When Fantasy Becomes Reality

25/08/2016

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barrysays

Science fiction writers and Hollywood directors have been hugely influential in envisioning the future, from robots to the mobile phone. Tomorrows' city is usually portrayed as some dark, polluted, dystopian nightmare but it need not be like that. Automated vehicle technology is about to rapidly free up the reshaping of our cities from the constraints imposed by road planning and our urban spaces will become light, green, clean and inviting. Our lives are to be revolutionised and the city of tomorrow is already here today

The following is originally from Barry Wilson's TEDxXiguan talk on August 13th. 

THE CHANGING WORLD 

Young Barry going to school. Image: BWPI

When I was a young boy, I remember I walked to school with friends. Not many people owned a car and the streets were generally safe from speeding traffic. It was safe to walk for miles as there were far fewer roads and life was relatively simple in a localised world.

​Today we live in a changed and busy globalised planet. A consumer economy focused on earning money and buying possessions; supposedly leading to a better quality life. But to achieve this wealth our world is sick. It’s suffering from over exploitation of resources; the oceans are full of plastic; our forests and jungles are disappearing; the soils we use to grow crops are toxic and clean water is scarce.

Barry on his bike. Image: BWPI

Air pollution. Image: The Climate Reality Project

Like many of you, I am actively trying to change my lifestyle to consume less energy and adopt a more sustainable lifestyle, particularly when travelling. I don’t usually walk to work, but I do cycle to work. I don’t own a car, but I frequently use car-sharing apps. I don’t normally use the elevator, preferring to take the stairs. But then it’s no hardship as I only live on the 3rd floor.

When making a longer trip however BMW is the travel mode of choice. “BMW?” you say, that’s not very sustainable. But my BMW is different it’s just an acronym: B for BIKE / M for METRO / W for WALK.
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Fortunately Hong Kong has a public transport system well geared to ‘BMW’, whilst China is progressing more rapidly than any other country in the world in addressing energy issues and promoting new styles of public transport choices like e-bikes, electric cars, car sharing, the building of new metro lines and the wonderful new high speed rail network that is replacing the need for domestic air travel.

The atomosphere is thinner than what we think. Image: The Climate Reality Project

Our small world is changing unprecedentedly fast through urbanization, technology innovation and climate change and we all have to keep changing our assumptions and habits with it. I wonder about how my young kids will be going to work in the future? In just another 10 or 15 years things will be very different from today. What might our new cities look like? Will they be safe, clean and comfortable? Or might they be something more typical of Hollywood’s dystopian vision?

Barry in dystopian future city. Image: BWPI

ENVISIONING THE FUTURE

“Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea”. Image: pinterest.com

Science fiction writers and Hollywood directors have been hugely influential in envisioning the future, from robots to the mobile phone.

Back in the year 1870, Jules Verne imagined an advanced submarine in his novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea”. That’s almost 150 years ago!

The War of the Worlds (1898). Image: goodreads.com

Not long after, in 1897, spacecraft from another planet were described by H.G. Wells in his novel “The War of the Worlds”. We only went on to develop submarines and flying machines after both of those novels were written.

Metropolis (1927). Image: 3ammagazine.com

Yet it is director Fritz Lang’s influential 1927 science fiction film “Metropolis” that is among the most iconic and influential visions of all time. A cinema classic with a huge cult following, every architecture student must have seen this movie. The city of Metropolis is ruled by a powerful industrialist who looks out from his high office tower at a modern, highly technicised world. It features one of the earliest movie portrayals of a robot that is made to look like a human. Metropolis is the first ever film to be included on the UNESCO Memory of the World “register” of essential cultural artifacts. This movie had a major influence on the way Hollywood saw the future and affected the vision of for instance Ridley Scott and George Lucas, who directed later classics such as Blade Runner and Star Wars.

Blade Runner (1982). Image: phys.org

Total Recall (1990). Image: gearheads.org

Blade Runner, made in 1982, is the now typical "urban future" clearly depicted. The setting is a grimy, crime-ridden Los Angeles in the 21st century. Harrison Ford is the star, jaunting through the dark cityscape to reveal a world in which no light gets to the streets.  For me the standout vision is of the ubiquity of huge digital billboards across the whole façades of high rise buildings. The overtones of today’s dense Asian cities in Japan, Korea and increasingly China are unmistakable. 

