Blue City is a transdisciplinary project aiming at modelling and simulating a city’s multi-layered, interconnected network of flows (from the flow of energy, materials, waste, water, nature, human and non-humans, vehicles, to large networks with numerous interconnected infrastructure and subsystems).
ABOUT THE BLUE CITY PROJECT
The Blue City Project is an Innosuisse Flagship Project led by Professor Jeffrey Huang of the Media x Design Laboratory (LDM).
The goal of the project is to map multi-layered, interconnected networks of urban flows in the living lab of Lausanne, thus exploring the possibilities of open digital twin platforms for proactive urban planning, supported by visualization, data science, and artificial intelligence.
Cities are home to most of the world’s population, and major contributors to planetary issues ranging from pollution, social inequity and loss of biodiversity, to overarching problems such as the climate crisis and ecological collapse. It is estimated that 90% of COVID-19 cases occurred in urban areas, further showing drastic structural shifts in society, and a lack of digital, data-driven tools for effective response in planning today’s cities. The Blue City Project is a transdisciplinary project aiming at modelling and simulating a city’s multi-layered, interconnected network of flows (from the flow of energy, materials, waste, water, nature, human and non-humans, vehicles, to large networks with numerous interconnected infrastructure and subsystems). Funded by an Innosuisse Flagship Grant and led by Prof. Jeffrey Huang of the EPFL Media x Design Laboratory (LDM), the project involves research partners from EPF Lausanne, ETH Zurich, HES.SO Sion and SUPSI, as well as nine implementation partners across multiple industries, all committed to a common goal of building better cities. The goal of this transdisciplinary consortium will be to develop tools for diagnosing the interconnected networks of flows in cities, using Lausanne as a Living Lab, while exploring the concept of urban digital twins to assist planning in the digitally-transformed, post-pandemic world. In a second stage, artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies will be implemented for generating new insights and predictions about city structures and flows, assisting the ultimate goal of improving urban well-being, ecological value (decarbonization), biodiversity, and the agency of citizens.
ABOUT THE BLUE CITY CONSORTIUM
The Blue City consortium is a combination of more localized and nationwide actors, all invested in the development of digitalization to assist proactive planning of future cities.
The consortium involves research partners from EPFL, ETHZ, HES.SO Sion and SUPSI and nine implementation partners from industry.
Beyond new insights into the complex flows and their interconnections, the subproject constituting this flagship projects will address timely and important real-world challenges supplied by the consortium’s actors; including environmental and urban well-being concerns relating to climate change, air pollution, noise pollution, mobility, epidemic challenges, and ultimately, enabling new planning policies for comfort, resilience, and sustainability. The Blue City Project will use the city of Lausanne as a living laboratory, given the accessibility to stakeholders, datasets, and its prototypical, generalizable characteristics (typical mid-sized Swiss city, transportation nexus of the region, cultural institutions, multi-modal transport network, etc.). The project’s systemic approach will, first and foremost, bring new information, technologies, methodologies, and business opportunities to the main stakeholders. Larger actors will not only gain insights on new tools and technologies to integrate into their value chain, but offer more informative and appropriate solutions to the end-users, or citizens. The planned openness of the platform will, in itself, offer many perks to the overall Swiss economy, society and environment, as it will lay a fertile playing field for both established entities, as well as spin offs and startups to engage with. Socioeconomic and environmental impact has the potential to be felt throughout the country. Finally, the Blue City Project will directly respond to multiple sub-goals of the overarching point 11, “Sustainable Cities and Communities“ of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
form and flow
The Blue City project reimagines the very essence of the city, marking a paradigmatic shift from a static appreciation of what a city "is" to a dynamic exploration of what a city "does." It's a transformation from a city defined by its static forms—its edifices, monuments, and designed spaces—to one understood through its agency: the currents of life that animate it, breaking away from traditional hierarchies to explore the multidimensional interrelations that cut across structures, forming a meshwork of connections [1].
In shifting from form to flow, the Blue City unravels the urban fabric to reveal the capillaries of connection that underlie its morphology [2]. It is a pivot toward the intricate networks of circulation—the movement of people, the exchange of goods, the pulse of data, the distribution of resources—that form the true musculature of the urban organism. This approach diverts us from the fixed images of the city to immerse us in the invisible yet integral systems that dictate urban life, the subtle yet pervasive systems of biopolitics [3].
By focusing on the flows, Blue City proposes a vision that sees the city not as a collection of volumes but as a constellation of interconnections, a tapestry woven not just from the threads of the present but also from the sinews of temporal progression [4]. It recognizes that cities are not static entities but rather, are in constant flux—becoming rather than being. This ontological shift transcends spatial boundaries, integrating the temporal dimension into the urban narrative. It redefines the city as a temporal phenomenon, a living entity that is mapped not just through its physical coordinates but also through its evolving rhythms and rates of change [5].
With Blue City, we no longer just catalog the concrete but interrogate the currents of change. The city emerges as a living process, a space-time continuum that evolves, adapts, and flows.
[1] Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
[2] Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering urbanism: Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Routledge.
[3] Foucault, M. (2008). The Birth of Biopolitics: Michel Foucault's Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6), 109-133.
[4] May, J., & Thrift, N. (Eds.). (2001). Timespace: Geographies of temporality. Routledge.
[5] Hillier, B. (1996). Space is the machine: A configurational theory of architecture. Cambridge University Press.
