including re-spatialisation of cities, from this global crisis (Hu, 2020). Addressing these transformative forces and their spatial impacts and implications seems to suggest a smart design approach towards new urban spaces, which are being made and remade along with the macro processes and consequences that are unique to smart urbanism. This smart design approach is, ideally, marked by innovation, collaboration, adaptability, and resilience in seeking an alternative to the dominant modernist and postmodernist urban design traditions.

In this book, I call for debate and I propose a smart design manifesto to advocate a new urban vison, and a new paradigm of design thinking and approach. Smart design, as an urban imaginary, is grounded in the urban transformations of today, and is ultimately future-oriented. The ‘manifesto’ idea owes an intellectual debt to Toward an urban design manifesto, by urban thinkers and practitioners Allan Jacobs and Donald Appleyard in the early 1980s, which advocated an urban design shift from the modernist tradition to the postmodernist paradigm (Jacobs & Appleyard, 1987). Building upon and extending the postmodernist urban design ethos, the proposed smart design manifesto has a dual mission of responding to an emerging urban trend and anticipating an imagined urban future. It aims to explore and stimulate new urban thinking about, and design approach to, the urban spaces being shaped by, as well as shaping, the contemporary economic, technological, and spatial transformations in cities.

This introductory chapter sets the contextual, theoretical, and methodological scene for the book and describes its aims. It posits the pursuit of smart design as a soul-searching exercise situated in the many disruptions confronting contemporary cities. The knowledge economy and information technology have been rapidly evolving and transforming for several decades, and seem to be reaching a critical point of profound, innovative disruption as we march into the third decade of the 21st century. Disruptions also occur abruptly, like the global health crisis of COVID-19 and the associated collapse of the global system. These disruptions, both evolving and sudden, have significant impacts on the ways we use and perceive urban spaces, and they contextualise the effort of seeking a smart design approach. To unpack the impacts of these disruptions on urban spaces—this book’s focus—I construct a design-centred conceptual nexus to link these economic, technological, and spatial transformations to inform the smart design proposition. This nexus is the conceptual framework for investigating each of the transformative dimensions—economy, technology, and space—and their impacts on and implications for making new urban spaces. This book combines empirical experiences and observations from major global cities, reflections on emerging urban trends, and imaginations about an urban future to propose a smart design manifesto. This manifesto integrates change, flexibility, collaboration, and experimentation as essentials of smart design for shaping and imagining new urban spaces.

Searching for a smart soul in disruptions

The smart age is an age of disruptions, characterised by unprecedented and unforeseeable changes. It is in human nature, and in our interests, to seek order from disorder, and to seek certainty from uncertainty. Proposing a smart design paradigm is an effort to seek order and certainty about the shaping of new urban spaces among disruptions. I identify two types of disruptions that are of prime concern here. One type concerns the dominant forces of the new economy and the new technology, redefining working and living, and connecting and restructuring the world. The other type concerns COVID-19 and the resultant collapse of the global system. These two types of disruptions converge, interact, and contradict, fundamentally reshaping or ‘disrupting’ the world. COVID-19 almost instantly became a global health crisis, a telling illustration of what contemporary globalisation is about. On the other hand, this pandemic is also a deglobalising force, collapsing the global system that has been accelerating since the late 20th century. Interactions and contradictions between deglobalisation and (re)globalisation have already been at play, in international relational and geopolitical senses, in recent years (Garcia-Arenas, 2018; Troyjo, 2017). COVID-19, as a public health crisis, simply amplifies and dramatises these tensions. These global forces and processes contextualise this book’s focus, which, geospatially, is downscaled from the globe to the city, to focus on a disruptive urbanism.

It has almost become a cliché to talk about how the current economic and technological transformations are qualitatively different from those in history. Indeed, they are fundamentally disrupting many norms in the ways we live and work that have been established over hundreds, or even thousands, of years. They are also accelerating the pace of change, creating new opportunities as well as challenges not previously seen. In the context of these transformative processes, innovation holds the key to disruptions—to be disrupting or to be disrupted (Blakely & Hu, 2019). Our work is being redefined, ‘shifting all workers’ day-to-day time, effort, and attention from executing routine, tightly defined tasks to identifying and addressing unseen problems and opportunities’ (Deloitte, 2018, p. 6). Many jobs become instantly obsolete; many new jobs are being created, requiring new sets of capabilities and skills. Due to displacement caused by automation, nearly 40 per cent of current US jobs that involve routine or physical tasks could shrink or disappear between now and 2030 (McKinsey & Company, 2019). A university degree does not guarantee a career for life; it just marks the beginning of a career journey during which graduates need to learn more new skills to adapt to and survive frequent changes. Two-thirds of early-career Australians (less than five years’ work experience) expect that their jobs will not exist, or will fundamentally change, in the next 15 years; 52 per cent already see their qualifications as not being ‘very much’ relevant to their work (Deloitte, 2016). In preparing graduates for a knowledge economy, research—the capacity to discover new knowledge—is not limited to curricula for students working towards research degrees such as a PhD. It is an essential, indispensable element of every stage of tertiary education. The traditional university–industry binary is being fused into a closer partnership—an innovation ecosystem to incubate knowledge activities and outputs (Pancholi et al., 2020).

A globalised knowledge economy and the digital revolution are rescaling and reconfiguring spatiality at macro and micro levels. The world is being shrunk, spatially and temporally, with easy, instant outreach and connection. The ubiquity of information access is de-spatialising many human activities—living, working, transacting, educating, and entertaining—that are traditionally based in distinct spaces. Global cities are interlinked urban nodes of a global system; places are locally based and globally connected; spaces are reinvented and reinterpreted to represent both physical and virtual realms. In terms of spatiality, a mixture of the global and the local, the physical and the virtual, is challenging ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Smart urbanism
• 2 Relationality and centrality
• 3 Flattening and polarisation
• 4 Division and fusion
• 5 Reimagining urban spaces in COVID-19
• 6 Towards a smart design manifesto
• Index