What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions". ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at UABB 2019 to set up a discussion on how new technologies - and Artificial Intelligence in particular - might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, Politecnico di Torino, and SCUT. If you are interested in taking part in the exhibition at UABB 2019, submit your proposal to the “Eyes of the City” open call until May 31st, 2019: www.eyesofthecity.net
Urban development has intensified the development of a national landscape of energy production – a territory that could be called the ‘extraction infrastructure web’. This landscape exists out of sight; obfuscated by a complex distribution of corporate, government and environmental databases. The city benefits from the energy network, while averting its gaze from the social and environmental consequences of the flow of energy from the territories of extraction to the metropolis.
Energy has a contentious history in the American context. Its trajectory begins with the logging of the east coast forests, continuing to the mining of coal, the drilling for oil, the splitting of the atom, and the hydraulic fracturing of natural gas wells. Infrastructure has catalyzed this trajectory—new energy infrastructures are increasingly ‘one-way’ autonomous systems. This shift has devastated the communities that were historically sustained by reciprocal infrastructures, such as canals and railways, of the early energy eras. Autonomous systems coupled with automation have hindered the flow of resources from the city back into the communities that have paid the environmental price for energy. While these new efficient systems lower the cost of energy in the city, they also increase demand, intensifying the development of the extraction network and its effect across America.
