all right let's go ahead and get started welcome everybody so as we all know we are emerging Out of This Global Health crisis and for the past couple of years we've been hearing all sorts of things about the death of cities for example as a matter of public health cause of living we've heard about crime governance and so the question is as we move forward where do we go from here so I'd like us to spend this hour together to discuss what could be our most hopeful vision for the future of cities and we're all you know part of a city being Philadelphia and so to be a we have we have a personal stake in this conversation my name is Tim gorshanas I'm a faculty member at Drexel and the organizer of speculative Futures Philadelphia and this panel is a discussion that's organized in partnership with the institute for smart and healthy cities at Thomas Jefferson University so we've got four colleagues here from Drexel and Jefferson and the University of Pennsylvania and we're going to have a conversation about the future of cities so we've got some experts here who are all working in this space from different angles and they're going to share with us some of their research and and knowledge basically so before we begin just a couple of housekeeping items which you can also see on the screen here um this is being recorded everybody who registered as an attendee should get the link a little bit later so you can watch the recording on your own we'll also post it up on YouTube so that it'll have a life um for the future and people can find it via search and and hear our words again if you've never attended a zoom webinar you'll see that the chat box has two different tabs in it one is q a and one is chat in the chat you can feel free to share any thoughts or anything along the way with other attendees and also with the with the panelists here and I'll be watching the chat as we go along there's also the Q a function where you can ask a question specifically and um yeah people can like upvote each other's questions and and we'll get a chance to to respond to those in the Q a section so my vision here is we'll talk for I don't know 40 minutes 30 something minutes and then we'll switch into audience q a and we'll just follow the conversation and see see what interesting things come up so without any further delays let's get started I'd like us to start by going around and uh we'll hear from each person just giving a short introduction to your work and who you are and what you do um so I think just just make it easier we'll go by last name uh alphabetical so I mean that means paying your first and uh so yeah Patty let's hear from you what are you doing who are you thank you Tim uh hello everyone my name is Paul Buu I'm a assistant professor at the College of architect and built environment at Jefferson um I'm also the director of two graduate programs here massive Urban Design uh we focus on food considers and the Medical Science and internet analytics and geography um so um I'm a strong believer in technology that would help form the service in the future so as many of you know the construction sector which include Urban Design architecture landscape architecture is possibly the only industry sector um that is weak behind the other industry sectors in terms of productivities in the last three decades uh so to me the the main reason has been the lack of embracement of the Innovative Technologies so my own uh interested uh interest is is is to um to study and apply how we can leverage a technology specifically the data driven simulation simulation based computational design and analytics tools to predict the growth of the city and uh and especially you know when when we see the pandemic and the global navigations and the population growth uh and the climate change of course how we can use all the tools available to us to help form and build a better future of our cities so I remember thank you so much for inviting me to join this panel and I look forward to more discussions with the panelists and the audience thank you wonderful thank you all right Allison let's hear from you next hi I'm so happy to be here today it's so amazing to have a cross Philadelphia University Gathering it doesn't happen enough and so it's really nice to see everyone here um I'm an assistant professor in City Planning at University of Pennsylvania where I direct our smart cities concentration my research focuses on Water Management in cities so I'm specifically interested well the way it engages with kind of future cities is probably across two Dimensions one of them is climate change so our future city has to shift along with our changing climate um there's a little adage that says climate mitigation or kind of stopping climate change as it's happening is all about greenhouse gases or carbon the climate adaptation so changing our behaviors to respond to the climate changes that are already underway is really all about water so water is changing and its timing and its quantities and so we're going to need to adapt our water systems um so this is going to be a big challenge for our future cities but a big opportunity is that we also have this emerging trend of digitization of a lot of services and so I think we're going to be able to kind of jump on that digital wave and modernize a lot of our infrastructure including our water infrastructure um so how does this relate to health too I know we're kind of touching on health and sustainability I'm going to suggest that water is one of our most important aspects of Public Health in a city so if we have clean water we have a healthy population and when we don't have clean water we have an unhealthy population and this is true all around the globe whether you're in West Virginia and you're dealing with industrial contaminants in your water or you're in Alabama and your sewage your septic Tank's not working and you're dealing with hookworm outbreaks or you're in Malawi and you don't have a developed Wastewater infrastructure and you have the largest cholera outbreak you've had in decades maintaining our Water Resources is really essential to our Public Health and also our ecosystem Health but I'll leave it at that um so that's my work thank you so much wonderful thank you all right Frank um my name