A Who's Who of Smart Cities

Maria Aiolova, Assoc. AIA, Co-founder, Terreform One
An architect, educator, and urban designer who holds 18 technology patents, Aiolova co-founded Terreform One, a design research nonprofit in Brooklyn, N.Y. The group looks to technology, design, and synthetic biology to develop sustainable, localized solutions for transportation, infrastructure, waste treatment, food, water, energy, and other concerns.

John Bachmann, Vice president, AECOM
Bachmann manages the master planning for Visakhapatnam, India—one of 100 such plans that the country has in the works. Vizag, as the effort is known, aims to create a sustainable smart city in a coastal region that is already home to 4 million residents, employing data-driven strategies that can be overlaid on existing infrastructure rather than building from the ground up.

Alison Brooks, Principal and creative director, Alison Brooks Architects
London-based Brooks uses cultural research to inform community-centric design. She believes that single-use buildings are a thing of the past, and advocates for architecture that can serve a variety of roles. For her Audi Urban Future Initiative research, Brooks explored the intersection of densification of cities and ride-sharing using connected devices.

Dominique Davison, AIA, Founding principal, DRAW Architecture + Urban Design
Kansas City, Mo.–based Davison is a classically trained cellist, punk bass player, and architect who leads a team that employs data visualization, processing, and analysis to improve understanding of cities’ environmental impact. That research became PlanIT Impact, a startup that aims to increase planners’ ability to realize net-zero cities. The company’s software analyzes the impact that energy, water, and transportation have on building performance.

Jan Gehl, Hon. FAIA, Co-founder and senior adviser
Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, the revered architect and urban planner helped transform that city into one that prioritizes pedestrians, cyclists, and public space. A critic of the current concept of smart cities, he has expressed concern that the strategies employed will not improve resident quality of life.

Toni Griffin, Founder, Urban Planning for the American City
In addition to leading initiatives such the Detroit Future City plan, Griffin is an urban planning professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. There, she founded the Just City Lab, which promotes integrating social justice into the planning of future cities. “We’re also interested in the distribution of non-material goods, such as power, rights, and decision-making. You have to think about representation, and accountability, empowerment, and trust,” she told CityLab last summer. “And those are … not something you can sit at your desk and get quantitative data on. These [things] have to be measured qualitatively, which means using the experience of people on the ground as data points.” The lab’s Just City Index weighs planning against 12 resident-centric tenets, such as resiliency, democracy, and mobility.

Rem Koolhaas, Hon. FAIA, Co-founder, OMA
The Dutch architect has been a vocal critic of smart cities, notably in his 2014 presentation at the Brussels Smart City conference. “We are fed cute icons of urban life, integrated with harmless devices, cohering into pleasant diagrams in which citizens and business are surrounded by more and more circles of service that create bubbles of control. Why do smart cities offer only improvement? Where is the possibility of transgression?”

Keiichi Matsuda, Designer
A designer and filmmaker based in London, Matsuda explores the effects of augmented reality on the average citizen. In his 2016 film, Hyper-Reality, Matsuda presents a futuristic city where individuals utilize virtual interactive interfaces to engage with the physical environment.

Margaret Newman, FAIA, Principal, Arup
As a principal in Arup’s New York office, Newman’s focus is on urban design, public space, and multimodal network development. Her prior experience as chief of staff to Janette Sadik-Khan at the New York City Department of Transportation and as executive director of the Municipal Art Society of New York have informed her focus on creating sustainable, integrated urban design that promotes economic growth, resiliency, and diversity.

Zenon Radewych, Principal, WZMH Architects
Radewych is a principal at Toronto-based WZMH Architects. The firm’s development of an Intelligent Structural Panel, with plug-and-play infrastructure that allows wireless control of building systems made it the first architecture firm to participate in Microsoft’s global Internet of Things Insider Labs accelerator.

Carlo Ratti, Director, MIT Senseable City Lab
Also the founder of Turin, Italy–based practice Carlo Ratti Associati, Ratti is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the director of MIT’s Senseable Cities Lab, which investigates how layering technology and data on urban environments can create what it terms a “real-time city.”

Adrian Smith, FAIA, and Gordon Gill, FAIA, Founding partners, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture
In addition to designing Masdar Headquarters outside Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates—which targeted being the world’s first energy-positive building—the duo’s Chicago-based practice has used smart city strategies in further master planning projects, such as the 28-building Astana Expo City 2017 complex in the Kazakhstan capital.

Ben van Berkel, Hon. FAIA, Founder and principal architect, UNStudio, UNSense Studio
Van Berkel is the founder and principal architect of Amsterdam-based architecture firm, UNStudio. It’s offshoot, UNSense—launched in March 2018—explores integrative for the built environment to improve the efficiency of cities, and the quality of life of their residents. The independent startup/innovation platform focuses primarily on sensor-based technologies for cities, individual buildings, and interiors “in order to humanize architecture,” according to the firm.

James von Klemperer, FAIA, President and design principal, Kohn Penderson Fox Associates (KPF)
Von Klemperer led the team that created the master plan for New Songdo City, a 1,500-acre development in Incheon, South Korea, which combines classic urban amenities such as a 100-acre park with innovations such as a pneumatic waste collection system. The firm’s KPF Urban Interface uses data analytics to inform future city design.