William Mitchell, MIT dean and professor, architect, urbanist and theorist, widely regarded as one of the most prominent thinker on “smart cities”, has passed away. He lost the fight with cancer at the age of 65. Mitchell was considered one of the world’s leading urban theorists.
William Mitchell, MIT dean and professor, architect, urbanist and theorist, widely regarded as one of the most prominent thinker on “smart cities”, has passed away. He lost the fight with cancer at the age of 65. Mitchell was considered one of the world’s leading urban theorists.
Through the work of his Smart Cities research group at the MIT Media Lab, he pioneered new approaches to integrating design and technology to make cities more responsive to their citizens and more efficient in their use of resources. He likened tomorrow’s cities to living organisms or very-large-scale robots, with nervous systems that enable them to sense changes in the needs of their inhabitants and external conditions, and respond to these needs.
Read more at the Official MIT Obituary.
His link to the European Network of Living Labs is discussed in more detail in this blog post by Luca Galli:
I first heard about Mitchell quite late; it was end of 2004 or beginning of 2005. I was attending the first public meetings of what then became the network of Living Labs, a mixed formal and informal coalition of various organizations engaged with open innovation (see the site of ENOLL, European Network of Living Labs). In that context, Mitchell was credited as the one that originally forged the concept at MIT Media Lab. I remember especially references made by Veli Pekka Niitamo (Nokia, CKIR Helsinki) and architect/professor Jarmo Suominen.
Read the entire blog post.
In a recent interview with Bill Mitchell on Urban Mobility, he explained his vision on how cities should evolve in the future:
Cities are fundamentally about interconnecting people. And urban personal mobility — it’s a basic thing, one of the reasons that cities exist. You really want to find ways of effectively maximizing opportunities to connect to people and institutions. For 100 years the automobile has been a tremendously successful response to that need. But it has powerful negative externalities.
Read the entire interview.
The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) is the international, non-profit, independent association of benchmarked Living Labs.
The European Network of Living Labs is the international, non-profit, independent association of Living Labs.
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