is Frank Lee I'm a full professor at Drex University um and all that means is that I'm really old um and today Academia way too long um I um I've been at Drexel close to 20 years 10 years I was into computer science and for the last 10 years I've been digital media I founded the game design program and my area of creative work and and research involves using emerging technology for uh to explore its use in entertainment and engagement um and I guess unlike Allison and Pang and others here doing kind of real work I kind of play um that's sort of my role and that's my work but in particular I guess I'm interested in how we can I mean I believe fundamentally believe that people are social uh By Nature and whatever Smart City smart technology we create we can not ignore that fundamental fact and and why way I approach that aspect of it is using AR VR GPS anything that's sort of coming up to see how we can use that to enhance or augment um social aspect not necessarily virtual but sort of physical real social aspects of human experience and a couple of examples I guess the type of work that I've done um is for example using or thinking about AR and VR and repurposing that as a way to reimagine what poems and short stories would be like um using GPS and thinking about its use uh potentially creating um thousands of people multi city-wide uh hide and go seek and I guess I guess I'm mostly well known for um kind of reimagining skyscraper as a game display and so on so those are the type of stuff that I do yeah thanks Frank yeah the social aspect of health is definitely you know hugely as important as you're saying so it's you know different from water and and that sort of that sort of aspect of Health but totally all right and last but not least we've got Edgar right yeah I'm also a professor at Thomas Jefferson University and I'm the director of The Institute for smart and healthy cities so talking just a little bit about the Institute so it was formed about two years ago as a collaboration between three different colleges in the College of architecture and the build environment um the College of population health and the College of engineering and design so purposefully the the position was such as that we really have to collaborate across multiple disciplines and I think that's really really important when you look at the effects um climate change has on the not only on the city but I think more important on the individuals who live in cities so we are sort of framing the um our aspects to finding smart and healthy cities in three different scales the larger scale obviously the city if you're looking at city-wide effects on on um on the population but also infrastructure heat Islands green infrastructure Transportation energy and so forth and then the next scale is the building scale where we looking into performance criterias and buildings and how buildings can be better adjusted to the new Norm the climate change as well as we're looking at control aspects and then so forth and then the smaller scale that's where a lot of our um industrial industrial designers come into play a device scale so what can we wear what can we develop on an individual scale to be better equipped and better responsible responsive to climate change aspects and to do so to to Really develop that what sort of across the campus approach we sponsoring cross-collaborative research projects so we have to first round out where teams across the campus looking into the effects on climate change on vulnerable population for example and how to mediate these and um so and maybe in a in a nutshell what we try to see is where are we right now in in terms of developing concepts for smaller healthy cities and how do we need to calibrate these Concepts down the road for the new Norm in 10 15 20 years from now wonderful thank you all right so we've heard a little bit from from each panelist in terms of the the work that you've been doing and now we'll kind of go into a broader conversation um when we're looking at the future and trying to imagine what the the near future could hold for us I think it's always good to look at the the near past right so what's where have we been what are the where are the trend lines leading so I'd like to begin with this question how have cities changed in the past couple of decades and maybe you can each approach that you know from your own lens of the kind of work you do and you know maybe respond to each other and see what what kind of conversation comes up so whoever would like to jump in first on this how have cities changed in the past few decades maybe I give it a shot so first of all I think it's really hard to answer that question without knowing in what continent and what ecosystem you you're playing so if if you if you ask me as a European how are European cities have changed I would say greatly you know public transportation is really On The Rise you know biking e-biking bike Lanes all these things are really prominent and embraced by the citizens this is not a top-down thing people wanted more biking they wanted more adjustments on so the US I think it's a different slightly different story I think the US is from you know no hard feelings here but I think a little bit behind the curve when it comes to Trend transforming cities into much cleaner and much more sort of livable cities there are some good examples like Washington perhaps and and maybe Austin and others but in in general I think that European cities are much more tuned into you know and I leave it up to the others maybe they can give us some some insight how Asian the cities even faster um transforming in that respect yeah I think I'd like to follow up on this um so as you can tell I originally from Asia and so uh definitely agencies have different challenges um compared to U.S and European cities for example when clearly one clear observation is uh is the high Destiny so how we can accommodate the the huge amount of population moving to the cities and and the width of an affordable and livable Housing and Urban species that has has been a challenge and because of the high density and the many Asian cities you know like European cities uh has been able to successfully adopt it to public transit systems and promote promotion of walking and