Our current smart society, where problems and frictions are smoothed out with smart, often invisible technology like AI and smart sensors, calls for designers who unravel and open the smart fabric. Societies are not malleable, and moreover, a smooth society without rough edges is neither desirable nor livable. In this paper we argue for designing friction to enhance a more nuanced debate of smart cities in which conflicting values are better expressed. Based on our experiences with the Moral Design Game, an adversarial design activity, we came to understand the value of creating tangible vessels to highlight conflict and dipartite feelings surrounding smart cities.
LINK
The World Health Organization (WHO) strives to assist and inspire cities to become more ‘age-friendly’ through the Global Age-Friendly Cities Guide. An age-friendly city offers a supportive environment that enables residents to grow older actively within their families, neighbourhoods and civil society, and offers extensive opportunities for their participation in the community. In the attempts to make cities age-friendly, ageism may interact with these developments. The goal of this study was to investigate the extent to which features of age-friendly cities, both facilitators and hindrances, are visible in the city scape of the Dutch municipalities of The Hague and Zoetermeer and whether or not ageism is manifested explicitly or implicitly. A qualitative photoproduction study based on the Checklist of Essential Features of Age-Friendly Cities was conducted in five neighbourhoods. Both municipalities have a large number of visual age-friendly features, which are manifested in five domains of the WHO model, namely Communication and information; Housing; Transportation; Community support and health services; and Outdoor spaces and buildings. Age-stereotypes, both positive and negative, can be observed in the domain of Communication and information, especially in the depiction of third agers as winners. At the same time, older people and age-friendly features are very visible in the cityscapes of both municipalities, and this is a positive expression of the changing demographics. Original article at Sage: https://doi.org/10.1177/1420326X19857216
MULTIFILE
Due to climate change the frequency of extreme precipitation increases. To reduce the risk of damage by flooding, municipalities will need to retrofit urban areas in a climate-resilient way. To justify this investment, they need insight in possibilities and costs of climate-resilient urban street designs. This chapter focused on how to retrofit characteristic (Dutch) typologies of urban residential areas. For ten cases alternative street layouts were designed with a determination of the life cycle costs and benefits. All designs are resilient to extreme rain events. The results show that most flat urban typologies can easily be retrofitted in a climate-resilient way without additional costs compared to the standard way of retrofitting. Climate proofing sloping areas are highly dependent on the situation downstream. When there is no space downstream to divert the water into waterways or parks, costs to provide storage easily rise above traditional levels for retrofitting. In addition to reducing flood risk, for each case one variant includes resilience to extreme heat events making use of green. The life cycle costs and benefits of the green variants showed that especially green designs in high-density urban areas result in a better value for money.
MULTIFILE
