The Informational City

Abstract

What will our future cities look like? Will they look strikingly different to the cities of today, and be constructed with the latest materials and designed using the latest design methods? Or will they look much like our existing cities, with occasional new buildings, but with most existing building stock retained and simply retrofitted with the latest information technology? This article argues that the most likely driver of change in our future cities is less likely to be new architectural forms, than informational systems that have already revolutionized other industries. It explores the impact of the computational interface as the site of information exchange in the transportation industry in particular, and argues that not only is a similar revolution likely to sweep across the building industry, but that it has already begun to leave its mark. It also argues that with the advent of ‘big data’ the discipline of architecture needs to be reinvented not just through the introduction of BIM, GIS and other information based services, but also through a radical rethinking of its operations. What needs to be designed, then, the article concludes, are not new forms of architecture – or indeed new architectural forms – but an entirely new information based approach to the discipline of architecture.