biking um um but you where you have different uh issues with high high density and also through the skyscrapers as a murder search uh it can shoot it so people are you know kind of Trapped in their individual units in the sky so the challenge I think because you know in addition to my role as Jefferson I also I'm also affiliate affiliated with a non-profit organizations named the Council on Paul Williams are very habitat so we study a lot on how car building can be part of the future sustainable cities so so one fundamental issue we discovered is the lack of communal green space with the intolering and also as the bottom of the building and on top of the popularity for example most of the Cities we have seen in Asia and many other cities tall booting has has been considered as isolated air-conditioned glass boxes right so it's just a stand um on the on the City Beverage so um so so having said this that reminded me uh when I when I visited um in Burj Khalifa which is the tallest building in the world currently uh I took a picture uh there and it was amazing the world tallest building uh is built surrounded with highways so tall buildings is is supposed to be a part of the the urban Fabric and and part of the urban infrastructure should the highway should be a opposite components against the tolerance and how can top building and the highway and merge it together uh and how build poverty can stand uh on the on the ground and have a more welcoming and community space uh and see you know we still feel probably as part of your street life and also for top buildings Beyond two hundred millions 400 meters Union city's been having this thought how people can have and still enjoy the communal space street life in the sky so we don't have to go all the way down to the street to get a copy through the elevator and how we can create a more sustainable vertical cities across um those skyscrapers is also a challenge uh and interesting research topic foreign [Music] so I completely agree with Edgar's point that it's a little hard to identify specific Trends globally but there's one that's really important which is no matter where you are in the globe we're urbanizing at rates that we haven't seen since maybe the early 20th century so there's just masses of people flooding to cities especially in Asia and in Africa and this is putting a lot of pressure on our Urban services like Peng was just talking about so there's big questions about how we continue to provide these public goods to people as we have more and more people drawing from them and then related to what Edgar was saying as well about maybe some issues in the U.S cities is specific to the U.S we have we well things are changing a little bit with recent infrastructure bills but um we have been investing about 1.5
percent of our GDP and infrastructure this is the lowest rate of federal infrastructure investment or one of them in the world um so this is kind of pile driving us into the sort of shortfall of investment and is causing a lot of decline in infrastructure while we have more pressure on infrastructure in cities because of these rates of urbanization um so this kind of uh one two punch of urbanization and lack of investment is uh going to create some new opportunities I'll leave that for the next question um I would love to jump in uh mainly because this is not my area of expertise so I could put my hat on as a layperson and ask sort of questions that I really want to ask um hopefully this is also resonant with the people who are listening I guess uh I have two questions one is um they're certainly I I mean having read a lot of newspapers I know people are sort of flocking to uh cities especially in Asia I know that's true but it must be true in the US but I feel like kobit had kind of upended that a little bit where people are now because of zoom and other work from home so people are leaving cities a lot of the rentals in New York and other places are essentially falling right in city so I feel I wonder whether um do you see that as a contemporary thing or that as a like a fundamental shift in Direction um for how people live both in cities and surrounding that's one um the other questions I had um is being um Korean by birth uh my sort of and kind of fascinating with what's going on in Korea one aspect that I I've seen is that the buildings the tall apartments and small surrounding so it'll become like balkanized cities in themselves they're shopping here areas they never have to leave they're tutoring that's going on a little play area so they just kind of chill them to play together they're even schools within those areas so I wonder whether this sort of balkanization of like small little micro cities within cities is something to be concerned about is the way the future is going to go and so on especially from a social aspect I've sort of fundamental concerned that we are even kind of setting up little I guess fences um around probably economically kind of similar people right uh within those areas and so on so those are two questions that I have hmm maybe as a quick follow-up so I think the obviously all cities are under under climate threat and global warming is increasing um also you can say that for example European countries of the western world is pretty stable when it comes to CO2 admission so they almost stabilized it so that's good news you know you can say it's good news but on the other hand they're the largest economic countries or population world's largest countries like China and India and large parts of Africa still on an extremely steep growth trajectory so even if the Western World Stop stops admitting more co2s I think these these countries we'll catch up with the Western World and so what that means is that we will admit you know a lot of these uh you know uh carbons into the air and so that's where coming back to my initial statement we need to see what's the new Norm in 15 20 years from now and how can we make actually our cities ready for these new challenges and when I say cities I really means the people who are living in these cities so what what are the mechanisms we have to develop now to mediate the negative effects of climate change in 20 years from now and again I think we we may be focusing on the western side of