Voluntarily imprisoned: Prototype the future city

The city is in a throes of a gigantic transformation process, due to modernisation, globalisation, technological innovation, urbanisation, explosive population growth and climate change (Brotchie, Newton, Hall, & Nijkamp, n.d.; Cohen, 2006). Within a time of change, whereas technology integrates progressively in our lifestyle, and where man is increasingly designing its environment according towards its own needs – the development and future expansion of the city is becoming a challenge. This lead to the main problem statement: What is the new kind of future habitat that can respond to the socio-technological dimensions, recognising the uncertainties of the future? In order to answer the main problem statement, the project will start with a literature study, followed by a case-study / prototype design. The literature study consists of two part: 1) Starting with the technological revolution, the first part will try to reveal the changing dynamics ofthe socio-techno system (within the global urban context) and which consequences these changing dynamics has on our lifestyle and on a broader scope, 2) Secondly, the aim of literature study is to expose the spatial implications of this socio-techno transformation on the urban structure of the global city. Firstly, we have seen that technology is a part of growth, acceleration and the expansion of the city. Technology has facilitated us with increased speed and a more inclusive network ever seen. Users of this network, supported by communication and information technologies, become singular nodes, isolated but connected through screens and the virtual world. For those connected to the network, the concept of time and place changes entirely. The connected urban population is not just bound together by the physical infrastructure of a city anymore, but starts to merge with it, annihilating time, and killing distance. In order to protect oneself, from the increase in physical and informational speed, man will increasingly has the need to withdrawal in capsules. Blind to the outside world, the capsular civilisation is one of dualization of segregation of exploitation and exclusion resulting in an implosion of the polis of the common (Barney, 2013; ManuelCastells, 2000; Cauter, 2004, 2012; Graham & Marvin, 2002). Secondly, we have tried to reveal what spatial (in the urban and architectural realm) consequences this capsular society brings forth. We have distinguished five mechanism of capsularity: decentralisation, fragmentation, isolation, privatisation and simulation. Together these characteristics will increasingly lead to the encapsulation of the urban and architectural realm. The future city will not just be a collectives, but rather a multiplicity of entities with their own sociality, character, and own rights (Manuel Castells, 2000; Cauter, 2004; Neil. A, 2018). The coming age can be defined as an age of disintegration, gated communities are the urban and architectural models that give shape to this order: an inside world of privatised publicness versus a chaotic, unsafe and uncontrollable outside world. We become voluntarily prisoners (Cauter, 2012; Davis, n.d.; Eckardt, 2017).Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences | Explorela