The City of the Future
Colaboration | Lab.I.Arq + Adapt Lab
Hugo Farias, coord.
Cities have always assumed themselves as poles and centers of economic growth, innovation, culture and creativity. For all these reasons and because, as a consequence of them, it is in urban areas that higher levels of quality of life can be achieved -, cities attract and will continue to attract, continuously and significantly, more and more inhabitants. The Earth is increasingly an urban planet.
The research project aims to reflect on the architecture of the contemporary city, focusing on housing buildings, equipment, public space, mobility, green structure and water, issues of memory and identity.
Its main objective is to seek to identify, analyze, propose and develop new solutions for a more sustainable, resilient, greener, more humanized and more identity-based city. A city with a better future.
The concentration of the population in urban centers implies, on the one hand, that the effects of problems as serious as climate change, heat waves and floods, pollution, congestion, crime, lack of adequate and quality housing, lack of access to water and electricity, among others, are felt more intensely in cities. On the other hand, and, in a way, paradoxically, the high concentration of people, ideas and resources results in significant levels of innovation, at all levels – which are leading the processes of combating the problems mentioned above. Thus, if the city today constitutes a central problem of human existence, it simultaneously constitutes the means in which this problem will be solved.