A34 OPINION
SG+50: Future Trends 2065
Smart people,
smart nation,
smart Singapore
Cars that drive themselves, trash that is tagged, your waste
analysed two researchers imagine a Singapore 50 years
from now, based on research that is already being tested here
Carlo Ratti and
& Matthew Claudel
For The Straits Times
In 50 years time, how do you see
the evolution of cities? the e-mail
began. Could I ask you to put on
your horizon-scanning goggles or
3D immersion, five-sense lenses?
With these bold questions, our
editor at The Straits Times invited
us to predict the future of
Singapore. Her e-mail continued
with more pointed inquiries about
the intersection of technology and
urban space the so-called smart
cities domain.
The questions (or provocations,
rather) suggested profound
transformations to the island
nation, from renewable energies to
drones, from transportation to
politics. Will there even be cities as
we know it, or just biopolis cities
within giant domes, with
everything climate controlled? Or
will cities polarised by inequality,
be broken up into capsule
climate-controlled biospheres?
Important questions indeed, as
we enter a new era of urban
transformation based on digital
technology. So, lets strap on our
horizon-scanning goggles and tune
them to 2065. By then, major
revolutions at the convergence of
the digital and physical world
revolutions that have already
begun today might be a reality.
This could drive transformations
in everything from mobility to
energy, water to waste
management and civic
engagement.
MOVING AHEAD
IN DRIVERLESS CARS
Among the plethora of possibilities,
we want to highlight three. The first
is in the realm of mobility.
Singapore has a long history of
innovation in the field of
transportation. It was a pioneer in
road pricing, when in the 1970s it
imposed an area licensing fee on
vehicles entering the city area. In
1998, it introduced Electronic Road
Pricing (ERP), which uses
advanced technology to scan cars
and charge drivers a fee based on
time and overall traffic demand.
ERP had a dramatic impact on
road congestion, inspiring similar
schemes around the world, from
Stockholm to London to Milan.
Since then, Singapore has been
focusing on the latest advances in
mobility, especially in self-driving
(or autonomous) cars. In 2014, the
Government convened a high-level
Committee for Autonomous Road
Transport for Singapore, known as
Carts one thing we can predict
with certainty is that the Singapore
of 2065 will be no less inclined
towards committees and
acronyms.
As we write this in mid-2015,
autonomous driving technology
has already matured to a point
where it can be tested and viably
implemented in real urban spaces.
Over the next years, the use of
driverless cars will transform the
environment, making transport
more efficient and sociable, as we
will be able to travel together in
shared autonomous vehicles, and
not in solo-driven cars.
A system of shared autonomous
cars might blur the distinction
between public and private
transport. Your car could drive
you to work in the morning and
then, rather than sit idle in a
parking lot, drive someone else to
run his errands.
Instead of being a family car, a
vehicle might be shared among a
neighbourhood, an office cluster or
even a shared social-media
community.
Two recent papers by the
Massachusetts Institute of
Technologys (MITs) Smart Future
Mobility team sought to model and
test this future of car sharing. They
show that in theory the
transportation demand of a large
city such as London, New York or
Singapore could be satisfied with
just one-fifth of the number of cars
in use today. Think of the possible
savings in road and parking space if
Singapore needs just 200,000 cars,
not one million, and the reduced
congestion and travel times. If
shared driverless cars become a
reality, by 2065, cities across the
planet will be able to reclaim much
of the space once used for parking.
Streets might be lined with public
spaces, mini-gardens or renewable
energy farms.
Former parking garages may
become co-working spaces or
fabrication platforms, ushering in
the impending third industrial
revolution (when mass
production is replaced by
customisation and local
production, something that could
replace 45 per cent of the jobs we
know today, according to
researchers at Oxford Universitys
Martin School).
WASTE ANALYTICS
Another area of transformation in
cities might be that of waste and
waste management.
Today, the global supply chain
has become incredibly
sophisticated globalised
manufacturing and assembly
means that products and
components zigzag across the face
of the planet, often separately,
before they are assembled and
finally land in a consumers hands.
While companies now track
components before assembly, not
much is known about what
happens to our trash what could
be called the removal chain.
Inspired by MITs recent Trash
Track project, we can imagine a
near future when every object is
tagged and tracked online.
Products could be traced across
their entire lifecycles. Think of your
mobile phone if its components
are tagged, it can be taken apart
after you upgrade to a new model,
and each component could then be
recycled or given a second life in a
different gadget.
Recycling might become almost
ubiquitous, as individual items are
processed and reused separately.
Furthermore, digital-biological
devices can give us great insight
into the health of entire urban
areas. Another MIT project called
Underworlds, for example, is
testing the integration of smart
monitors in an unexpected place
the sewers.
