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I thought I would start with a very brief

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history of cities.

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Settlements typically began

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with people clustered around a well, and the size

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of that settlement was roughly the distance you could walk

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with a pot of water on your head.

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In fact, if you fly over Germany, for example,

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and you look down and you see these hundreds

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of little villages, they're all about a mile apart.

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You needed easy access to the fields.

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And for hundreds, even thousands of years,

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the home was really the center of life.

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Life was very small for most people.

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It was the center of entertainment, of energy production,

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of work, the center of health care.

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That's where babies were born and people died.

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Then, with industrialization, everything started

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to become centralized.

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You had dirty factories that were moved

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to the outskirts of cities.

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Production was centralized in assembly plants.

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You had centralized energy production.

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Learning took place in schools. Health care took place

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in hospitals.

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And then you had networks that developed.

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You had water, sewer networks that allowed for this

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kind of unchecked expansion.

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You had separated functions, increasingly.

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You had rail networks that connected residential,

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industrial, commercial areas. You had auto networks.

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In fact, the model was really, give everybody a car,

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build roads to everything, and give people a place to park

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when they get there. It was not a very functional model.

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And we still live in that world,

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and this is what we end up with.

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So you have the sprawl of LA,

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the sprawl of Mexico City.

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You have these unbelievable new cities in China

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which you might call tower sprawl.

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They're all building cities on the model that we invented

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in the '50s and '60s, which is really obsolete, I would argue,

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and there are hundreds and hundreds of new cities

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that are being planned all over the world.

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In China alone, 300 million people,

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some say 400 million people,

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will move to the city over the next 15 years.

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That means building the entire, the equivalent

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of the entire built infrastructure of the U.S. in 15 years.

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Imagine that.

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And we should all care about this

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whether you live in cities or not.

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Cities will account for 90 percent of the population growth,

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80 percent of the global CO2, 75 percent of energy use,

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but at the same time it's where people want to be,

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increasingly.

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More than half the people now in the world live in cities,

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and that will just continue to escalate.

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Cities are places of celebration, personal expression.

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You have the flash mobs of pillow fights that —

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I've been to a couple. They're quite fun. (Laughter)

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You have — (Laughs)

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Cities are where most of the wealth is created,

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and particularly in the developing world,

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it's where women find opportunities. That's

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a lot of the reason why cities are growing very quickly.

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Now there's some trends that will impact cities.

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First of all, work is becoming distributed and mobile.

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The office building is basically obsolete

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for doing private work.

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The home, once again, because of distributed computation --

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communication, is becoming a center of life,

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so it's a center of production and learning and shopping

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and health care and all of these things that we used

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to think of as taking place outside of the home.

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And increasingly, everything that people buy,

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every consumer product, in one way or another,

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can be personalized.

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And that's a very important trend to think about.

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So this is my image of the city of the future.

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(Laughter)

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In that it's a place for people, you know.

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Maybe not the way people dress, but --

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You know, the question now is, how can we have all

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the good things that we identify with cities

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without all the bad things?

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This is Bangalore. It took me a couple of hours

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to get a few miles in Bangalore last year.

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So with cities, you also have congestion and pollution

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and disease and all these negative things.

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How can we have the good stuff without the bad?

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So we went back and started looking at the great cities

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that evolved before the cars.

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Paris was a series of these little villages

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that came together, and you still see that structure today.

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The 20 arrondissements of Paris

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are these little neighborhoods.

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Most of what people need in life can be

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within a five- or 10-minute walk.

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And if you look at the data, when you have that kind

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of a structure, you get a very even distribution

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of the shops and the physicians and the pharmacies

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and the cafes in Paris.

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And then you look at cities that evolved after

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the automobile, and it's not that kind of a pattern.

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There's very little that's within a five minute walk

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of most areas of places like Pittsburgh.

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Not to pick on Pittsburgh, but most American cities

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really have evolved this way.

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So we said, we'll, let's look at new cities, and we're involved

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in a couple of new city projects in China.

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So we said, let's start with that neighborhood cell.

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We think of it as a compact urban cell.

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So provide most of what most people want

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within that 20-minute walk.

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This can also be a resilient electrical microgrid,

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community heating, power, communication networks,

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etc., can be concentrated there.

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Stewart Brand would put a micro-nuclear reactor

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right in the center, probably. (Laughter)

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And he might be right.

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And then we can form, in effect, a mesh network.

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It's something of an Internet typology pattern,

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so you can have a series of these neighborhoods.

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You can dial up the density -- about 20,000 people per cell

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if it's Cambridge. Go up to 50,000

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if it's Manhattan density. You connect everything

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with mass transit and you provide most of what most people

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need within that neighborhood.

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You can begin to develop a whole typology of streetscapes

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and the vehicles that can go on them. I won't go through

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all of them. I'll just show one.

