Reconstructing identities and the idea of Global Regionalism

We live in a time of great anxiety and change; a time of shifting allegiances where the certainties upon which we have relied have simply vanished. Our once familiar political landscape is in flux; pandemics, civil rights, China, Brexit, Trump, interminable wars and nationalism, have led us to seek answers in ways that are simple and easy to understand. The fingerprints of identity politics are everywhere.

Al Thumama Stadium: Local and Global Architectural Reach

The world cup stadia have been a constant concern for the hosting countries. Many of them have become a burden on the economies of their countries, only to become white elephants after the tournaments end. Therefore, the core mission of the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy in Qatar was to ensure that the World Cup Stadiums are built with a legacy and to remain functional in the long run, not just as facilities, but as cultural icons. Such efforts have promoted the exercise of stadia building in Qatar as a positive and unique experience. As a firm, we, at Arab Engineering Bureau, are honored to be part of the effort all through the making of Al Thumama Stadium, which will be discussed in this paper. Instead of a white elephant, Al Thumama Stadium is arguably a symbol of the local identity that will become part of the World Cup legacy, whilst being a state-of-the-art facility that plays a vital role in development of its surrounding neighborhood.

[E]motive Architecture: strategies for a behaviour-driven Space configuration

As Architect and Engineer, we used to work with the concept of Space. Struggling to find an exhaustive definition, we risk thinking about it as a framework with the same properties of the object we are going to design. Looking at the Space as an abstract background of the objects that we are going to place in it, we risk to not understand how it plays a cultural and social role in human affairs. The configurations of people can be influenced by, or influence, a configuration of space: therefore, the apparent effect of Architecture on social outcomes seems to pass through the relation of spatial layouts. Movement is by far the dominant form of space use and, following this logic, we can argue how spatial configuration can influence the pattern of movement in space. Generative design processes can be used to define the properties for a space layout that better stimulate a sense of well-being through human behavior monitoring. The potential role of generative design processes finds its maximum expression wherever a certain problem's parameters and interactions bring a level of complexity, much greater than that could be handled by human cognitive processes alone. Generative design integrates artificial intelligence by using search algorithms to achieve high-performing results. However, the emphasis on the 'automated design procedures' should not overshadow the central role of the designer's intellectual capacity, essential for the critical judgement towards the employment of algorithms, the selection of input data parameters as well as the criteria of evaluation. Architects and planners now have the chance to calibrate their designs looking at human comfort and social interaction.

Crossbreed – (Re) producing the Future

The subject of technological intervention has been largely debated among the world’s greatest minds. Political, theological, psychological, biological and ethical implications have all been argued for and against the ‘technological other’. Does the fact we now CAN perform certain operations and changes to the human body and society at large actually mean we SHOULD? What impact can we foresee with unlimited human intervention in nature ‘as it was intended’? How can we benefit from an era of information flow, where crossing and hybridizing-disciplines, or as I term it “crossbreeding”, become the new breeding ground for innovation? How would Architecture be affected by a future that belongs to organic, non-organic humans and anything in between? This paper will discuss these issues and take a peep into where we might be headed in the near future, so to better understand the challenges that are ahead of us.

Shared Models and Open Infrastructures for the smart City Internet of Things based on the Semantic Web

Contemporary cities face many challenges: energy, ecological, demographic or economic. To answer this, technological means are implemented in cities through the use of sensors and actuators. These cities are said to be smart. Currently, smart cities are operated by actors who share neither their sensor data nor access to their actuators. This situation is called vertical: each operator deploys its own sensors and actuators and has its own IT infrastructure hosting its applications. This leads to infrastructure redundancy and ad-hoc applications to oversee and control an area of the city. A trend is to move towards a so-called horizontal situation via the use of an open and shared mediation platform. Sensor data and access to the actuators are shared within this type of platform, allowing their sharing between the different actors. The costs of infrastructure and development are then reduced. This work is part of such a context of horizontalization, within an open and shared platform, in which we propose: 1) a layer of abstraction for control and supervision of the city, 2) a competition control mechanism handling conflict cases based on the RDF (Resource Description Framework) semantic Web standard, 3) a coordination mechanism promoting the reuse of actuators using ontology, 4) an implementation of our work by a proof of concept. The abstraction we propose is based on models from reactive systems. They aim to be generic and represent the invariant of the smart city: the physical elements. They allow applications to control and supervise the city. To facilitate the development of applications we standardize the interface of our models. Since these applications may have real-time constraints, especially those that have control objectives, we propose to take advantage of the distributed architecture of this type of platform. Given the sharing of the actuators, we have identified that conflicts can arise between applications. We propose a mechanism of competition control to deal with these cases of conflicts. We have also identified that a coordination mechanism must be offered to applications wishing to perform atomic control operations. Such a mechanism promotes the reuse of the actuators present in the city. Finally, we implemented our proposals around a proof of concept, including several use cases, to demonstrate our work.

