Smart Cars, Smart Cities, and Smart Sharing: The Changing Nature of Urban Public Spaces

Introduction

Urban public spaces ensure the functional operation and resource sharing of a city. For centuries, streets, plazas, and parks have played a key role in affording cultural, social, political, and economic activities for the benefit of society. However, over the last two decades, several socio-economic and technological changes have resulted in a fundamental shift in the way we design, manage, and use urban public and semi-public forms and spaces. This chapter addresses three foundational changes: the introduction of smart, or autonomous (AV) vehicles; evolving smart city technologies; and the emerging business models and associated technologies of sharing. The authors explore how these three socio-economic and technological changes will affect the design and use of current and future urban public spaces, and offer new approaches for investigating and visualizing how they will alter cities in the future.

Autonomous Vehicles: During much of the 20th century, the expanding reliance on private cars formed and reshaped cities, often resulting in segregated, contained, and enclosed uses for streets and public spaces that provided minimal cohesion among people (Kunstler, 1994; Furman, 2017). However, the last ten years have seen a remarkable change occurring along city streets and public spaces in what is referred to as the public to private transect (Pasalar & Hallowell, 2019). As urban roads and parking areas are upgraded to AV or car-free environmentally, and human-centered designs, such as ‘complete streets’, the very nature of how people inhabit and move from public spaces through semi-public areas and finally into private zones is also being altered. Hence, a new strategy is proposed for exploring the concept of a private to public transect with the ability to examine the layers of transition from the public zone of the street right-of-way to the private interiors of buildings. This approach allows an urban transect to be measured and illustrated, so that as more and more autonomous vehicles, smart technologies, and sharing businesses alter the way streetscapes and other public spaces function, a record can be maintained over time.

Smart Cities: The increasing interest in smart cities, efficiency, safety, new sharing business models, faster services and new leisure activities, have all led to new and evolving devices such as self-driving cars, smartphones, and digital applications, virtual platforms, and so forth. A World Bank report (2012) suggests that ‘smart cities’ are about rethinking urban communities as inclusive, integrated, and livable. As part of ongoing smart city discussions, planners, designers, and economists are looking into these concepts and questioning the socio-cultural and economic effects of technology and sharing economies on the use and experience of public spaces. Urban life is inevitably and continuously undergoing dramatic change, leading to a reconsideration of how urban space is designed, transformed, and used. Hence, designers are considering how urban public areas in smart cities can provide affordances that help to create new relationships of use through technology and provide engaging public experiences within these spaces. Furthermore, designers should continue to address how smart, and shared technologies change the activities and 'formation of space' in city parks, plazas, and streets as places to gather and support communities. Creating human-centered smart cities that are able to bring people together by incorporating shared spaces and technologies that encourage socializing, collaboration, efficient mobility, and a healthy environment is essential. However, smart cities can run the risk of not being people-centered.