URGENCY
Facing the imperatives of the ecological crisis, our planet stands at a precipice. Amidst this critical juncture, cities, the sprawling urban tapestries that house more than half of the global population, emerge as the central actors, producing an estimated 60-80% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Their profound footprint has inadvertently positioned them as significant contributors to the overarching climate narrative, playing a pivotal, often antagonistic, role in exacerbating the crisis. [2]
At the heart of our environmental dialogue are moments of acute pain—those cataclysmic events that captivate headlines and rattle our consciousness: devastating hurricanes, uncontrollable wildfires, sweeping floods. [3] These are the sirens of our time, evoking a sense of immediacy and necessitating swift action. They're the jolting electric shocks, the searing sensations that command our physiological and emotional response.
Yet, while the acute moments seduce our attention with their immediacy and vividness, the chronic pains—those silent, pervasive changes—become absorbed into the daily fabric of our lives, often unnoticed. It's the relentless rise of sea levels, millimeter by millimeter; it's the glaciers, receding drip by drip, becoming silent testimonies of a world transformed. This chronic narrative, though less visible, forms the backbone of our environmental challenges. [4] It's the disquieting foundation underlying the spectacular facade of acute crises.
To genuinely address our ecological predicament, we must shift our gaze. Reconceptualizing urgency requires an architectural reconfiguration of attention: one that transitions from responding to dramatic events to initiating sustained, adaptive interventions. It's time we move beyond mere crisis management. This journey calls for an existential redesign—a deep engagement with the chronic 'pain'. We need a paradigm shift that transcends alleviating symptoms and delves into rectifying the very systems that birth them. Our planet, our cities, and our future depend on it.
[1] Seto, K. C., Dhakal, S., Bigio, A., Blanco, H., Delgado, et al. (2014). Human settlements, infrastructure, and spatial planning. In Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.
[2] Steffen, W., Crutzen, P. J., & McNeill, J. R. (2007). The Anthropocene: Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature. Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment, 36(8), 614-621.
[3] Emanuel, K. (2017). Assessing the present and future probability of Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(48), 12681-12684.
[4] Church, J. A., & White, N. J. (2011). Sea-level rise from the late 19th to the early 21st century. Surveys in Geophysics, 32(4-5), 585-602.
PLATFORMS
Drawing parallels to a real-time theatre, Blue City isn't merely a static stage. It's a hyper-responsive platform pulsating with the collective intelligence of AI algorithms, live participants, and a thriving collaborative nexus. Industry partners, city officials, and academic research laboratories coalesce, crafting a dynamic where data isn't merely accumulated; it transforms, it metastasizes, morphing into informed decisions that shape the city's future.
This seamless integration of minds and machines allows strategies to spawn spontaneously, giving life to an urban environment where every facet—the bustling roads, the humming power grids, and the vibrant tapestry of its inhabitants—resonates with an anticipatory intelligence. This is a city that transcends traditional observation—a city that feels, reacts, and evolves.
Central to this vision are spaces and innovative platforms that foster distributed collaboration. The Blue City Room emerges as a physical/digital agora for collective urban analysis and decision-making—a think tank where decentralized discussions challenge the norms, breaking silos and forging new pathways. Parallelly, the Blue City Store emerges as a digital marketplace, a hub that champions the transparent exchange of urban data and diagnostic tools, democratizing access and spurring shared growth.
Blue City aims to inaugurate a new taxonomy of city-making, one where adaptability doesn't just coexist with planning, but usurps it.
Welcome to the city that never sleeps, but dreams—with its eyes wide open.
DIAGNOSIS TOOL
In addressing the intricate labyrinth of today's urban challenges, it becomes evident that traditional diagnostic tools have reached their limitations. The city, with its myriad layers, pulses, and rhythms, cannot be discerned merely through static metrics or one-dimensional measures such as carbon footprints. The rapid pace and transient nature of urban flows demand a continuous, real-time diagnostic approach. [1]
Current urban diagnostics, compared to medical practices, resemble a cursory skin check. Such superficial examinations, focusing solely on a city's visible exterior, fail to capture the dynamic interplay of its internal flows and mechanisms. [2] It neglects the essence of the city as a multifaceted living organism, thriving and evolving through its interwoven systems. [3] Analogous to the medical world, where a physician employs an array of diagnostic tools—from X-rays to blood tests, from CT scans to genetic profiling—to holistically understand the human body, urban diagnostics necessitates similar “deeper” tools.
The Blue City project seeks to revolutionize city diagnosis. Venturing beyond traditional mapping and indexing, which only capture the city's skeletal framework, the project dives deep into the city's vascular systems. It investigates utilities and infrastructures, the conduits that sustain urban life, and examines the city's pulsating flow—of human capital, of goods and services, of knowledge and culture. It assesses the city's metabolic rate, gauging both its resource consumption and waste production, offering a comprehensive urban health check.
Combining generative AI and spatial analytics into “generative spatial AI,” Blue City addresses the critical challenges in city diagnosis on an unprecedented scale.[4] Through generative spatial AI, gaps in city data can be impartially completed, urban flows in new and previously inaccessible locations estimated, and the trajectories of these flows predicted, as they shape the future urban landscape.
[1] Virilio, P. (1999). Polar Inertia. Sage.
[2] Batty, M. (2013). The New Science of Cities. MIT Press.
[3] Portugali, J. (2011). Complexity, Cognition and the City. Springer.
[4] Huang, J., and Keel, P., (2023). Generative Spatial AI. White Paper. http://generativespatialai.com.
