Researcher in complex systems, robotics and artificial intelligence, Carlos Moreno is a pioneer and specialist of the Human Smart City, concept that he proposed in the form of the "living city", the "living city", and that he constantly promotes on the French and international scene. In a spirit of decompartmentalization, his career is at the crossroads of research, innovation and industry.
Researcher in complex systems, robotics and artificial intelligence, Carlos Moreno is a pioneer and specialist of the Human Smart City. Far from blind enthusiasm or total rejection, he builds a critique of the techno-centric and universalist smart city. He advocates a model based on consultation and co-construction. In this talk he also develops his vision of a new model of international governance, driven by a coalition of metropolises.
While the first real experiences of smart cities, dead on arrival for the most part, have been bottomless money pits, Carlos Moreno, a researcher in the fields of complex systems, robotics, and artificial intelligence, contrasts this notion with a new vision of the “living city.” While he is aware of the importance of digital tools in the design and evolution of the urban fabric, he nevertheless criticizes the techno-centric and universalist dimension of the smart city, which erases the place of the living and its interactions, literally generating dead cities. The living city seeks to understand the other and the way that it interacts with its socio-territorial-urban environment. Technological but first and foremost human, the living city advocates relationships and exchange to bring forth new ideas and practices. It is a creative ecosystem not dictated by the vertical nature of technology or of architecture, but based on metabolic exchanges and citizens’ re-appropriation based on a DIY approach.
Designing an inclusive city implies involving their residents in urban projects, but what is the role of architects and urban planners in this process? For Andrew Freear, the head of the Rural Studio program, they both have the ethical responsibility of getting locally involved via concrete projects. Architectural schools must thus take on training citizen architects by engaging them in learning by doing, and thus have them redevelop a deep connection with context and places, acting as neighbors and activists within communities in order to collectively carry out experimental projects that tangibly improve society and the environment.
The two Lebanese artists and filmmakers were awarded the 2017 Marcel Duchamp Award for Unconformities, a project currently on display at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. This artwork, like their approach, is based on a methodology of investigation and excavation and aims to offer another reading of history and the traces of the past.
Nicolas Nova is a social anthropologist. Inspired by New Media Studies and design fiction, he contends that the future of design lies in recycling and reparation as well as reinventing forms and functions. Did you know that a used flip-flop could serve as a lighter?
The geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque revisits the polysemic dimension of the term “milieu,” and explains the distinction made by mesology—“the area of biology that deals with the relationships between the environments and organisms”—between “environment” and “milieu.” The reality of things differs depending on the environment of each species or culture, the object doesn’t exist in itself but according to its relationship with the subject. In this way, mesology goes much further than the subject/object dualism of modern science. Ontologically “trajective,” the environment is neither objective nor subjective, but firmly between the two theoretical subject/object centers. Berque takes the term “mediance,” meaning the dynamic coupling of the individual and their surroundings, from the Japanese “fūdo,” to which he adds “trajection,” a process that results in the “mediance” of human existence in its concrete surroundings. Taken as a whole, all human environments, distinct from the biosphere through their eco-techno-symbolic dimension, form the ecumene. For architecture, this implies a respect for history and the environment, without mimicking ancient forms, creating from the “mediance” of each place.
Larissa Fassler is a “Neo-Situationist” artist. By exploring places over the course of many hours, she gleans their ephemeral essence, which she then superimposes on the fixed urban master plan. The subjective maps thus generated highlight both urban narratives and history.
Maximum is a design studio that maximizes the value of waste; its material, its form and its engineering. Some materials are transformed in a semi-industrial process while others give birth to unique pieces, such as the glass walls of the Centre Pompidou caterpillar.
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