Just over a month ago was translating a text that became one of our most read articles, and certainly one of them that has led us to place ourselves in the second position of Spanish architecture websites to finish the year, the text titled "My thoughts on the smart city" was the transcription of a talk by Rem Koolhaas at the High Level Group meeting on Smart Cities, Brussels, last 24 September 2014. Some ideas below;
Architecture used to be about the creation of community, and making the best effort at symbolizing that community. Since the triumph of the market economy in the late 1970s, architecture no longer expresses public values but instead the values of the private sector. It is in fact a regime – the ¥€$ regime
More and more voices are proving a hard reality, that smart cities, in their current vision, in the end, they will destroy our cities even our democracies. More and more people recognize new ways to act on the city and show how the smartest cities actually rely on citizen cunning and sometimes on unglamorous technology.
These days an article in The Guardian "The smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology" pay attention again on the actions of thoese humble urban communities who ignore the futuristic visions of governments and developers, and lead the way in showing how networked technologies can strengthen a city’s social fabric
Its author, Adam Greenfield argues in the article, that instead of committing to futuristic visions of 'smart cities', governments should seek to replicate the efforts of groups like the architectural collective who improved El Campo de Cebada, in Madrid, which relied on unglamorous, mature technologies.
This text was commissioned by LSE Cities for the Urban Age newspaper, to coincide with the Governing Urban Futures conference held in Delhi in November 2014.
