Edito : "Live in a living City"
Carlos Moreno
President of the Scientific Committee
Professor, Scientific Advisor of the President of COFELY INEO, GDFSUEZ Group
The Lively City Facing New Challenges
A town is a living place that becomes more complex as it grows.
It has a variety of needs, uses, services, and flows: food, housing, environment, education, culture, transport, health, security, energy, waste, and communication.
Each city evolves in a different context that shapes its own characteristics. The Planet population has just exceeded 7 billion and more than 50% of the population lives in cities today. In 2030, we expect 8.3 billion inhabitants and 5 billion living in urban areas.
Challenges never seen before are ahead of us: the exponential growth of cities consumes resources that weaken an already severely affected environment. Significant impacts are predicted in known ecosystems. Urbanization is accelerating infrastructures needs upsetting the balance between humans and nature in depth. In its turn, threatened nature confronts us with new situations that have to be dealt with.
At the same time, the world has just passed 5 billion connected objects and the forecast for 2020 shall be at least 3 times more. This is an impressive evolution since the advent of the Internet only 20 years ago. An ordinary Smartphone today has the same computing power as the computers who sent men to the moon in 1969.
Thus, relationships between people are undergoing deep changes as real-time and ubiquitous computing power with massive Internet networking between people and objects are about to set place. Distances are abolished and virtual neighbourhoods are becoming universal. The Interactive City and Communicative City is becoming a reality.
The Lively City Facing Complexity
A lively being, complicated by its
development, has its own metabolism.
The City must constantly adapt
itself ahead of unavoidable changes. Any unexpected danger or threat can give
rise to unpredictable situations anywhere, at any moment. The complexity of the city makes it difficult to plan
and anticipate possible changes if we stay on sectorial, inflexible and accounting paradigms.
We need a cross-disciplinary, contextual and comprehensive vision of our living space to ensure for interdependence between various interacting systems while process multiple flows of information to ensure that we make informed decisions in real-time and in meaningful ways.
Understanding the fragility of the city, thinking of it as a sensible place, making it simpler, more accessible, and helping it to become resilient, are key issues for the future. In our view, it is crucial to provide the city and its citizen’s with ambient intelligence in order to be self-adapting, self-learning, self-repairing and robust at the same time.
Our cities will have to move towards a more transversal, open, scalable and adaptive ecosystem. Energy challenges and the emergence of low-carbon cities require putting sustainable development at the heart of the city life. Communicating objects, networks, electronics and telecommunications will transform the relationships between the people and their decision-makers.
5PLUS CITY FORUM is a place of reflection around the living and complex city.
5PLUS CITY FORUM is a collective input for the awareness of the major challenges our cities are confronted today and tomorrow. Our commitment is to promote dialogue at very high level, to reflect on our common vision of the city, its evolution and its projection in 5 years. We will explore today’s strong concepts in the hope that they will help draw the foundations of new proposals to make our cities better living places and resilient in their inevitable transformation to come.
