Hello, my name is Brian Boyer. I teach architecture here at the University of Michigan, and I'm also the director of our new bachelor of science and urban technology. In addition to my work at the university, I run a design studio called Dash Marshall in New York and Detroit where we focus on the future of cities. Imagine yourself on a warm September afternoon. The year is 1902, and you're enjoying a picnic in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park with friends. Often the background are the carriages that brought you and many others to the park. It's one year before the Ford Motor company sold its first model A, so those carriages are anything but horseless. 5,000 people in the park means 2,000 horses, maybe more. Now imagine what that smells like. In the 20th century, taking the horse out of the equation had as much of an impact on the experience of urban life as did introducing the motor vehicle itself. Streets were cleaned once and for all of manure, stables were slowly abandoned or converted into other uses, and the term hitching post became a quaint name for a bar rather than a functional element of the streetscape. The rise of the motor vehicle brought gas stations, road signage, parking lots and parking decks and even novelty attractions and road rage. It wasn't just the physical aspects of cities that changed when cars were introduced, the emotional, cultural and social experience of life in America and many other countries changed as well, thanks to the motor vehicle. Along the way, many neighborhoods and communities were destroyed in acts of so called urban renewal when highways were rammed through existing communities. In most cases, those highways were built for white suburban commuters and displaced communities of color, as was the case in Detroit. It took 60 years for cars to go from being the hot new technology to an expectation of everyday life in America. Now with automation seeping into nearly every make and model of vehicle, the era of automation is set to play out much quicker. Will it have as profound an impact on urban life as the era of motorization did? To explore this, let's ask two questions. What familiar places and experiences from the era of motorization will disappear as automation becomes the norm in cities? And what new types of places and experiences will come to define urban life in a city where autonomous technology is normal? These questions are explored thoroughly by Anthony M Townsend, author of Ghost Road Beyond the Driverless Car. My design studio Dash Marshall worked with Anthony to develop visualizations of the autonomous city. We created a handful of urban scenarios that are really thinking tools for what could be. Our studies were not based on a particular place, but instead use a somewhat generic idea of American urbanism at four different levels of density, from the busy downtown to the desolate hinterlands. For each area of the city, we first assumed that autonomous, mostly electrified hyper connected vehicles provide the majority of transit for people, goods, and services. So let's look at each image and highlight some of the details as we go. The urban core, the absolute densest part of the city. In places like this, there are people everywhere. They're supported by low cost, automated logistics, and residents are flocking to walkable, leafy neighborhoods, sidewalks are congested with robots scurrying to and fro. Figuring out how pedestrians safely coexist with robots will be as much of a challenge in the 21st century as it was to keep streets safe for pedestrians in the 20th century. Newer parking decks have been converted into apartments or other uses, and the ground plane gets tough to navigate. So air space starts to look attractive as a way to move goods in and out of buildings, ff not also people. Older buildings like this pink structure might be retrofit to introduce drone decks. New buildings could have drone ports built in from the start. If we go one ring out from the downtown core, you arrive to an area of general urban development. Anthony Townsend calls this the fulfillment zone in Ghost Road because he imagines this part of the city is where the massive robotic infrastructure needed to power the autonomous city will be located. The fulfillment zone cannibalizes warehouses, factories, shopping malls and other large floor plate lower buildings to make room for the massive amount of logistics needed to provide instant on demand gratification for food, shopping and services that residents have come to expect. New businesses like ghost kitchens thrive here. They have no dining room and instead serve up food to customers who order by app. This area is a boon for experimentation. Large room sized, autonomous vehicles might lumber into leftover parking lots and set up temporary outdoor bazaars or food courts. It'll be cheap and quick to set up shop, but equally as quick to abandon it. Amidst all of these residents facing attractions will be the background hum of driverless trucks, delivering containers of goods, then sorting and repacking those goods for final delivery by smaller autonomous vehicles. It's pure orchestrated chaos. Next are the suburban areas. The bottom half of this image shows a familiar road, heavy, low density suburbia where the homes are quaint and space far apart. The top half of the image imagines what happens when the mobility of suburbia changes here. The transit station connects people to downtown and the region. Near the station, dense residential developments of about four stories are the norm. Disused parking lots have become parks and green courtyards that bring nature into the city. In today's world. The best urban planners encourage development around transit connections such as bus or light rail, which is called transit oriented development. The idea is that people who live 1 to 2 miles from transit can walk or bike to the station and live a car free life electrified and autonomous scooters, bikes and personal mobility devices stretch that maybe 23 or five miles, meaning that the transit oriented development areas can expand their footprint as well and expand the density in the city. Finally, the rural lands beyond the edge of town. How will automation reshape these areas that are typically left out of visions of the autonomous city? The first thing we notice is energy infrastructure, It's everywhere, turbines, solar panels, other renewables are providing the massive amounts of electricity needed to keep America's fleet moving and now that junk and goods can be hauled over much longer distances at a low price, dirty and dangerous land uses are even further from the urban cores than they were during the 20th century farms, energy production and light industrial form a patchwork that extends well beyond the horizon. Zooming back out to see the four scenarios side by side. What I hope you can appreciate are the uncanny details of these images. You won't find any levitating buildings or other sci fi technology yet the world depicted here is very different from today in important ways. What should it feel like to spend an evening out in the city that is highly automated? What will honest labor mean? And where will it happen? How will cities relate to the natural environment when long distance mobility is cheaper and easier? How will gas stations, parking decks, parking lots, streets, sidewalks, rooftops and basements be repurposed by cities that need a fraction of the parking space. The urban outcomes of automation are anything but a given the introduction of automation to our streets, will put new demands upon city managers, block clubs, church groups, neighbors and more. That means shaping these outcomes will be the result of important and difficult work to be done by people like you.
