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Audio Interview

Transformation and innovation: cities of the future

Published on April 7, 2022   23 min

Other Talks in the Playlist: Interviews with business leaders and scholars

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Interviewer: Today, the 11th of October 2021, I'm interviewing Professor Carl Ratti, Director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT and at partner Carlo Ratti Associates, Italy, about his article of 19th February 2021 in Project Syndicate, 'Are Cities Finished?' It was written with co-author Richard Florida. It is expected that listeners will have read the article before listening to this interview. Professor Ratti, I have two questions, and I suspect quite a few supplementary ones following your answers. What do you think is going to happen and over what period? Prof. Ratti: Thank you and thank you very much for having me. What is going to happen is that I hope that cities change a lot during COVID. Usually, cities follow what they call best practices. They look at what other cities have done. They look at the past, and based on that, they try to implement new changes in cities. But when you're doing that, you're usually locking the future into the past. You're not innovating much. Now, during COVID, for the first time, nobody really had any best practices. We didn't know exactly how we should behave. As a result, we've seen a big wave of innovation. We've seen a lot of trial and error. We've seen projects that had been discussed for, I don't know, for years or even decades, being implemented very quickly, like pedestrianizing a part of the city. In the article with Richard, we talk about Paris. When I was living in Paris, Rue de Rivoli was like a big traffic authority and that has been almost completely handed over to scooters,

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Transformation and innovation: cities of the future

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