the world are things that I don't want to sense of problems but the arising large sort of emissions will come not any longer from the West will come from Africa in in Asia I could speak to Frank's questions for just a second um I don't know that I have all the answers but one of the trends that I know exists I think this is probably fair to say we can generalize this a little bit all over the world but I'm more familiar with the trend in the U.S um there's been periods where people have moved towards the cities and the periods where people have moved away from the cities and then towards the cities and away from the cities and towards the cities in a way and this is often related to Public Health crises um so in the early 1900s in the U.S the cities were really dirty and people started to kind of step outside the suburbs but the thing is is that we also and this would probably be true in a lot of places in the world are not doing a lot to support rural economies and so while people might be stepping out to the suburbs a little bit during covet I mean we've seen a lot of resurgence in real estate markets and urban cores because fundamentally a lot of people want the services that are offered in cities but people that are in the rural areas kind of need to come to cities for economic opportunities now and especially as we get more of our goods from around the world a lot of our economic opportunities are in the service sector and then you just need to be adjacent to other people so I don't see there being any change in the trajectory of urbanization whatsoever in fact I think all the economic forces are there to accelerate urbanization over the coming years um so maybe covert provides a little blip and people kind of moving out for a bit and that's really only the wealthy and really only people who have jobs that can work from home and then but I think for the most part we're all just going to continue to consolidate um as for the situation in South Korea that's really interesting but one thing that I think is fascinating too is an advantage of cities is that sort of horizontal and vertical exchange of ideas this is where a lot of our economic productivity comes from and so if you have the siloization is that a word of people in South Korea you I think you would start to see a decline in that horizontal exchange of ideas and I wonder if people will want that I think they might want to reconnect you know really interesting I think this is a great segue into our sort of next topic which is looking at you know challenges for the near future so we've talked about some really interesting things so far I mean climate change has been a big theme and looking forward to addressing that I really like Allison what you said about um no I'm not you had a really nice way to say it but you know uh on one hand we can look at emissions but then water is sort of like the long-term um big big issue right we've talked about issues and governance sort of maybe some tension between top down and bottom up especially I've got what you mentioned in terms of um Green Space and and bike infrastructure and that sort of thing uh you talked about this sort of maybe attention between high density and communalism maybe is a way to put it which has sort of also been echoed in Frank's questions about the the silos right so there's some really really interesting um challenges that just come out of the past Trends and so I'm wondering now what what other challenges do you see or what are the biggest challenges um for cities and again understanding that maybe we can't make blanket statements about the whole world but if you wanted to comment on certain regions you're familiar with or keeping your eye on or which may present especially big challenges so whoever would look to get us started with that one well maybe maybe I can quickly jump in so let's say focusing on Philadelphia so not too far away I think it's the biggest challenge in Philly is it's underfunded in fact the people who actually made some money they moved out of the city are working in our online so the city is actually even sacrificing some of the the tax dollars they got from folks who were not living in the city um the infrastructure is completely sort of obsolete you know especially Alice In The Water System sewage systems it's it's really 19th century and it was never really fixed public transportation you know scepter is pretty okay but then you know buses and other systems are pretty needs a lot of money so I think the biggest problem is really funding to actually fix problems which piled up over the last 50 years before we actually getting to reworking you know a complete new new way of um you know infrastructures or a living lip work conditions I see that the city actually twice hard so they you know they they really we work in Brownfield areas close to the airport and others so there's there's something going on it's a good sign that things happen but I think um to tackle aspects like fresh water water Rising water levels uh flooding heat waves heat island effects negative heat island effects I think it takes some some real funding to move these things forward so I like to follow um around the financial liability to maintain a support to this to me the biggest challenge will still be around climate change the challenge is in my video are not just uh okay for example this winter we don't feel as cold as last November and and the priority last winter this week so and uh and uh and and also we see flooding we see um and the fires with the earthquakes we see natural disasters everywhere now and from from certain points personally I I felt I I started here more often hey this is a one-thoughtment year in Vegas and uh statistically when talking with invention is supposed to happen every Wednesday every thought of years statistically right but we started here more and more more often so I thought it Divine Studio where I was in Chicago uh in a context of um because of the natural disaster so we kind of change people realized uh we have to abandon our current city uh because financially not just environmental necessity cannot uh you know self-sustain but and also financially you know for example how much money we need to put in to uh be resilient against the problem against