As an update to this Friday Five post, two more interesting links about the future of cities:

Lagos La Vida Loca

Lagos La Vida Loca is a 15-minute video by Current TV about Lagos, Nigeria which provides a graphic glimpse into life in the one of the world’s largest megacities. In 1950 Lagos was home to 300,000 people; today it is the world’s largest megacity with somewhere between 12 - 20 million residents (there are no official population statistics) and an estimated 6,000 people arriving every day.  Often dubbed the “New York of Africa” Lagos provides a glimpse into the future when by the year 2030 two of every three people on the planet will live in an urban environment.  If you want to know what the future looks like, watch this.

Hub2 - Virtual Urban Design

One of the more interesting questions about the future of cities is where (and how) virtual worlds and real worlds will intersect.  I recently met up with Emerson College professor Eric Gordon to talk about the future of urban design and what role virtual worlds will play in it. Gordon is the co-brainchild of Hub2, a project that’s using Second Life to help Boston residents to articulate visions of public spaces.  Earlier this year Gordon’s students created 3D immersive models of Boston’s Government Center, an urban space that is the absolute epitome of soulless city architecture.  (note: the above screen shot is from the press event where Boston’s Mayor Tom Menino received the keys to the virtual city).

The prototypes are the test case of a methodology Gordon’s calls “rapid urban prototyping”.  Traditional urban planning is two-dimensional and cumbersome at best: intelligible blue-prints are drawn up, groups respond to them, plans are redrawn again.  Gordon’s idea is to use virtual worlds as a platform to allow community stakeholders to interact in real time to collaboratively design an urban space.  Using a virtual world space as a blank canvass, for example, a community wishing to design a park can bring together planners, architects, engineers and citizens to decide how the park should be laid out simply by moving around virtual objects - a swing set, some benches, a water fountain. The three-dimensional virtual space not only creates  an enhanced sense of the design options, but also should also significantly reduce planning time and costs.   Read more about Gordon’s work on his blog, The Place of Social Media.

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