Carlo Ratti

Cities are 2% of the earth's crust, but they are 50% of the world's population. ”

Some trash is recycled, some is thrown away, some ends up where it shouldn't end up. ”

Phone networks can capture life on our planet. ”

The deployment of geolocating tags attached to ordinary garbage could paint a surprising picture of the waste management system, as trash is shipped throughout the country in a maze-like disposal process - as we saw in Seattle with our own Trash Track project. ”

The plastic bottle we're throwing away every day still stays there. And if we show that to people, then we can also promote some behavioral change. ”

Like a tracer running through the veins of the city, networks of air quality sensors attached to bikes can help measure an individual's exposure to pollution and draw a dynamic map of the urban air on a human scale, as in the case of the Copenhagen Wheel developed by new startup Superpedestrian. ”

The first autonomous cars date back to the late 20th century. But recent increases in sophistication and reductions in cost - reflected, for example, in cheap LIDAR systems, which can 'see' a street in 3D in a way similar to that of the human eye - are now bringing autonomous cars closer to the market. ”

As people talk, text and browse, telecommunication networks are capturing urban flows in real time and crystallizing them as Google's traffic congestion maps. ”

Makr Shakr aims to share this new potential - design-make-enjoy - with everyone in just a few minutes: the time taken to prepare a new cocktail. ”

We have this condition where digital technology is becoming increasingly smaller and distributed in the environment. In a certain sense, this is the first time ever we can describe a city in real time. ”