Together with colleagues at Yale, Harvard and other universities, Prof. Carlo Ratti from MIT Senseable Lab used AI to compare footage of public spaces from the 1970s with recent video in the same locations in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The findings are striking: people walk faster, linger less, and are less likely to meet up. That’s no surprise in a world where phones, Netflix and AI companions are luring us away from real-world spaces and real-world friends. Yet, if technology is part of the problem, it may also be part of the solution. By using AI to study urban public spaces, the MIT team can gather data, pick out patterns and test new designs that could help us rethink, for our time, our modern versions of the agora– the market and main public gathering place of Athens.
The urban playground has always drawn curious minds. Among the sharpest was William “Holly” Whyte, who filmed plazas and parks in 1970s New York. He was fascinated by where people chose to sit, how they navigated space, and what drew them together. His findings, documented in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980), were at times beautifully simple: “What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people.”
Read the full article on The Guardian.
Recommended by Luisa Bravo
More Stories
The Vanishing Town Square – Another Reason Democracy Is Failing
Public Life Study: Standards Manual
A working-class immigrant neighborhood in Queens banned cars along a major road