6/9/2015 Global Strategic Foresight Community - Reports - World Economic Forum

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Global Strategic Foresight Community

CONTENTS
 Cities and Urbanization Electronics Engineering and Construction Infrastructure
Science and Technology

Ambient Technology in Cities

The Impact of Ambient Intelligence on the Urban Landscape

Chris Luebkeman, Arup Group Ltd

The emergence of so-called ambient intelligence – electronic environments that are sensitive and
responsive to the presence of people – is now providing unprecedented means to understand the city at
the unit scale. Soon buildings will “talk” to each other and the outside world, knowing where they are
geographically, aggregating news, understanding issues of the day. This will allow us to coordinate city
functions and eliminate inefficiencies to allow large metropolises to thrive in a resource-constrained
future. While there is potential risk in wide accessibility to such information, we can protect ourselves by
understanding the systematic interactions in the networks we configure. In this way, we will advance
towards a society in which embedded knowledge revolutionizes our collective wisdom.
 

Any planner worth his or her salt will tell you that they have no idea how a city Share this page:

really works. This is because there is little hard data about how any city, or the
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collection of systems that aggregate to create it, works at steady state over an
extended period of time. To date, the capability to measure and sense what is
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really going on has been very coarse, at best. Yet, the emergence of ambient
intelligence is now providing unprecedented means to understand the city at
the unit scale; its impact on the way we understand how the city and its
components actually work represents a fundamental shift.  Author

Few trends are having or will have as profound an impact on the built environment,
and by extension on every citizen of the urbanized world, as ambient intelligence.
This term was coined in the late 1990s to describe electronic environments that are
sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. The implications of the notion
that an environment is not only aware of “me”, but also what “I” want and need, is
quite horrifying to many, but thrilling to others. All that is required for this vision to  
become a reality is a mesh of sensors and information; ready or not, the Chris Luebkeman
fundamental components of ambient intelligence are already being built in many Global Director, Foresight,
parts of the world.  Research and Innovation, Arup
Group Ltd

Today, for example, we can make a window that “knows” where it is, i.e. what city
it exists in, what street it is on and which houses are around it. It can know what is
Disclaimer
good for it: whether it needs a frame or needs cleaning, whether at a given moment
All opinions expressed herein are those
it should be clear or opaque. The owners of the building such a window is in can, of the authors. The World Economic
Forum provides an independent and
through monitoring similar “smart” appliances featuring this kind of imbedded impartial platform dedicated to
generating debate around the key
intelligence, have access to data that allow them to understand virtually all of the topics that shape global, regional and

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6/9/2015 Global Strategic Foresight Community - Reports - World Economic Forum
industry agendas.
elements affecting the entire structure. And to make and act upon decisions based
on information aggregated into knowledge.
Highlight
So, can you imagine if your home could vote? Think about what this would mean. It
would mean that your home could communicate with the outside world. It would How smart will smart buildings

mean that it could aggregate the news, parse it and understand the issues of the become? Imagine if your

day. It would mean that your home would need a secure digital identity. It would home could vote

mean that it would need to know where it was geographically so that it could
identify what issues were important to the structure itself and those who occupy it.
Within the next three to five years, we can anticipate that buildings will “talk” to
each other and the outside world in just such a manner, facilitating the kinds of
data collection and systematic interaction that will revolutionize whole cities.

Highlight

Ambient intelligence: an
unprecedented means to
understand cities

Taken to the city level, these developments in ambient intelligence have far-
reaching implications for tomorrow’s resource-constrained societies.

In a future world of perhaps as many as 13 billion people, where megacities have

become the norm, a deep understanding of how a city functions at a granular level
can make it all work. When do people actually go to work? What routes do they
take? What are their energy usage tendencies? We will be able to see and
understand heat flows, cash flows, inhabitation trends, etc., that can then all be
coordinated to eliminate inefficiencies and allow large metropolises to thrive.

If all goes well then the information provided by society will become the driver of a
profound new asset for designers and urban planners. Ambient intelligence has the
potential to invert the process so that design becomes performance-based rather
than form-based. This change, along with infinite computing power and infinite
memory, will enable tools that are easily accessible to all that have embedded
parametric models within them to be accessed by just about anyone. This
metamorphosis will democratize design in the same way that digital tools have
democratized accounting. 

These new tools will be able to reflect the real-time and/or actual behaviour of the
elements. They will be able to update their performance parameters to adjust to the
demands which climate change is bringing to the built environment. And citizen
designers will be empowered to respond. 

Pure fantasy? Well, if you think about it, comparable achievements are already
here and happening on smartphones. Thus it is not a matter of if, but when
ambiently intelligent systems will begin to coalesce.

There is a potential dark side to all of this, too: if all of the information aggregated
by these systems is widely accessible, then it is also both potentially corruptible
and susceptible to malfeasance. We must protect ourselves by thoroughly
understanding the systematic interactions in the networks we configure, thereby
allowing us to make them more resilient. 

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6/9/2015 Global Strategic Foresight Community - Reports - World Economic Forum
Through what we might call “google-ization”, as a society we have ready access to
information. When information can be challenged and parsed to find patterns, then
we have knowledge. Making sense of the knowledge is what gives us
understanding. The revolutionary shift currently taking place is that toolmakers are
now making tools with knowledge imbedded. In the very near future, such
understanding stands to revolutionize our collective wisdom.

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