the earthquake against us and uh and we did the research okay so in different climate climate zones and different terrains where should people move to if they have to aband their current cities and at that time people you know felt I was greedy and but a couple years later for example the capital city of Indonesia the president announced that they're going to move their Capital City Jakarta to another place so a city like Miami for example in U.S and would we Face a point that people realize okay see level change sea level rise based on is in reversible we just can't knocks do anything about that dance and we we have to to to to to move the entire popular population to a different place which inherently more sustainable which means a less risk of natural disasters uh more clean than a drinkable water and not so cool so-called not so hard which means the energy and receiving so uh again that might seem to be um you know the the very far far future but we have already seen a city in some cities in the globally it has has been taken access on on that so numbers wanted to see that they happens but I think we have to um be far more aggressively uh desire and maintain the city from the view of the climate change um I can step in it so I you know I love to talk about climate change being a big problem because it is um I want to acknowledge one of the comments that popped up in the chat which is the thing that homelessness and crime is the big problem in Philadelphia and yeah I think that's a hundred percent correct and then also sort of speaks to this other problem that you probably need to think about a little bit more in my work which is just this idea that we have this just widening economic Gap and everything is becoming so so expensive in cities and there's not a lot of resources for people who don't have money so ensuring that we um are really equitably Distributing Urban services and making sure that everybody is taken care of through cities and we create these really livable cities for absolutely everyone is an essential challenge in the future [Music] maybe this is sort of getting ahead of things but I think that there's some given the sort of context of this panel being about uh future cities and also like sort of smart cities I think there is some opportunities here that a lot of Digital Services can offer us and I think we're going to talk about opportunities next maybe but perhaps another uh challenge to consider as we're thinking about the opportunity of Digital Services is there's also this issue of um let's see dealing with things like digital privacy algorithmic fairness and then a huge one right now that is not spoken about enough is Cyber attack so there's just I mean the cost of cyber insurance was going up and up and up cities are getting hit by ransomware attacks like you know hundreds of times per day um so managing all of these issues that are sort of related to digitization I think it's going to be a big challenge for us to wrap our heads around as we think about how we roll more smart Services into the City and so while smart services in my mind are absolutely necessary to combat all of these issues that we've brought up they also come with their own issues to deal with too so unfortunately there's no silver bullet ever um I just do kind of just jump in a little bit um certainly I mean just from a lay personal point of view and listening to the expertise of the panel here um I feel the world is so dark I want to just go back to my bed and hide underneath my uh blanket but I feel like um we can also try to address that this is I think where Allison was heading towards um mate are there sort of positive signs it might not address or even get anywhere near the fundamental problems right that's been sort of discussed but are there some potential positive amelioration of some of these issues um I think the extensive use of Telehealth especially talking about sort of rule side and their access to help of healthcare might be one positive side certainly I feel like the third cheap aspect of uh smartphone essentially computers um has sort of brought some Equity of access to information and there's still economic issues but certainly it doesn't cost three thousand dollars to buy a computer you know just you get it with your wires you know service plan um and so on so I'm wondering from all three everyone here with whether there's some potential upcoming either near or near distant technology that may try to take a step toward some of these directions and so well just as I think you're talking more towards what makes actually a smart city so and you know that's a little bit a waveform carbon neutrality and global warming and effects on this so it's more like let's say um what are the components and you know if you talk to tech companies they're talking about the internet of things and is a network of um you know the devices and controlling everything from energy flow to transportation to climate indoor and outdoor climber and and and everything and connected even maybe to personal health and and so forth so if you talk to the building industry it's probably talking about embodied carbon Footprints and carbon neutrality life cycle assessment so um when when it comes to um you know political entities or you maybe talk about the Democratic distribution of goods across the entire Spectrum within the population so equity and inclusion I think it's it's a key word so for me these are all aspects describing what is actually a smart or future city for me and what city I want to live um so to get there well that's a multi multifacet problem so from again from our perspective we want to tackle it uh to um to increase the livability in the health status across a large population so that's why we want to make the connection between the built environment and environmental aspects as well as the the individual and population health so but um in a nutshell it's a it's a very sort of wide-footed problem okay yeah thank you I think what this is highlighting for me is the way that all these challenges are kind of intermingled and so and I appreciate this the comment about homelessness and crime I mean it's not not the area of expertise of anybody here but we really do see you know these things are connected