AUDI, quit driving through my mind!

Okay Okay, I know it’s an daft advert for AUDI but I can’t stop thinking how absurd this exhibition is.

Designed by handsome pants and co BIG Architects, Kollision and Schmidhuber & Partner for the Miami Design Week. The entry in the Urban Future Concept Awards back in November sets out to illustrate the cities of the future. Cities covered in sensors and lights providing a bombardment on information at all times.

I find this so compelling, not because of the concept itself, but why this concept exists at all.

Yes, I can see that this new ideal driverless car loaded with sensors could probably drive top speed through a park of insane kids playing shinty without total carnage but come on now, it’s unlikely we’ll be getting rid of a strategy that has physically shaped our cites for hundreds of years.

Granted the idea of eliminating boundaries and handing the public realm back to the public is not a new idea -my mind flashes up the cityscapes of Frank Llyod White, the sky awash with funny wee personal helicopters.  What’s interesting is that instead of actually taking back the city in the sense of eliminating the need for boundaries, i.e eliminating the danger of cars, the proposal here is to make the city more ambiguous.  Just keep everything that is existing in the city but get rid of the physical constraints surrounding it all, which sounds kinda scary.

I totally admit that this looks on paper a really lovely idea. A free for all where I can walk to where ever I like without walkways shepherding me and really embrace the expanse of the city to the maximum.  It would all be great until I get hit by a tram because, let’s face it, the barriers on the side of the pavements are to prevent people wondering out in to the road and killing themselves or at least slightly traumatizing a vehicle owner. 

The funny thing is that I feel like I’m in the box here, but I’m a child of the form for function school. Streets for traffic have shaped the form of our cities for thousands of years. It has been implemented and maintained over this time to allow the city to function at its best. Not that I’m adverse to new things, just show me something not so blue sky it’s in the stratosphere.