Augmented Cities in the Neoanthropocene

Abstract

Contemporary cities could be considered vibrant organisms of places and communities, of data and information, of sensors and actuators, and of actions and reactions generated by people and environment both. Cities must be more responsive to our behavioral changes, enabling devices for enhancing our contemporary life. We would be able to build amore efficient urban environment, able to sense, to understand and to act every day and for everyone. In the post-city age and beyond the smart city, Augmented City is a new paradigm that perceives the demands of more networked, knowledge-based, and creative society that answers to the global change by a new circular metabolism. The Augmented City is a spatial/cultural/social/economic platform for enhancing our contemporary life, individual and collective, informal, and institutional, expanding the urban space generated by the effects of innovation. The Augmented City redefines dogmas of urbanism that we often thought of being more static and rule-based, recovering its prospective, incremental, responsive, and creative approach. We need to think, design, and manage cities more sentient, open source and intelligent, again productive, creative and based on recycle, cities resilient, fluid and reticular, and truly strategic. The Augmented City is not the city of the future, but it brings us in a different present.