and I'm also thinking about the sort of social aspects to Wellness that that Frank that you were talking about earlier um so we've already started moving towards the direction of of positive and exciting things and and so let's let's continue on that so we've talked a little bit about you know the promise of smart City possibly although as Allison pointed out it does have some risks right particularly in terms of cyber security possibilities with Telehealth and the proliferation of smartphones what other emerging Trends are you guys seeing that are positive or exciting or anything that might give us some hope Technologies or research or anything else so I can give it a quick shot but I actually I will place a ball into Pink's Corner because he still is the expert when it comes to parametric design tooling for urban planning and I think that's from from my vintage point I think that this really is the next very large Trend that artificial intelligence really gets fully involved in the planning process of large Urban developments but I don't want to talk about something which is really not my domain it's really A banks Pink's domain so thank you editor um I like to Circle back to what Frank mentioned in the beginning and he's from the gaming industry or even discipline I think we a lot of the tools were currently using I will be using actually we learn from other other Industries for example the University of Technologies we mentioned the ARB us and we started to to apply those Technologies to the Urban Development I think that works very well because as Edgar and Edison you know talk about this is a outdiscipline is is not a single subject right it would evolve in multidisciplinary research and also a community engaged uh process so having having the immersive technology that AR with some interactive platform so everyone can can understand the and and interact the way the data weigh the design not just by single Data Solutions but in 100 million dollars in their Solutions and with the changes we might make and also see that we need this impact on certain aspects in the box if you move if you for example if you lower the height of the proposed algorithm in the city what the shadow are going to be changed how that will impact the thermal Comfort on the streets and it was the financial column but what's the financial improvisions as well so we had we have we can um uh presents all the workers through this new technologies and doing all uh stakeholders together and and engage the the developers governance and the local communities uh I think a lot of Technologies are very helpful uh in the in the in designing the university as well um I guess I mean talk about because I deal mainly with three merging Technologies and and its potential use um some of the stuff that I'm certainly am big fan of is just-in-time information right the ones that has been brought up by smartphones it's such a computer it requires internet access everywhere America Falls far behind the countries like um in Asia and so on you know certainly I I'm a long advocate of declaring internet as a public utility and making sure that it's accessible to rural areas and other places as a fundamental um utility but certainly you're not quite there yet in the United States but once we have that so it was actually fundamental Super Highway of internet I feel like democratization of information is one key thing that I think is sort of emerging and that's just the way of the future um other things I feel like like with that sort of brings people closer together not necessarily physically virtually so I'm still amazed by the fact that my young kids uh they're 8 and 11 right now could talk to their grandfather in Korea using FaceTime I mean that's something that you could not have imagined you know like 10 15 years ago that immediate access um of bringing people right in front of you halfway around the globe um I think is a trend um that we are moving towards that's for me it's making me excited about technology and this potential use as we have engagement entertainment so we talked about a lot of different challenges and um I see technology as being a way to address many of these challenges so let me just quickly summarize that three key challenges are for me bringing our carbon emissions down like immediately delivering more services to more people and then increasing the flexibility of our cities to respond to wider variations and conditions so here's how emerging Technologies can help with that um we need a lot of to bring our carbon down we need to Electrify a lot of different sources and we need to learn how to manage our grid differently we'll have distributed sensors and new algorithms are going to help us figure out how to manage electricity much more efficiently in cities so that's really exciting in terms of helping us drop our carbon emissions in terms of uh delivering more services to more people there's a lot of efficiency that can be gained through digitization and there's a lot of people that should be able to access new Services if we can deliver them at a lower cost um and then the third one in terms of increasing flexibility this is one that really gets me excited but right now our cities are very static they're built for Kong out of concrete which doesn't adapt very well and other like hard materials and they're really designed for people that are sort of healthy maybe age 18 to 65 and they're also sort of designed for this climate conditions that existed in like in Philadelphia in the 1850s when a lot of the city was built so we're seeing new extremes with climate and we're see like there's a wider variety of people that want to maybe interact with the city and I think a lot of emerging Technologies allow us to customize the delivery of services to people's needs a little bit more minutely so for example um in my class at talks about City sensors students come up with ideas of how we could use sensors to make cities more adaptable and one group came up with a project that people who had sort of different needs when crossing the street could potentially wear an RFID wristband or attach something to a cane or wheelchair that pings the crosswalk um like controller and depending on what your needs are you could get a customized uh