DIGITAL CITY

The fourth industrial revolution, in the digital / technological, and that is in progress will produce great shocks in social and economic activities, consequently, in the territory of the cities. The technological innovations of this new digital age, in terms of its global scale and its comprehensive form that advances in all walks of life, as well as its complexity and speed, will transform the spaces and life of humanity. And cities will be greatly impacted, as this is the privileged space where the main human activities are concentrated. Urban life will be affected in its sense of belonging and neighborhood, or living and living, when it no longer depends on physical proximity; but rather of a virtual community connected on a digital platform.

The city will be modified when the work is robotized and industrial plants no longer need large flows of workers moving between regions. Trade will not depend on spaces concentrating goods and people, as logistics systems and virtual experimentation of objects will allow everyone to join in a virtual market. The industry with the production of custom objects in 3D printers will be integrated spaces in the urban structure and no more immense factories in the peripheries. The autonomous vehicles will substantially change the urban mobility and the management of the streets and avenues, to the same extent that will change the concept of vehicle as individual patrimony.

 

The living spaces will be a mixture of living, working and leisure with the artificial intelligence and the internet of things. All these possibilities will bring about profound changes and ruptures in housing, production, work, consumption, leisure, transportation and logistics systems, that is, they will cause impacts and discontinuities in the functions and territory of cities. History shows that cities have had only three such large spatial ruptures. The first one, in its origin, when the walls defined a space of security and of the centralized administration, marking the difference with the activity of the field. The second, in the agricultural revolution, after the middle ages, where national states were forming, expanding and demarcating frontiers and allowing cities to extrapolate the walls and consolidate themselves as a territory of commerce and services. The third, in the industrial revolution, when the intensive process of urbanization, concomitant with the large industrial plants of scale production predominating in the territory, provoked intense and deep transformations in the cities.

 

The fourth break in the territory of cities is already approaching the new technological / digital revolution. Are the cities prepared to face the challenges of this new era? Can space be planned for activities in this new phase of humanity? Will the urban civilization be able to adapt its territory to this new digital / technological way of life?