NCC Symposium, January 18-19, 2005, MIT. New Century Cities: Real Estate Value in a Digital World. Dennis Frenchman.

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1 NCC Symposium, January 18-19, 2005, MIT New Century Cities: Real Estate Value in a Digital World Dennis Frenchman (Opening Remarks) Let me add my welcome to MIT on behalf of the City Design and Development Group in the department of Urban Studies and Planning. We are delighted to be co-sponsors of this symposium on New Century Cities. We d like to begin this morning by sharing with you some viewpoints on New Century Cities I ll go first followed by Mike Joroff, and then we ll take a few moments to quickly introduce some of the cities, themselves. [1] For me, these projects are significant because they demonstrate the growing interrelationship between digital technology, real estate and design. Now, there have been many conferences on digital technology and society, but little discussion about its effects on the design, form and function of cities. I suppose this is understandable. Digital technology first made its impact on the realm of work in the 1980 s with the advent of the personal computer; in the 1990 s the internet opened this technology to the home where my teenage son now rules with his ipod and fantasy baseball league. Now, in the new century, is it emerging into the space between the home and the workplace [2] the streets, squares, parks, restaurants, shopping centers, meeting, and entertainment places where much of our civic and social life occurs. This third, urban realm is the wild frontier of the digital world -- less controllable, more challenging, yet incredibly enticing, because like the fabric of the physical city, it s the glue that binds together everything else. It is no wonder that companies like Samsung, HP, Intel, IBM, Cisco, and Ericson, along with many smaller companies here today, are working to develop the potentials of urban space. The best IT companies are doing more than chasing/making markets, they are working to create new cyber environments that blend the digital with the physical and are enabling relationships and activities that would be otherwise impossible to achieve. Likewise, cities here today -- Copenhagen, Helsinki, Seoul, Singapore, Zaragoza, Cannes, Belfast, and New York, Philadelphia and others -- are seeking to create new kinds of places that take advantage of these advances. They recognize the extraordinary potential to enhance community and livability, while making their cities more connected to the world and more competitive in the global market for IT companies and their workers. On the other hand, to date, the real estate industry has been largely missing from the action. Its ironic, because after all, developers must build most of this environment including, increasingly, the streets and public places. The Dennis Frenchman / MIT, January,

2 real estate firms here today are breaking the ice; moving into this new realm trying to figure out where the value is. MIT is a natural setting for these groups to get together, since we have leading programs in real estate, city design and media technology. Earlier this fall, getting ready for this symposium, we began to explore our common interests in a rather unique faculty-student research seminar (Let me explain -- at MIT that s code for saying that the students know more than the faculty). Anyway, in the seminar, we were astonished at the number and scale of projects and experiments mixing digital media, information, and place-making that are now unfolding around the globe. Currently, these efforts are disconnected. But as the process of innovation accelerates they will surely overlap and gel into a new vision of city design and development the New Century City. To kick off my end of the discussion this morning, let me share with you some glimpses of that vision, drawn from what we learned in the seminar, and the work of the people in this very audience. What will the New Century City be like? And how will it differ from today s world? Here are a few ideas: [3] First of all, in New Century Cities: there will be anywhere [4] The City of Philadelphia made an interesting announcement the other day that the whole town is going wireless. This means that you ll be able to fire up your laptop on Broad Street or Rittenhouse Square and download anything from anywhere. The same is happening in other cities: [5] In Lower Manhattan major public spaces already have wireless access, and we ve all seen those images of people networking on their laptops in a park. But its important to remember that in addition to providing access to the world, [6] wireless can also deliver information and services tailored specifically to where you are -- giving local history, or guiding you to a parking place, a point of interest, or your friend. This adds a different dimension to physical sites [7] that in the future will be valued not only by the old adage of location, location, location but also by their accessibility to, and visibility on the unwired system. [8] As digital landscapes evolve over time this is the wireless landscape of Cambridge, for example -- we expect the relationship to real estate to grow in subtlety and complexity creating new ways of using cities and changing their form. For example, look for work and learning to become less concentrated in specialized office buildings and schools and more distributed across the city. [9] This can been seen in New Century Cities like Singapore s One North and in [10] Crossroads Copenhagen, where workplaces are being combined with culture, recreation and amenities. Wireless could redistribute people in other profound ways. History Unwired and Ericson, for example, [11] are using broadband mobile phones to rescript the tourist experience in Venice, where 21 million people a year now mob the same Dennis Frenchman / MIT, January,