Aid and crossing the street so it may be a longer costing time or lights or sounds helping you guide the across the street so rather than everybody always getting the same crossing times it would adapt to user needs another example might be we use the exact same quality of water that's treated up to drinking water standards for absolutely everything in the city even if you could use a lower Quality Water so one of the things sensors and like distributed valves and distributed yeah I guess treatment processes could help us do is better match the quality of water that we're delivering to the users needs and this could help lower costs and increase efficiency so it's these sort of customizations that can make take our cities up to the 21st century at least I I wonder if I consider Japan with one question um is there a potential rule for uh browsourcing Slash citizen science for some of these issues and the reason why I bring that up is I thought there was a project that was I read about out of Berkeley that was using like 50 000 cell phones you download an application and it's using its vibration sensor to try to predict earthquake or to provide rapid I guess early warning for earthquake and so on so given the deployment of these multi-sensors that everyone has right like six billion sensors across the world is there a possible utility of that for some of these issues and so on I totally think so there'll be a combination of sort of officially deployed sensors and citizen sensors so our industrial design students for example they developed a product which measures the water content in in the earth in public parks so and it's um you know signals us to a centralized Hub so that the the city knows which plans or which trees need to be watered and which doesn't it's at point in time so that that saves time and and also water slash money so that's a really simple device so it's a you know one just you know one one item gets censored but it's actually very very powerful if you if you use that across the entire city so every tree has one and every maybe not every swap but you know a larger larger green area so so it's one one aspect where really a five dollar sensor can make a huge difference it's really cool to hear about the I mean pen was talking about sort of Innovations in the design process we've heard a bunch about Innovations in terms of using our resources more wisely from our smartphones to cheap sensors I'd like to bring up the question that we got from Jen which I think Echoes some of the stuff we were talking about earlier in terms of governance and how we're using our tax dollars and how these resources are getting distributed I don't know if anybody would like to comment on this but the question is do you think building sustainability into our future can come from the federal level I mean I guess this is United States specifically we have this sort of interesting federal system Federated system uh does it come from the federal level or is a more effective approach for cities to work autonomously to focus on improving their own infrastructures any responses there yeah I have opinions on that oh I'd love to hear Edgars though too go ahead I think it has to come from both ends so well there's there's one there's uh you know ordinance uh requirements guidelines and so forth that needs to come from a from I think a government level offices of funding for certain you know deployments of Technologies need to come from the government for example CO2 admissions caps and and that kind of stuff on the other hand I think the approach also needs to be fine-tuned to the problem so it's a different story when you want to um you know turn Philadelphia into a smarter and healthy City in comparison to a city which is a hot and I would climber Zone let's say New Mexico so that their problems are different than our problems so I think in in that perspective there's probably some overlap but also very specific aspects which need to be addressed and um so we you know it's interesting because it's interesting to compare cities actually so we we have one project going on we will exhibit system where we're looking at Philadelphia and Venice two cities you know very different but have the same issues with surviving ocean levels so and how do these two cities deal with that with that challenge so and there's some similarities and some very unique different approaches to that challenge so so that's sort of my five sense to it I think it's so important for these different levels of proceed simultaneously so it's hard for well conceivably our federal government is mostly representative of the us though of course there's some reasons to believe maybe it's not um but one of the things that is going to be challenging is for the federal government to get really far ahead of where we want our cities to be so that means you have to have activism and action and everything in cities to kind of get people on board to start to vote and advocate for what they want to see from the federal government so then the other challenge is though we couldn't just leave it to cities to figure it out on their own because most of our infrastructures don't really end at the city boundaries and we need coordination of what's happening outside the cities too and across States so that's going to happen in state and federal level and so we need the federal government to kind of push this coordination between cities and spaces and to redistribute money and make sure that we have infrastructure systems that are working together but we also need cities to kind of Drive these ideas on what this future could look like um I'm wondering I guess my sort of naive Optimist view of how the state's federal system would work is that states sort of work states work as an experimental lab right trying different ideas at a smaller scale and something that kind of percolates up can be essentially adopted sort of I guess nationwide at the federal level but because politics and everything else that gets into it certainly we don't have that but ideally that sort of I guess how you would want or how it would work because you have 50 states right different ideas some of the ideas that really work well that gets adopted as a sort of essentially federal guidelines or federal rule