Future of the City: Virtual Mirrors

This article was originally posted on Kedgelabs.com on November 8, 2011.

“I don’t believe there’s a challenge anywhere in the world that’s more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities. But where do we begin…how do we start to answer the great challenge?” --Walt Disney

Each fall, EPCOT at Walt Disney World resort in Orlando, Florida holds the International Food and Wine Festival. As a long-time “Disneyite,” I feel a little bit of shame at saying that I had never been to this annual potpourri of delectable dishes from around the world. A few weeks ago, that travesty was corrected through the intervention of an incredible friend, and now all is right with the world, hyperbole be damned!

EPCOT pays tribute to Walt Disney’s dream of what the city of the future might look like, or more accurately what that city might contain. This “Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow” would have plenty of robots, to be sure. He envisioned a city that would entertain, inform, foster human connection and collaboration, improve overall quality of life, and serve its inhabitants. (This last idea is something our future cities desperately need, as the industrial meme has led us to build cities in which humans are like cogs in a machine. Walt once said that his idea of the future city would be one in which “the pedestrian will be the king!”)

However, that doesn’t tell the whole story, though I’m fairly sure that the visual lesson EPCOT teaches its visitors was not a part of Walt’s original idea. (Actually, if you’re interested in a fascinating read that includes ideas around city building, futures thinking, social metaphors, civilization-wide memes, technological integration, etc., you absolutely have to read about Walt’s concepts for the original EPCOT.) If you’ve ever visited EPCOT, you know that it’s divided into two separate sections: “Future World” and “World Showcase.” In terms of expectations about the vision behind the park, the first section is no surprise. However, the latter really has very little to do with Walt’s original vision or any connection to a “city of tomorrow”… at least on the surface. And this is where a little bit of pattern development and sense-making comes into play.

For those who haven’t seen EPCOT up close and personal, World Showcase is a seamless walkway of 11 countries. Not surprisingly, the landscapes of Nicaragua or Afghanistan are not a part of the tour – this is meant to be a celebration of some of the most romanticized countries and cities from a selection of Fodor’s travel guides: Venice, Paris, Beijing, and Tokyo, sans technology. This is old-world charm on display. La serveuse offers you an eclair in a little patisserie located down a bustling side street, service compris. A mariachi band serenades while you meander through a sea of Mexican crafts and folk art. English gardens and a traditional pub are made to feel just like the real thing. (OK, sort of.) This isn’t the latest Microsoft video about a future full of glass or a nod to a citizenry that finally rode to work in flying cars. This is about being local.

And though the two parts of EPCOT are separated from one another for the sake of entertainment and staging and creating the magic for which Disney is so very famous, it’s in the meshing of these two images that a more accurate “city of tomorrow” is realized. Yes, robots and smart devices and cloud computing are defining the path that our future cities will travel. But the quality of life that Walt imagined requires much more resilience than he could have seen over 40 years ago. And this means connecting, collaborating, developing, distributing, and living at the local level, creating a community atmosphere that promotes these “future necessities” of the 21st Century. Beyond the technology, this picture of the local cafe, the community gardens, and face-to-face connectivity at the street-level may have been more EPCOT-like than what Walt had in mind.

And still there is more, another level to this meshing of the technological and the provincial – a type of future city that Walt could not have imagined when he first laid out his plans for a human-centric EPCOT. This meshing that is only possible under today’s technology and social architecture could be called the “Virtual Mirror City.”

And what might such a city look like? This city would be able to pinpoint and gauge the exact needs of each and every segment or service, allowing for an accurate evaluation of data and information systems, infrastructure demands, utilities, community, health, food boroughs, cityscape experimentation, or any other idea that helps us to evolve the definition and usefulness of the “city.” Such an immediate and exact assessment can even help us to create the city of the future in real-time, even as the wicked problems of these dynamic ecosystems unfold.

Of course, this would happen as the concept of virtual mirror cities – the digital twins of the physical counterparts – become an integral part of city development and D2D operations. In such virtual mirrors, all data and physical events can be mapped and visualized, with solutions being fed right back into the system. Further, scenarios of the future of cities can be created on top of these virtual maps, revealing conditions and possibilities for the next 3, 10, or 25 years, helping us to make decisions today that would result in our cities of tomorrow. I’m not talking about outdated projecting through the use of data sets – with the rise of digital, cloud-connected, and smart cities, we have the capability to simulate all aspects of city design and use in real-time. This is the realization of the concept of the “social graph” translated for the even bigger environment of the emerging cityscape. (To see some of the work being done in the area of 3D city modeling, take a look at GeoSim Systems.)

With just a little more brainstorming, the virtual mirror could be a much better solution for potential threats to our physical cities than Japan’s recent decision to build “backup” or standby cities as a means to house immobilized government services.

Next steps: Can we take the idea of the virtual city even further? Most certainly, as the metaverse moves us from the concept of “city” as a physically inhabited space to a community that designs and rallies around a common purpose through the “ideography” of virtual spaces, bypassing the need to inhabit geographic locations for success. Under this definition, what was previously considered the to be the virtual mirror now becomes our “real city,” allowing for the inclusion of ideological inhabitants from any location in the world. This takes the notion of the “wikicity” where citizens physically enhance their environment by fixing neglected services such as bike lanes or cross walks, and puts it on steroids. Now the city gets turned on its head, where problems are first created and then solved in the virtual world, and this in turn informs the creation of the tangible – or not, depending on whether a concrete representation is even necessary. (Backcasting, anyone?) This turns the idea of the “city” into the biggest meshworked innovation generator we could possibly imagine!

And, returning to the lesson taught by my visit to EPCOT, the virtual mirror points us toward a use for technology that is more than simply “cool.” These cities have the potential to make us more adaptive, more resilient, and return us to human-focused futures. Would Walt be proud? I’m not sure, but I think so. After all, it was his desire to build “an experimental city that would incorporate the best ideas of industry, government, and academia worldwide, a city that caters to the people as a service function.” With the virtual mirror serving as just such an experimental learning environment where we can reframe government, commerce and currency, educational models, work paradigms, and the principle of “glocal” activity, we can make the transition from serving our cities to being served by them, indeed.

One more thought: What if we created virtual mirror organizations, or at least experimentation labs within our businesses that mirrored the dynamics of our real-world operations? What incredible potential this would create in so many ways!

About the Author
Frank Spencer is the principal at Kedge Labs; specializing In Ccreative foresight, innovation, & strategic design. This article was originally posted on Kedgelabs.com on November 8, 2011.

Photo: Rev Stan (Flickr)