Curate Urban Life in Future Cities

Abstract

"Life in More’s Utopia, as well as in most others, would be intolerably dull. Diversity is essential to happiness, and in Utopia, there is hardly any. This is a defect in all planned social systems, actual as well as imaginary.”  — Bertrand Russell, 1947. Looking through all the smart city systems that we have created, most of the projects focus on efficiency and control. They aim to "make the world a better place" by collecting, uploading, and transforming every piece of the information generated by the real world. However, humans' most important part of the city has received little attention in these projects. How can we bring more humanity and human touch to this data-driven urban system? In the debate about the utopia and dystopia future speculated by the smart cities system, the conceptualization of the two core concepts in this debate, efficiency, and humanity, has received little attention in smart city projects. I use multiple design solutions to create a balance of efficiency and humanity that could be applied to a smart city system. This thesis examines the effect of those projects on different dimensions of humanity. It maps different values that the system can serve with a guidebook, a systematic infrastructure, a manifesto, and several other design projects that apply to the smart city system for sustainable, delightful, and socially cohesive urban environments.