Oh California has enough money that they kind of Drive their changes and push to the federal level too and taxes to maybe a little bit of a lesser degree yeah thank you we're unfortunately coming up to the end of our hour so I've got one more question for us we've talked a lot about big picture stuff from like governance to climate change and so I'm wondering if we can bring this down to the level of any individual person watching and do you have any suggestions or advice for viewers or for each other or for us what what is the number one thing anybody watching could do to make a difference towards for the future of cities is it reading a book is it voting what what should we do any ideas that's a it's a good question I get asked quite often by my friends and family back in Europe flying quite often across the Atlantic so they they're questioning really my carbon footprint my personal carbon foot you know using you know flying all over the place and um and a bully if if you if everybody would look into how we actually as individuals dealing with uh global warming carbon neutrality and so forth it's an interesting question to answer so for example um eating a mead especially beef contributes actually greatly to carbon admission so you so um so one of my my students in one of my classes developed a software package an iPhone app who tracks your personal carbon emissions you know what you eat how often you walk when you take a car that's pretty fascinating you know our footprint on this planet in comparison to somebody let's say in Africa or developing countries so so my advice would be you know I don't want to be as a preacher here but we need to be conscious that carbon neutrality and carbon footman it's not somebody else's issue it's our issue and we are contributing to it I have a slightly oh sorry Tim go ahead sorry all right yeah so I think individually there's a lot we can do but there's not experience my my experience when I when I just moved to U.S
specifically Chicago throughout 13 years ago I was in a tall Residential Building apartment building I was shocked uh in around September the heat was on and uh I have to wear t-shirts um uh sorry yeah the Iran around September that he was on when you in the winter time I had to wear t-shirts in my apartment so I think you know specifically in this country I would advise you everyone can be a bit more tolerant with how you might feel comfortable with temperature um so you don't have to be aware t-shirt in winter at home uh so that that when when done the question how you can manage the energy individually at home uh so that's my that's my small advice like the idea of just being more tolerant in general um so my number one piece of advice a little different uh so cities are really complicated and we have all of these different interacting factors so there's climate changes there's issues with affordable housing There's issues with like the way the insurance sector incentivize with particular patterns of growth there's issue with Transportation There's issues with communication There's issues with schools there's issues with General economic Frameworks there's so many complicated things happening and unfortunately I don't think there's like a button you can push that fixes them all instead I think it's necessary to kind of slowly unlock a lot of these problems and so what my number one thing you can do is just pick something pick something that you like that you think benefits the public in some way or another and just work on that one thing and this is amazing that there's not a silver bullet in a lot of ways because it allows us all a lot of different entry points into this big naughty problem because they all come together other and they're all important so whatever it is you're doing stop looking for the perfect thing and just find the thing that you like and just do that thing um I guess I have sort of two sort of messages um the first one is is that if uh technology is wonderful but it's a double-edged sword every technological double-edged sword um so we have wonderful technology like you know deep learning other stuff that's able to help us and augment our abilities in a number of ways but I'll look that along brings it with the Deep fakes cyber threats and other stuff and so on so I think First Step foremost be aware of the Dual use of Technology whatever technology might be um and and and just be knowledgeable about it that's sort of the general message I would have um and if nothing else if just drop everything drop all your work drop all your words and go play a board game there's some wonderful board games that are out there I would recommend too pandemic is a wonderful Cooperative board game where you're trying to save the world from a pandemic um and the other is Ticket to Ride is also a wonderful family based game but I have hundreds of recommendations if you need just you know drop everything gather your family and uh just play a board game wonderful thank you and I'll just make a note that the makers of pandemic are actually working on a game about climate change and you know working together to solve climate change it's called Daybreak I guess it'll come out in maybe a year or so well this is a has been a really wonderful conversation I think this is a good place to bring it to a close and also we're out of time so I think we could have talked for for much longer but this was a really wonderful thoughtful conversation uh I hope everybody watching has learned a little bit more about the future of cities and I hope that this conversation has sparked your interest in some of these topics and that you'll do something to get involved and and do what you can and like Allison said find something that that drives you and dig into that thing just a reminder that registered attendees you'll get a link to this recording uh afterwards and keep an eye out for our upcoming events both from speculative Futures Philadelphia and from The Institute for smart and healthy cities and feel free to to look up our fellow panelists and see what they're up to in the future thank you everybody thank you to our panelists and thank you for everyone watching everyone thank you thank you thanks for looking at this thank you [Laughter] bye everyone hi
2023-02-07