The smart sewage platform
collects and analyses biochemical
information from sewage water. A
broad array of human activity is
reflected in a citys waste water,
and a whole host of applications
can emerge from sampling and
sequencing sewage.
One early application could be
predicting infectious outbreaks
before symptoms arise. Early
warnings in urban centres can
significantly reduce a communitys
medical costs, save lives and help
prevent pandemics. Researchers
can study the way
non-communicable diseases
develop, as biomarkers for diseases
such as obesity and diabetes can be
measured and tracked.
FLUID WALLS
Even Singapores architecture may
begin to come alive in future.
Buildings today operate by
The SG+50: Future
Trends 2065 Essay
Series is supported by
Leading thinkers give their take on
trends that will shape Singapore for
the next 50 years each Monday in
The Straits Times Opinion pages.
The 20 essays will be compiled into a
book published by Straits Times Press.
approximation, satisfying the peak
demand rather than the actual
need, whether with lighting or
temperature or space.
For example, if one person is in a
room, the whole thing will be lit
and climate-controlled. A small
class of nine students will use the
same room as a class of 30. As our out in the future, particularly as
buildings become increasingly
digital, they will be able to better
respond to our behaviour.
To achieve this, architecture will
be more physically flexible: Think
of walls and ceilings and partitions
that fold and unfold. If buildings
are a kind of third skin after our
biological one and our clothing it
has been rigid for its entire history.
With better data, the built
environment can adapt to us: A
living, tailored architecture that is
moulded by its inhabitants.
Architecture could wrap itself
around us, based on our needs.
Future climate-control systems, for
example, will sense peoples
location and create personal
thermal zones of comfort.
Dynamic spaces could change in
size and configuration to suit
peoples needs, becoming a cafe, an
office or a movie theatre at
different times of the day.
For a city with such limited space
| THE STRAITS TIMES | MONDAY, AUGUST 10, 2015 |
as Singapore, blurring the specific
uses of architectural spaces will
allow for more value to be derived
from the same square footage.
Not only will built space be
responsive, it will also gather data.
This will be particularly relevant in
Singapore where the population is
quickly ageing.
With always-on monitors linked
directly to a hospital, patients can
be more free, living comfortably at
home while a remote doctor is
constantly on duty.
Shared, driverless cars. Trash
that is tracked and reveals disease
movement. Walls and buildings
that wrap around our needs.
These are all visions of future
urban life, but will they all come to
pass? The honest answer is no,
probably not. Our scenario of the
future in this essay is not based on
prediction, but on extrapolation
listening to the weak signals at the
cutting edge of technology today
and projecting how they might play
involve as many perspectives and
they interact with each other.
Driverless cars, for example, are
being tested on Singapores soil, as
are trash sensors, and work is
progressing on fluid architecture.
We take into account the
direction of progress today, as an
orienting vector for our ideas about
Singapore in 50 years. This gives us
some bearing, but it does not mean
that these ideas will come to life.
In the year 1900, the Boston
Globe newspaper ran a piece titled
Boston At The End Of The 20th
Century, a glistening portrait of the
future city. Author Thomas
Anderson imagined airships
floating gently over moving
sidewalks, and pneumatic delivery
of everything from newspapers to
food none became a reality.
Horizon-scanning goggles are
clouded by a simple fact: The most
important innovations tend to
happen by disruption ideas so
radical that they obscure the line of
sight from trends and
extrapolation. No one could have
predicted the discovery of the
Internet and its impact on our
society, for example. No matter
how we envision the city of the
future, it will certainly look
different.
To Singaporeans of 2065, reading
through The Straits Times archives,
will we seem as foolish as Thomas
Anderson? Perhaps, but this
endeavour is certainly not
pointless. By extrapolating and
imagining an urban future, we can
engage collectively in a discussion
about how our city should develop.
A Smart Nation to use the motto
coined last year by the Government
is as smart as its residents.
Together, we can decide what is
or is not desirable exploring
possible scenarios that will help us
transform the present.
If Alan Kays axiom is true the
best way to predict the future is to
invent it then it is important to
ideas and voices as we can. This
article might be completely
ridiculous, but some of the
discussion prompted by The Straits
Times could indeed be an
important step towards inventing
the Singapore of 2065.
stopinion@sph.com.sg
Carlo Ratti, an architect and
engineer, is based in Cambridge,
Turin, Singapore and London. He
directs the Senseable City Laboratory
at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) and heads the World
Economic Forums Global Agenda
Council on Future Cities. Matthew
Claudel, based in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, is a research fellow at
the Senseable City Laboratory. For
the past five years, they have been
part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for
Research and Technology research
initiative, where they work within the
Future of Urban Mobility group.