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ARUP‘ s Design Book: 50 city stories explored, offers a great exploration of intelligent design for urban spaces. It stated that intelligent design is sometimes about new ideas or development. It’ s also often about giving cities’ existing assets ‘“ buildings, infrastructure and beyond ‘“ a new lease of life through well-planned updates.
Highlighting the interaction between urban environment and human development, city transformation follows a similar evolutionary pattern as human society through time. However, the constantly increasing urbanization trend that modern societies face, has resulted in a similarly high level of complexity within modern cities. This complexity is also followed by a difficulty in understanding and managing community issues.
Green cities, intelligent cities, responsible cities, resilient cities, beautiful cities and future cities, all of them are characterized by their own diversified historical paths, which have been substantially affected by human intervention. This in many cases has led to the birth of mega cities like Shanghai, where ARUP’ s interventions have played a crucial role throughout the evolution of the urban space.
Gregory Hodkinson states that:
If our cities are to be efficient, liveable, resilient and sustainable, the relatively long life-cycle of urban development means we can ill afford to get it wrong. It is a challenge that cities around the world must confront, regardless of their size, wealth or location. Future generations will live with how we handle it.
Read the full Design Book here.