Future of a City. Era of the Digital Renaissance

Digital Renaissance resurrects lost harmony between nature and culture, feeling of community and mutuality in a city; reinvents how city spaces should be inhabited and explored in the future; reimagines the way of how people should percept themselves in the mixed reality; and reestablishes the safety boundaries for technological boost.

With the virtual reality gaming technologies, which lead both children and adults far-far away from the actual reality; with the internet of things, which could totally blur the “distance” notion; with the expected rise of the artificial intelligence, which can calculate merely anything better than a human – how could we, architects, be so confident that the architecture would still lay in a field of mortar or bricks? Virtuality is everywhere and nowhere. Powerful technology is also a powerful weapon; in order to be able to maintain human existence technological singularity must come along with the “cultural singularity”. The aim of the project was not only to architecturally classify and comprehend digital technologies, but also build a strategic vision to the future city, executed by respecting current and future problems and speculating on the augmented spaces in the city. In the thesis research the new city ecosystem was expressed where the polylog of human, nature, society, machine and information happens. Author’s concept is the transformation of a “smart” city to a “mindful” city. Absolute communication and coordination turns a city to a super-organism. Anything recently died becomes a source for a new thing. A city realizes which fabrics does it require at the moment, and rams them up. Alive city introduces new creatures – digital citizens, who maintain the whole urboecosystem. Healthy environment provides citizens with the best food, water, air, lifestyle and mental comfort. Production is spread and ubiquitous, yet at the same time localized and personalized. Labor equals education, equals artistic activity and equals entertainment. Space in a city acts a creative thought catalyst. With the augmented reality technologies a digital modeling of real physical laws, glowing, refraction, tactile feelings, smells reach the highest excellence level. On the other side, virtual objects may contradict to perspective laws or gravitation. Moreover, it is possible to work and interact with that wonder-space. The era of Digital Renaissance is starting.