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This is Boulder. It's a great example of kind of a mobility

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parkway, a superhighway for joggers and bicyclists

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where you can go from one end of the city to the other

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without crossing the street, and they also have bike-sharing,

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which I'll get into in a minute.

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This is even a more interesting solution in Seoul, Korea.

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They took the elevated highway, they got rid of it,

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they reclaimed the street, the river down below,

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below the street, and you can go from one end of Seoul

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to the other without crossing a pathway for cars.

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The Highline in Manhattan is very similar.

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You have these rapidly emerging bike lanes

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all over the world. I lived in Manhattan for 15 years.

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I went back a couple of weekends ago, took this photograph

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of these fabulous new bike lanes that they have installed.

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They're still not to where Copenhagen is, where something

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like 42 percent of the trips within the city

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are by bicycle. It's mostly just because they have

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fantastic infrastructure there.

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We actually did exactly the wrong thing in Boston.

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We -- the Big Dig -- (Laughter)

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So we got rid of the highway but we created a traffic island

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and it's certainly not a mobility pathway for anything

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other than cars.

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Mobility on demand is something we've been thinking

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about, so we think we need an ecosystem

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of these shared-use vehicles connected to mass transit.

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These are some of the vehicles that we've been working on.

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But shared use is really key. If you share a vehicle,

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you can have at least four people use one vehicle,

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as opposed to one.

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We have Hubway here in Boston, the Vélib' system in Paris.

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We've been developing at the Media Lab this little

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city car that is optimized for shared use in cities.

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We got rid of all the useless things like engines

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and transmissions. We moved everything to the wheels,

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so you have the drive motor, the steering motor,

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the breaking all in the wheel.

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That left the chassis unencumbered, so you can do things

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like fold, so you can fold this little vehicle up

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to occupy a tiny little footprint.

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This was a video that was on European television last week

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showing the Spanish Minister of Industry driving

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this little vehicle, and when it's folded, it can spin.

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You don't need reverse. You don't need parallel parking.

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You just spin and go directly in. (Laughter)

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So we've been working with a company to

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commercialize this. My PhD student Ryan Chin presented

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these early ideas two years ago at a TEDx conference.

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So what's interesting is, then if you begin to add

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new things to it, like autonomy, you get out of the car,

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you park at your destination, you pat it on the butt,

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it goes and it parks itself, it charges itself,

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and you can get something like seven times

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as many vehicles in a given area as conventional cars,

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and we think this is the future. Actually we could do this today.

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It's not really a problem.

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We can combine shared use and folding and autonomy

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and we get something like 28 times the land utilization

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with that kind of strategy.

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One of our graduate students then says, well,

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how does a driverless car communicate with pedestrians?

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You have nobody to make eye contact with.

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You don't know if it's going to run you over.

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So he's developing strategies so the vehicle can

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communicate with pedestrians, so -- (Laughter)

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So the headlights are eyeballs, the pupils can dilate,

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we have directional audio, we can throw sound

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directly at people.

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What I love about this project is he solved a problem

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that hasn't, that doesn't exist yet, so -- (Laughter)

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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We also think that we can democratize access to bike lanes.

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You know, bike lanes are mostly used by young guys

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in stretchy pants, you know. So -- (Laughter)

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We think we can develop a vehicle that operates

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on bike lanes, accessible to elderly and disabled,

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women in skirts, businesspeople, and address the issues

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of energy congestion, mobility, aging and obesity

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simultaneously. That's our challenge.

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This is an early design for this little three-wheel,

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it's an electronic bike. You have to pedal

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to operate it in a bike lane, but if you're an older person,

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that's a switch. If you're a healthy person,

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you might have to work really hard to go fast.

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You can dial in 40 calories going into work

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and 500 going home, when you can take a shower.

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We hope to have that built this fall.

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Housing is another area where we can really improve.

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Mayor Menino in Boston says lack of affordable housing

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for young people is one of the biggest problems

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the city faces.

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Developers say, okay, we'll build little teeny apartments.

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People say, we don't really want to live in a little teeny

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conventional apartment.

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So we're saying let's build a standardized chassis,

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much like our car. Let's bring advanced technology

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into the apartment, technology-enabled infill,

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give people the tools within this open-loft chassis

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to go through a process of defining what their needs

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and values and activities are, and then

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a matching algorithm will match a unique assembly

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of integrated infill components, furniture, and cabinetry,

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that are personalized to that individual, and they give them

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the tools to go through the process and to refine it,

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and it's something like working with an architect,

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where the dialogue starts when you give an alternative

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to a person to react to.

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Now, the most interesting implementation of that for us

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is when you can begin to have robotic walls, so

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your space can convert from exercise to a workplace,

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if you run a virtual company.

