Remember the last time you moved? Moving residences is an inevitable part of modern life, but one that remains mired in hopelessly outdated legacy systems. Having just survived the partial renovation of and move to a century-old house, I am reminded how the typical home is obsolete even as it is built. Add the moving of “stuff” from one obsolete house to another, and you are contributing to one of the least smart, least energy-efficient time sucks in the canon of the contemporary human experience.

None of this is new to those architects intent on improving the efficiency of our buildings. Even innovator Buckminster Fuller learned the hard way that post-war America didn’t want clean, easy to construct, low-cost housing. Fuller stumbled onto the unspoken truth of our economic system:  governments want inefficiency because it creates jobs. Designing, building, occupying, and

The MIT Media Lab announced the successful commercialization of the CityCar:

The MIT Media Lab foldable electric CityCar was unveiled at European Commission headquarters in Brussels on January 24. The consortium is negotiating to place a fleet of 100 CityCars in Brussels next year.

Branded Hiriko, which means urban in the Basque language, these two-passenger micro cars are just two meters (6.5 feet) long and weigh 450 kilos (1,100 pounds). The passenger cabin can slide upwards as the wheels roll together, folding the chassis to minimize the car’s footprint when parked.

When folded, three CityCars can fit into one traditional parking space, making parking much more efficient in crowded cities.

The Hiriko’s electric motors are in the wheels, called Robot Wheels. Each Robot Wheel can be independently controlled, allowing the CityCar to execute tight maneuvers such as spinning

FLORA by ADAFRUIT from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Ever since a young Canadian student at MIT’s Media Lab began exploring the possibilities of wearable computing, the distance between information technologies and the body has collapsed. While Steve Mann continues to push the boundaries of leading to “cyborg” culture other developers are embracing the potential of the new medium.

R&D firm adafruit has just released the first low-cost, mass-produced wearable computing system for the rest of us. Based on the remarkably pliable Arduino platform, FLORA is a complete system that makes citizens every bit as smart as the smart city they traverse.

Here is how the company introduces FLORA:

For the last few years Ladyada has been thinking about everything she wanted in a wearable electronics platform for Adafruit’s community of makers, hackers, crafters, artists, designers and

James Law Cybertecture proposal for Taipei Art Museum

As a designer, theorist, and interactive developer MESH Cities founder Robert Ouellette has long advocated for a new generation of responsive buildings. Truly 21st Century architecture, he believes, would integrate sustainable systems together with human-needs-driven, interactive technologies. For most architectural practitioners, however, the aspiration towards truly responsive architecture is hinted at in seductive drawings and models, but rarely if ever attained in practice.

One of the reasons for that is the complexity of the myriad of emerging technologies the designer is required to master. Architecture remains, as Buckminster Fuller succinctly described it, a generalist’s profession. And there is so much to learn. Increasingly, the time it takes to understand a complex palette of information technologies and building

The second decade of the 21st Century brings with it such an overwhelming barrage of I.P.-driven change it is easy to forget that disruptive technologies have always influenced the way we build societies and the cities they inhabit. In fact, we’d argue that technology and modernity, or today’s “liquid modernity,” are so tightly bound together they are inseparable. Technologies like that being developed by Paraimpu increase that momentum.

The British Empire once ruled more land than any other nation in history. British engineering and the top-down systems it spawned changed the world. And all those systems had a home base. At the apex of the great empire was an equally great city. London, the economic hub of colonialism, used its wealth to build a cultural identity worthy of the world’s dominant power.

The publication and distribution networks centred on London’s Fleet Street