Responsive Cities ~ Emergent Urban Innovations

My colleague Kent Larson and I are running an informal MIT survey seminar on Responsive Cities this Spring 2009. Our focus is on six themes of emergent urban innovation:

1. New Model for Transportation -- February 10th -- How can city design, new vehicle concepts, and technology enable more responsive personal and mass transportation?
2. Digital Cities -- February 17th -- How can personal technology, sensing, urban-scale media, and just-in-time information foster community, sustainability, and a better life-balance?
3. Live-Work -- February 24th -- How can the city plan, architecture, transportation systems, technology, and services support a changing pattern of 24-hour distributed work, virtual offices, live-work environments, etc.?
4. Distributed/Centralized Energy -- March 3rd -- How can we design for both distributed and centralized energy? How can heating, cooling, and electrical loads be dramatically reduced through design innovation and technology?
5. The Code of Creative Cities -- March 10th -- How can codes, zoning, and master plans allow for change and enable bottom-up innovation? And...
6. New Model for Building Design, Fabrication, and Technology Integration -- Mar 17th -- How can mass-customization, disentangled systems, off-site fabrication, and information technology enable agile, adaptable, high-performance, responsive housing?

We challenge our students to explore the design, commercial and cultural consequences of emergent urban innovations across several levels of analysis from individual artifacts through urban plan.