Autonomous Urbanism: Towards a New Transitopia

This lecture launches the newly published book monograph Autonomous Urbanism: Towards a New Transitopia (AR+D, 2024), authored by New York Tech Assistant Professor Evan Shieh.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are appearing on our roads, representing the next technological disruption to our mobility systems. While their long-term spatial implications remain largely underestimated, this book argues that AVs offer a major opportunity to rethink our city’s built environments – with profound implications on urban life since automobiles replaced horse-powered travel and changed the design of cities in the prior century. However, driverless vehicles also risk reinforcing many of the negative effects of auto-based urbanism including urban sprawl, single-function infrastructure, congestion, and environmental degradation. Instead, this book proposes a driverless mobility paradigm shift that moves cities away from automobile dependency towards automated mass transit and mobility-as-a-service.

In this two-volume set, one book depicts the narrative experience of this future city through the format of an architectural graphic novel. The other lays the framework for that speculative future, grounding it in urban mobility history, transportation policies, and multi-scalar spatial typologies. By envisioning this future guided by design and policy actions, this book contends that cities can transition from the Autopias of today, to the Transitopias of tomorrow. This is a big shift. Are cities and their inhabitants ready?

Introduction

Maria Perbellini

Dean of The School of Architecture and Design

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Moderation

Marcella del Signore

Associate Professor

School of Architecture and Design

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Speaker

Evan Shieh

Teaching Assistant Professor

School of Architecture and Design

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Design Series: WORLDS UN/DESIGNED: Unscripted, Atypical, Unnatural, and Uncontrolled

Conventions have insistently shaped the practices of design and architecture. Design norms – planning conventions, material classifications, graphic standards, or accepted ideas of spatial experiences – attest to the ways designers approach world-building. Design norms often reveal a reliance on typified and naturalized views of spaces, systems, bodies, materials, and built environments that invariably foreclose more inclusive and progressive paradigms for our collective futures.

The SoAD AY 24-25 lecture and event series, Worlds Un/Designed seeks to deconstruct conventions in design, architecture, and urbanism by challenging typical stereotypes in design practices, urban systems, technological dependencies, gender and abilities, conceptions of natural and unnatural, and the blurring of physical and digital environments.

Worlds Un/Designed aims to address the exclusions and limitations inscribed in our existing constructed environments by engaging with questions of ecology, urbanity, sustainability, accessibility, mobility, and inclusion. The lecture and event series will include lecture presentations, book discussions and exhibitions as subtopics of the Un/Designed theme including among others: Unscripted addressing experiential perspectives of spatial design, unconventional usage and affordances; Atypical, addressing inclusive design for the atypical user; Unnatural interrogating the making of natural and unnatural biobased materials materials; and Uncontrolled, discussing on autonomous systems, unsupervised intelligence, and emergent
forms. By critically reflecting on the effects of conventions this lecture series calls for
stimulating our collective imagination towards healthier alternative future worlds, yet to be designed.

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