From Amsterdam to New Amsterdam to Amsterdam: How Urban Mobility Shapes Cities: Fid-Bau Portal

From Amsterdam to New Amsterdam to Amsterdam: How Urban Mobility Shapes Cities

Benson, Tom / Duarte, Fabio / Ratti, Carlo

Autonomous vehicles are anticipated to be a widespread and well-adopted aspect of urban infrastructure by the end of the decade. With research and development scaling up over the past few years, studies on autonomous technology’s built environment impacts are still in their infancy—but we can look to the history of urban mobility to inform our understanding of its future trajectory. In this chapter, we add to the discussion of how mobility has and continues to shape infrastructure in cities, presenting research projects from MIT’s Senseable City Lab along with their accompanying historical contexts. First, offering a brief overview of the urban planning histories of both Amsterdam and New Amsterdam, or present-day New York City, we then examine how software and hardware innovations in the AV industry could transform citizens’ movement through urban areas and interactions with physical infrastructure. Looking to Amsterdam’s famous canals, we investigate how the development of autonomous vehicles serves as an example of programmable infrastructure that responds in real-time to human behaviour. Following this, we propose how implementing autonomous ridesharing systems in cities could provide opportunities for repurposing present-day automobile infrastructure, i.e., parking. These case studies shed light on the possibilities AVs present for expanding infrastructure’s capabilities as dynamic, responsive conduits of city residents and resources, which raise questions about how we define infrastructure versus transit and whether such a distinction will exist in future urban mobility.