A sci-fi exploration of virtual reality takes place in the 1990 movie Total Recall, but one visionary scene that has really stayed with me involves self-driving taxis known as Johnny Cabs. Of course Arnold Schwarzenegger gets to blow them all up, but autonomous taxis are here to stay and about to become main-stream. 

The Phantom Menace (1999). Image: reddit.com

Then there is of course Star Wars, which took everything to a whole new level of fantasy. The website even has its own detailed databank of everything envisioned in the movies, including details of the hundreds of types of transport and descriptions of all the different cities of the galaxy.[1]

The Phantom Menace, made in 1999, depicts the planet Coruscant. It’s a real estate developer’s dream, with every single part of the surface completely covered by development. Mile-high skyscrapers extend both up into the clouds and miles below the surface of the planet. Will this be the type of city in which my children will be travelling to work; a Star Wars world?

Minority Report (2002). Image: i.ytimg.com

Set in Washington DC in the year 2054, Minority Report is a Stephen Spielberg marvel of 2002 starring Tom Cruise. At the World Architecture Festival last year in Singapore, the film’s production designer Alex McDowell said he had designed the entire city in great detail at the start of the movie-making process.

His team came up with the ideas for the film after an extensive period of research into cutting-edge technologies, which the design team then extrapolated into the future. They envisioned the whole city, its transport infrastructure, its social, political and cultural systems as well as the gadgets used by its inhabitants. This meant that the city itself influenced the plot of the film. The driverless cars that are able to travel both horizontally and vertically, for example, led to the creation of the movie's chase scene.

The movie helped to make dozens of contemporary technologies a reality. Over 100 patents have been issued for ideas first floated in the movie.

Alex McDowell，British production designer and film producer of MinorityReport. Image: usc.edu

Four districts in Zootopia (2016). Image: disney.wikia.com

Now here is a change. This year had a new visionary movie which surely everyone has seen. There are 3 cities in the city, each with their own distinctive character, cultural districts and neighborhoods. It has intricate methods of public transportation, heating and cooling. Oh yes and it has animals; lots of them. In Zootopia the huge trees are not actually trees, they’re huge steam trees with pipes that take water from below, bringing it up to the roof of the city and using artificial sprinklers to diffuse it into the air.

The designers took influences from all over the world including Shanghai and Hong Kong, Europe and South America. They wanted to make sure that it felt like a “world” city rather than an American city. 

TECHNOLOGY TODAY

Image: inhabitat.com

So we’ve had a look at the world and climate change makes it a rather worrying place right now. Furthermore our visionaries in Hollywood often paint a frightening future. Film directors are in a position to outline reality rather more realistically than politicians of course. But will it really be that way?

The opportunities presented by big data and the age of autonomous vehicles to reshape our cities cannot be overstated. We are already familiar with using ride-hailing apps such as Uber. Apple have just invested $1 billion in China into Didi Chuxing as a development platform for introducing their self-driving taxi fleet. It’s clearly not a good time to be a taxi driver.

On 1st April last year it was reported in the media that the New York City Mayor had signed a contract to start bringing Google’s patented driverless cars into the New York City taxi fleet. Evidently the Mayor’s Office said that there would be 5,000 driverless cabs on New York City streets by 2016.

​Did it happen already? You are not sure? Well, no it didn’t. This was actually a funny April Fool’s joke first presented in 2012. At that time it seemed entirely plausible, but by 2015 it was a totally convincing piece. It’s an almost certain reality by 2020 even if the taxis are not necessarily Google’s. Uber has just announced it will use driverless taxis to start picking up passengers in Pittsburg this very month![2] 

NuTonomy car. Image: investorherald.com

​So the race is on, but it’s highly possible that Singapore will be the first nation to fully automate its taxi fleets. Seven major companies are signed to bring them to market before 2020. NuTonomy, a driverless car US startup, passed its first obstacle test last month. It intends to debut their pilot study for driverless taxi cabs in Singapore, beating competitors with a public testing date before this year ends. In a few years, they do aim to have thousands of driverless taxis throughout Singapore. The National League of Cities estimates automated cars will be absolutely standard across the world by year 2030.

Elon Musk, founder of TESLER. Image:inferse.com

EHANG184 Flying Vehicle. Image: huffingtonpost.co.uk

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But this is just the start of the automated transport revolution. Autonomous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs) are now on the production line. Unsurprisingly the market leaders are emerging from China; the personal drone capital of the world.