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You have guests over, you have two guestrooms

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that are developed.

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You have a conventional one-bedroom arrangement

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when you need it. Maybe that's most of the time.

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You have a dinner party. The table folds out

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to fit 16 people in otherwise a conventional one-bedroom,

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or maybe you want a dance studio.

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I mean, architects have been thinking about these ideas

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for a long time. What we need to do now,

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develop things that can scale to those 300 million Chinese

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people that would like to live in the city,

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and very comfortably.

256
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We think we can make a very small apartment

257
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that functions as if it's twice as big

258
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by utilizing these strategies. I don't believe in smart homes.

259
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That's sort of a bogus concept.

260
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I think you have to build dumb homes

261
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and put smart stuff in it. (Laughter)

262
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And so we've been working on a chassis of the wall itself.

263
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You know, standardized platform with the motors

264
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and the battery when it operates, little solenoids

265
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that will lock it in place and get low-voltage power.

266
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We think this can all be standardized, and then people

267
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can personalize the stuff that goes into that wall,

268
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and like the car, we can integrate all kinds of sensing

269
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to be aware of human activity, so if there's a baby or

270
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a puppy in the way, you won't have a problem. (Laughter)

271
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So the developers say, well this is great. Okay,

272
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so if we have a conventional building,

273
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we have a fixed envelope, maybe we can put in 14 units.

274
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If they function as if they're twice as big,

275
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we can get 28 units in.

276
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That means twice as much parking, though.

277
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Parking's really expensive. It's about 70,000 dollars

278
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per space to build a conventional parking spot

279
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inside a building.

280
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So if you can have folding and autonomy,

281
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you can do that in one seventh of the space.

282
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That goes down to 10,000 dollars per car,

283
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just for the cost of the parking.

284
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You add shared use, and you can even go further.

285
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We can also integrate all kinds of advanced technology

286
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through this process. There's a path to market

287
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for innovative companies to bring technology into the home.

288
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In this case, a project we're doing with Siemens,

289
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we have sensors on all the furniture, all the infill,

290
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that understands where people are and what they're doing.

291
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Blue light is very efficient, so we have these tunable

292
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24-bit LED lighting fixtures.

293
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It recognizes where the person is, what they're doing,

294
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fills out the light when necessary to full spectrum white light,

295
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and saves maybe 30, 40 percent in energy consumption,

296
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we think, over even conventional state-of-the-art

297
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lighting systems.

298
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This just shows you the data that comes from the sensors

299
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that are embedded in the furniture.

300
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We don't really believe in cameras to do things in homes.

301
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We think these little wireless sensors are more effective.

302
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We think we can also personalize sunlight.

303
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That's sort of the ultimate personalization in some ways.

304
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So we, we've looked at articulating mirrors of the facade

305
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that can throw shafts of sunlight anywhere into the space,

306
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therefore allowing you to shade most of the glass

307
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on a hot day like today.

308
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In this case, she picks up her phone, she can map

309
00:14:47,403 --> 00:14:51,907
food preparation at the kitchen island to a particular

310
00:14:51,907 --> 00:14:55,390
location of sunlight. An algorithm will keep it in that location

311
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as long as she's engaged in that activity.

312
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This can be combined with LED lighting as well.

313
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We think workplaces should be shared.

314
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I mean, this is really the workplace of the future, I think.

315
00:15:07,020 --> 00:15:08,789
This is Starbucks, you know. (Laughter)

316
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Maybe a third — And you see everybody has their back

317
00:15:11,379 --> 00:15:13,863
to the wall and they have food and coffee down the way

318
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and they're in their own little personal bubble.

319
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We need shared spaces for interaction and collaboration.

320
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We're not doing a very good job with that.

321
00:15:22,291 --> 00:15:24,791
At the Cambridge Innovation Center, you can have

322
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shared desks. I've spent a lot of time in Finland

323
00:15:28,028 --> 00:15:30,800
at the design factory of Aalto University,

324
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where the they have a shared shop and shared Fablab,

325
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shared quiet spaces,

326
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electronics spaces,

327
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recreation places.

328
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We think ultimately all of this stuff can come together,

329
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a new model for mobility, a new model for housing,

330
00:15:47,046 --> 00:15:49,480
a new model for how we live and work,

331
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a path to market for advanced technologies,

332
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but in the end the main thing we need to focus on

333
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are people. Cities are all about people.

334
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They're places for people.

335
00:15:58,578 --> 00:16:00,941
There's no reason why we can't dramatically improve

336
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the livability and creativity of cities like they've done

337
00:16:03,989 --> 00:16:07,623
in Melbourne with the laneways while

338
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at the same time dramatically reducing CO2 and energy.

339
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It's a global imperative. We have to get this right.

340
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Thank you. (Applause)