3 few sites, while the rest of the city is underutilized and declining. [12] History Unwired will enable visitors to explore Venice with a friend if you are an art lover, Peggy Guggenheim, perhaps who ll guide you to her [13] favorite restaurants and hidden spots, opening doors to private art collections, accommodations and services, based on your interests and time. This will vastly enhance the experience of visitors, but also spread them out in place and time, redistributing the economic benefits, and making more effective use of the city s real estate. [14] Secondly, in New Century Cities, everything will know everybody Wal-mart, the world s largest retailer, declared other day that it will require all the products it sells to be self identifying by [15] This will be made possible by the use of radio frequency ID tags, which once we all have them, will allow people and objects to know each other and to interact. This is very significant, because a lot of real estate is organized around sorting out people and things. Take the supermarket, for example say good-by to the checkout counter. You will simply put an item in the basket and be charged automatically. Or you ll pay just to enter certain spaces, like every car on every street that now enters central London. [16] This system has reduced congestion and pollution in the area by 30% accomplishing more at one stroke than all physical traffic improvements made over the past 25 years -- while generating income to support public transit and pedestrian improvements. Say good-by to toll booths, showing your passport, or getting into line for the movies. [17] RFID tags will blur the line between being in and out, between the private shop and the public street and create opportunities for building new markets and ways of valuing products and services. As they become ubiquitous, everyplace will be a potential sales point and the prices will vary depending on who you are and when you are there. This will transform the design and development of retail, restaurant, social and entertainment places. We see them melding together into a new kind of finer grained commercial experience more tailored to groups of patrons and their lifestyles. Look for new kinds of centers that mix culture with consumption more like the Greek agora than the Burlington Mall. [18] A wonderful example is TownFriends, a business proposition made by students at the Sloan School of Management that would use RFID tags to note when the resident of a community shops on its Main Street, building loyalty the old fashioned way, by giving them special deals and personalized service. It can also help to improve business districts, by assessing the costs to each store based on the number of local patrons. Perhaps this will allow real Main Streets to compete with the fake Main Streets now being developed in so-called lifestyle centers across the US. Dennis Frenchman / MIT, January,

4 [19] Thirdly in New Century Cities will have: just in time architecture As a physical asset, great value in real estate projects is tied up with their appearance. [20] What, then, do we make of the Lehman Building in New York, which changes its appearance from moment to moment? [21] As display technologies become cheaper and more versatile, they will bring the potential for programmable surfaces into many areas of our environment. This will transform architecture, making buildings more agile, not only in terms of their appearance, but also in terms of their use part of the activity, rather than a passive backdrop. We see the developer s role expanding from making fixed structures to also servicing the flow of information, scheduling, and the reimaging of properties and their spaces in time. From the street, [22] buildings and facilities will become a medium for advertising and public services, like Clear channel s digital street network in New York. But because individual displays can be accessed and coordinated, [23] they can also be a medium for public expression and a new civic art as suggested here in the Seoul Digital Media City. On the inside, digital display will enable more diverse and intensive use of space. [24] At MIT, the SENSEable City Lab has patented a see through wall surface that can be opaque, transparent, or carry text and images, (and the Japanese are hard at work on transparent circuitry). Such materials will allow a space to adapt quickly to different needs -- becoming at one moment a transparent café visible to the outdoors and the infinite corridor, and in another moment, an enclosed conference room with moving images and text on the walls. [25] Multiplied across an institution, or firm, we see the potential for programmable environments that can be remotely scheduled just in time for a changing array of uses. [26] Lastly, New Century Cities will be: more like nature We were all taught to think of our built environment as separate from nature. After all, buildings give light at night, heat in the winter, and they are square and solid, not complex and yielding. Digital technology is changing this conception, by enabling elements of the built environment to sense changes in their context and their users and to respond, acting less like a collection of fixed objects and more like natural systems. Sensing technology will have profound impacts on design. [27] At the level of the home, environments will more supportive for an aging population. Kent Larson s placelab here in Cambridge, for example, is an apartment that senses the function of its occupants, to enable research on home healthcare, work and entertainment. [28] At the level of the building, structures are becoming sensitive to the weather and the people inside, making them highly efficient in terms of energy consumption and use, like the breath taking Genzyme building a few Dennis Frenchman / MIT, January,

5 blocks from here which incorporates over 40,000 sensors. [29] And at the level of the city, a whole new generation of streets and street furniture will sense local conditions and adjust, like these street lights proposed for Seoul, that dim when there are no cars, change colors during a festival, provide shelter in the rain, or project information on buildings and sidewalks. And at all of these scales, new means of digital design and construction are allowing us to produce at lower cost, more complex and sensitive forms. What is so very interesting about these developments is that in the process the geometry of our built environment is transforming. [30] In the NCC seminar, we investigated the new buildings around MIT Gerry s Stata Center, Genzyme, Simmons Hall, and the new Media Lab, and made an interesting discovery: They are radically different from conventional buildings and actually look different from each other, but their underlying geometries have similar qualities: More like a sponge or a living tissue than the sterile form of typical modern buildings. Our hunch is that the old boxes are simply to confining for new mixes of use, and do not lend themselves to systems that sense and respond. [31] These are just a few examples of what is happening. Layer them one on top of another, and you can see the new third realm emerging neither public nor private, but highly permeable, where once isolated activities are melding into a complex new landscape that is both digital and physical. The potentials are dazzling, but also troubling. Those sensors that ease your shopping could also keep track of you. And they give rise to some difficult questions: Who will own, develop and manage this realm? And who should edit its content? Cities? Media companies? The real estate industry? Where will the value be created? And finally, who will benefit, and lose, in the New Century City? Dennis Frenchman / MIT, January,

New Century Cities: Real Estate, Digital Technology, and Design

11.947 CRE CDD DUSP Media Lab Joint Faculty-Student Seminar New Century Cities: Real Estate, Digital Technology, and Design Session 1 Course Logistics Calendar Date Session Opening Thoughts Sept. 15 1