The Ehang 184 is a personal autonomous flying drone, developed for low altitude flights and is currently being tested in Nevada to put the aircraft through regulatory approval. You get to your destination by simply tapping it into the system’s smartphone app. The early model presented at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas had enough battery power for a 20 minute flight, (around 80 kms).

Getting drones to talk to each other has been the big barrier however. And they are going to need to communicate with everything moving around them. Controlling teams of moving robots so they don’t crash into each other is a hard problem that continues to keep designers busy.

Getting swarms of drones to flying in terrifyingly perfect formation was however starting to be overcome as long as 5 years ago as can be seen from this TED talk by Vijay Kumar in 2012.

So that was the beginning. More recently 100 drones flew in awe inspiring formations to set a new Guinness World Record in January 2016 in Germany.

TOMORROWS WORLD - TODAY

The ‘bubble’ car (Car on a Stick), by industrial designer Ross Lovegrove. Image: dezeen.com

Our cities and their streets have been designed firstly around the horse and cart and then later adapted to incorporate private motor vehicles. Autonomous vehicles however function in ways completely different from existing motor vehicles, essentially freeing themselves from the traditional “rules of the road” and potentially liberating the planning and design of our streets.

But let’s not stop there. It will be possible with AAV’s to virtually clear moving traffic from the streets by changing to the use of low level, tiered, aerial roads, where all the vehicles are communicating and responding with each other. Not having human drivers means this can be done safely and efficiently with transport corridors separated at perhaps 20m vertical intervals. Just think back to the vision of the planet Coruscant in Star Wars and all those skylanes of aerial traffic heading across the backdrop.

skylanes on Coruscant. Image: moviepilot.com

The most exciting aspect for me with automated public transport is the prospect of fully addressing the “holy grail” of urban planning; solving the last mile problem. Public transport is all very well, but the private vehicle can deliver you door to door. The problem of getting that last mile from the train or bus stop to your destination has always been problematic, especially when carrying goods, being physically infirm or simply just avoiding the rain.

Coruscant sky taxi. Image：galacticvehicles.neocities.org

But who needs their own car when AAVs not only have the ability to drop you door to door but even DOOR to FLOOR. AAVs can utilise roof spaces, refuge floors in tall buildings, terraces and large balconies. Apartments can start to be adapted to even have their own skyports.

Emergency drones. Image: dailymail.co.uk / diydrones.com / dronelife.com / techdrive.co

The immediate and most obvious benefit from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is their potential to carry out civic duties of emergency response to fire, medical and security needs. Much of the way streets have been developed has been in order to service buildings, particularly in the event of fire. By providing aerial access for fire and maintenance services through high level, externally accessed building hydrants, be it for fighting fires or cleaning windows, it means that vehicle access requirements on the street and around buildings can change. Building codes on emergency vehicle access (EVA) can be relaxed and building arrangements become more varied and flexible. What’s more, with the impending death of the private motor vehicle in urban areas, goes the need for parking spaces. Autonomous vehicles can be employed 24/7, whilst private vehicles are parked for the majority of their lives; an incredibly inefficient use of space and resources. Just think what can be done without all that wasted space.

Image: bhmpics.com / starwars.wikia.com / joaogerardo.wordpress.com

The arrival of automated aerial transport and servicing means safer places for cycles and pedestrians on the streets; it means more interesting spaces that are less standardised; it means more greenery and fewer obstructions. It means that our city streets in the near future will not need traffic lights, road signs, kerbs, railings or protective barriers. It means no roadside pollution! It means more space. It means more green space. It means that the city streets of today will become the city parks of tomorrow.

Image: BWPI

So what might the cities of the future perhaps look like? Will they be the corporate power centres of the city of Metropolis? Will they be the dystopian nightmare of Blade Runner? Or might they be the distinctive themed neighborhoods of Zootopia?

I believe they just might be a little of all of them…

Image: BWPI

Barry Wilson is a Landscape Architect, urbanist and university lecturer. His practice, Barry Wilson Project Initiatives, has been tackling urbanisation issues in Hong Kong and China for over 20 years. (www.initiatives.com.hk). ​

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Reference:

[1]http://www.starwars.com/databank
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[2]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-first-self-driving-fleet-arrives-in-pittsburgh-this-month-is06r7on