Crossing the Rubicon: Tevere Cavo, an Urban Project for Rome

We believe that the new frontiers of Information Technology have to deal with the central role of Infrastructures in the existing city. Indeed, this new generation of infrastructures will allow the 'redirection' of the development. To arrest developments in "Green fields" and direct devel-opments towards "brown areas" in the existing cities we need infrastructures of new generation. In this historical moment, a development phase has to focus on the use of urban voids in the existing city to stop the endless urban sprawl. 'Crossing the Rubicon' was an expression I used years ago - in the preface of Kas Oosterhuis's book "Towards new Architecture"- to underline the role of a generation of architects that put Information Technology at the heart of a new de-velopment phase for architecture. I am using the same expression now to highlight the role that Information Technology has to play to shape new infrastructures. As an example, here I present and discuss the urban project "Tevere Cavo" in Rome.

Pay-as-you-go City’: New Forms of Domesticity in a Technological Society

Ongoing urbanization, combined with market fundamentalism as the prevailing mode of political management, is leading to the spatial and social segregation of economic classes in cities. The housing market, being driven by economic interests rather than public policy, favors inflexible forms of ownership or tenancy that are increasingly incompatible with the more diverse forms of live-work patterns and family structures occurring in the society. This paper presents a research-by-design project that explores a speculative future scenario of housing, based on current developments in digital technologies and their impact on the mobility and accessibility to services enjoyed by urban residents. It references technology platforms that underpin the 'sharing economy' or 'gig economy', such as 'pay-as-you-go' car and bike sharing programs or internet and smartphone-based services for taxis or temporary accommodation. The study explores how new forms of participation in the housing market could circumvent the current segregation of different communities across the city. It describes a speculative system of distributed residential spaces, accessible to all on a 'pay-for-time-used' basis. By offering freedom of choice across domestic functions of greater range and accessibility than found within existing housing or hotel accommodation, the system would enable opportunistic or nomadic forms of living linked to the dynamic spatio-temporal occurrences of social, cultural or economic opportunities. The research references how new forms of social networking create new challenges and opportunities to participate in communities and explores how new technologies, applied to housing, can help to find a 'sense of belonging' within the technological society.

LIQUID CITIES, a city designed by citizens

‘The city of Sofronia is composed of two half cities. One is a large roller coaster with steep bumps, a whirligig with fanning chains, a Ferris wheel with rotating containers, a cylinder with steep wall riders with their heads down, a circus tent with a bunch of trapezes in the ridge. The other half of the city is made of stone and marble and cement, with a bank building, workshops, residential houses, the slaughterhouse, the school and everything else. One half of the city is huge, the other is improvised and when the time of the stay is up, it is taken apart, dismantled and taken to be transferred to the wasteland of another half city’ __Invincible cities, Italo Calvino Rezone wants to make the concept of the city more liquid.. A city where things can change, a flexible city that adapts to the desires of its inhabitants. A city designed by professionals, but also by its citizens. A city where roles are fluid and change. Where the designer becomes the builder, where the builder becomes the adviser, where the citizen becomes the designer. A constant flux and change of roles and structures. Rezone creates open designs, methods and strategies where the influence of the end user is big. With new technologies, it is possible to create personalized designs and methods for everybody. For rezone, experimentation is an important aspect of the working flow. Rolf van Boxmeer has a background in architecture and Tessa Peters has a background in the arts. The crossover of art and architecture brings new insights and is an activist methods and designs that can change the status quo in different urban fields.

The Affective City: Cartography of Machinic Urban Assemblages

While the city is generally perceived -within complexity theory and dynamic systems theory as a changing field of dense interactions that occur in a range of spatial and temporal scales, we are unable to perceive it or describe it in these terms. The main goal of our work is to redefine space - ontologically and epistemologically- in order to reveal the invisible system of its interactions. Thus, the city is represented via a connectionist model, by means of the representation of the interconnections of its various parts. The project theorizes the city as a multiplicity, a structure of spaces of possibilities while at the same time trying to establish a liaison between the city's properties, tendencies and capacities. While properties are actual and can be observed, tendencies and capacities lie in the virtual level and become actual once exercised. Their intensive cartographies map zones of varying degrees regarding the density and intensity of information that is available pointing them as the city's islands of affordances. In this framework, Hecate becomes the city's virtual map, an interactive mechanism able to decipher, map and connect the superimposed layers of significance informing the city's layout and behavior, in real time. Visualized as a network of richly interconnected nodes of varying intensities, each representing information flows between the system and the city, Hecate is introduced as a visual thinking tool to perceive them in real time.

Cumulative, Collaborative, Disruptive Architectural geometry in research, practice, and its imminent mainstream future

Solutions to the significant social, ecological and economic opportunities and problems of 21st century architecture and urbanism involve a vast number of variables. These solutions will require the use of data-driven technologies to acquire physical and social information of sites and consumer communities, digital technologies to design for the briefs so acquired and robotic manufacturing to deliver the designed solutions effectively.