Archinect - News

Carlo Ratti wants to remake New York into a ‘Playground City’

2023-05-15T17:09:00-04:00

Carlo Ratti and Harvard's Economics department chair Edward Glaeser recently detailed their vision of New York as a “Playground City” in an interactive opinion feature for the New York Times. The six-point plan calls for a number of radical solutions — including the widespread (but not windowless) conversion of “deep core” office buildings favored in comments by Mayor Eric Adams — and apparently has parallels to life in 17th- and 18th-century London.

“In a Playground City,” they describe, “mixed-use neighborhoods that tie life, labor and leisure together generate what the New York urbanist Jane Jacobs calls the 'sidewalk ballet,' a productive and playful dynamic in which a diversity of different users come and go at all hours.”

The plan centers on increased social interaction and a revival of street life, fueled by small businesses, green space, and recreation. They say we must “view the city as a for-profit real estate development company wholly owned by a nonprofit poverty-allevi...

MIT research finds that commuting distances are standard regardless of city size

2023-01-03T11:24:00-05:00

Researchers from the MIT Senseable City Lab have produced a series of maps visualizing commuting habits across Chinese cities. Titled Potato Project, the study used mobile phone location data from 50 million individuals across 234 cities to understand commuting patterns between a person’s home and work locations.

Image credit: MIT Senseable City Lab

The research project was launched in response to the group’s observation that despite the significant increase in the size of cities over decades, commuting distances and times in larger cities have remained stable versus smaller cities. “The conserved commuting properties are quite counter-intuitive,” the team notes, “as the distance from the periphery to the urban center in larger cities is obviously greater than that in medium- or small-sized cities.”

Image credit: MIT Senseable City Lab

With little existing large-scale modeling on the subject, the researchers analyzed the mobile phone location data to better understand the similarities...

MIT-designed self-driving Roboats make a splash in Amsterdam’s canals

2021-11-18T13:33:00-05:00

After six years of design and research at MIT, a pair of autonomous boats have been launched into the canals of Amsterdam. Roboat, a research project undertaken by the MIT Senseable City Lab and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute), seeks to encourage a future where autonomous boats could help the city of Amsterdam move part of its road traffic to the water.

Image © MIT / AMS Institute

From November onwards, the two full-scale prototypes will be used for three use cases: passenger transport, logistics (waste collection), and data collection (surveying water infrastructure and monitoring water quality). The boats will operate with complete autonomy through the use of way-point finding, autonomous docking and undocking, and collision avoidance.

Image © MIT / AMS Institute

“Picture being amid the hustle and bustle on the Amsterdam canals,” explains Ynse Deinema, Roboat Project Lead at AMS Institute. “This urban context involves tight space maneu...

MIT lab creates digital model and formula of how people move across cities

2021-07-07T13:18:00-04:00

Researchers at the MIT Senseable City Lab have unveiled their latest project, which seeks to understand human mobility in cities. Titled Wanderlust, the project uses large-scale cellphone data to understand the movement of people in the metro areas of Boston, Abidjan, Braga, Lisbon, Porto, Dakar, and Singapore. The result is an interactive digital model which quantifies data through time and space, unlocking a new way of seeing and reading cities.

To undertake the project, the MIT researchers analyzed over 8 billion human mobility traces collected across four continents. In doing so, they found that the flows of movement to all locations in each city followed a predictable, universal pattern. This pattern can be reproduced through a mathematical formula: “The number of visitors to any given location decreases as the inverse square of the product of their visiting frequency and travel distance.” This formula can be simplified to say “people are unlikely to travel far too often.” ...

MIT develops interactive digital environment to understand Brazil’s favelas

2021-04-26T18:47:00-04:00

The MIT Senseable City Lab has unveiled their “Favelas 4D” project, dedicated to mapping the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Using 3D laser scanning technology to analyze the urban landscape of Rocinha, the project seeks to understand and quantify the architectural logic of one of Brazil’s famous informal settlements.

Brazil’s favelas consist of dense, multilayered, informal settlements that dot the hills of large cities such as Rio de Janeiro; their urban chaos contrasting starkly with the planned neighborhoods surrounding them. This spatial complexity makes the favelas a difficult terrain for typical open-source mapping tools such as satellite imagery and Google Street View, leaving much of their labyrinthine cityscapes unmapped and misunderstood.

Favelas 4D. Image: MIT Senseable City Lab

On the importance of mapping these informal settlements, the MIT team explains; “The global trend of urbanization is not limited to shining downtown districts and masterplanned developm...

Autonomous boats pave way for water cities of the future in Amsterdam

2020-01-09T17:39:00-05:00

The Advanced Metropolitan Solutions Institute of Amsterdam alongside MIT’s Senseable City Lab are ready to launch a full-scale model of what can be an essential infrastructure for water cities around the world.

According to Popup City, the two currently intended applications of the "Roboats" will be introduced in the city of Amsterdam. One will be a moving bridge system that will link the NEMO Science Museum to the historical Dutch Navy dock. The other will address the municipality's current garbage collections system, with the Roboats serving as "floating garbage containers," something the city believes will relieve the present challenges with disposal.