I feel privileged to have worked with a team of students of the Delft University of Technology on our future cities.
Humanity is confronted with an ever-changing environment. At the rate and pace humanity is going now with respect to increasing globalization, climate change, increasing demand for food, water and other resources the future will not look positive for humanity. These challenges are enormous in scale and complexity, and we will need to take equally enormous leaps in our imagination to meet them successfully. With regards to the urban environment, the direction we are heading towards now will not sustain the current population in a sustainable way. A transition must be made towards a new urban environment to accommodate the rising population. In this transition technological, economic, environmental and political factors will play an important part. We are at a critical point in time and change must happen fast in order to attain the living conditions we are used to at the moment.
The purpose of this study is to provide a sustainable redesign of the components of the urban environment of 2030 and beyond. Goals SDGs concerning the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by the employment of rising, promising, and RD stage technologies and innovations in the design to deliver a circular system by introducing innovative solutions related to recycling, resources safeguarding, waste reduction, social equality, health, well- being, energy efficiency and reversing global warming. Moreover, it explores the models to integrate the solutions and the possible combinations in the design of the urban structure. This project examines these promising technologies and innovations and their potential, to investigate the sustainable nature and the true value of these innovations to the ecological, social and economic systems in the final design.
To solve the city problems, promising technologies have been carefully selected that has a big effect on the future urban environment and play a prominent role in shaping the future. Some of the technologies are still a long way down the road but others are already in their useful stages and could already be applied to some extent. It was concluded that the most important innovations with various implementations in different parts of the city are biotechnology, nanotechnology, transportation technology, artificial intelligence and internet of things, cyber reality, urban farming and additive manufacturing technology. Kits are developed for the city components by mapping and combining specific technologies relating to the components. The specific applications with the implementation of technology from each kit are mapped together to create a network for cities. The project adopts the general direction of the Sustainable Development.
Thank you Guy, Ola, Sujith, Vasiliki and Zixian!