Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Media x Design Lab
On-going doctoral research project.
While the rise of big urban data is proclaimed by the popular press and tech industry boosters as the beginning of a new era of efficient, clean and safe ‘smart cities’, the relevance of architecture and design to the future of the city has seemed usurped or left behind. Increasingly data have become a subject of urban studies, as food for a new industry of automated intelligences, or as a supposedly-pernicious epistemic unit undermining the humanist tradition.
As architects work to engage with data-driven urbanism, new methods of research and practice are being developed- my research deals partly with recording and evaluating these efforts. More fundamentally, however, architects must advocate for the value that design can bring to the city- how that value may exceed quantification, but also how it may be demonstrated or argued for within the framework of data-driven urbanism. An effort must be made to understand architecture not as an autonomous discipline, but as a humanist tradition of thought and practice embedded in a rapidly developing technological ecology. This embedded understanding of architecture recasts the architectural artefact as an intervention in the data-driven city.
