Audi to hold Urban Future Summit

Aiming to further the thinking initiated at the inaugural Urban Future Awards last year, 2011 will see Audi hold the Urban Future Summit on September 12 in Frankfurt, just prior to the start of the 64th international motor show.

The symposium will feature presentations from internationally renowned speakers on the future of individual mobility in megacities, with participants from all over the world. The goal of the summit is to ‘build knowledge networks', focusing on the subject of "Energies - what forces will change the cities of the future?"

Expert speakers such as Saskia Sassen, Carlo Ratti, Ludger Hovestadt and Charles Leadbeater will be among those who will discuss how mobility and the urban space must develop to meet the demands of future cities.

Professionals from fields such as architecture, urban planning, trend research, economics and the automobile industry must react according to developments flexibly and with a variety of strategies, Sassen says.

"We must think of mobility as a sort of black box that has many more facets than those defined by current technologies."

The proposals of architects Jürgen Mayer H., Bjarke Ingels and Alison Brooks for the Audi Urban Future Award 2010 will form the basis of the discussions along with speeches.

Three principle themes have been identified for the Award: Networks, social cooperation and resource management. A distinct workshop for each of these will take place in Frankfurt.

The first workshop, "Energies of Data - Networked City", is based on the Award-winning design by Jürgen Mayer H. The question of how far future cities will be shaped by networks will be explored, raising questions about whether sustainable changes in urban environment and mobility will be generated by automated driving, personalized electronic systems and social networks.

Bjarke Ingels' theses for the Award explore issues surrounding "Energies of Resources - City of Abundance". Data on energy sources, infrastructure and participants in traffic is fed into networks, which could improve traffic flow, resulting in surplus energy and free, interactively usable surfaces. The question is whether or not cars and buildings can make use of the same system.

Alison Brooks' proposal forms the basis for the third issue, "Energies of Social Relations - City of Cooperation". It is likely that the level of social interaction will increase as city populations swell, and so the change in relationship between individual ownership and social cohesion will be explored.

Carlo Ratti, engineer and architect at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will speak on the subject of networks and Ludger Hovestadt, architect and professor at the ETH Zurich, will discuss the field of resources.

In the third workshop Charles Leadbeater, author, consultant and trend researcher, will be speaking about his views on social cooperation.

Peter Schwarzenbauer, Member of the Board of AUDI AG for Marketing and Sales, comments on the pioneering role of the company: "Today the automobile is a determining factor in the appearance of cities, but in functional terms it is, in principle, completely isolated. In future however, automobiles will be involved and intensively networked."

Visit www.audi-urban-future-initiative.com for more information about the Audi Urban Future Initiative and the 2011 Summit.

By Rufus Thompson