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Commercial Real Estate

CRE Opinion: Time, Technology, and Building the Future City

The change is coming faster than you think.
By Steven Duong |
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Steven Duong of AECOM

There is an excellent saying floating out there, something to the effect of, “We overestimate how much we can accomplish in the short term, and underestimate how much we can accomplish in the long term.” We can expect great shifts in society multiple times within a generation, whether or not we are ready for it.

How many years separated the Wright brother’s first flight in Kitty Hawk to the Apollo 11 moon landing? Sixty-six years. How quickly did the smartphone go from novelty gadget to the operating system of our subconscious (and far too often our consciousness)? Less than 10 years. The iPhone was released just one year prior to Barack Obama being elected president. We’ve hardly had one president with the existence of the smartphone.

Perhaps it is time we revisit the short term.

Since 2012, we went from having no serious autonomous vehicle companies to having Google, Uber, Tesla, Ford, Otto, Amazon, and a host of other private companies having significant test fleets of autonomous vehicles and federal level policy that is moving surprisingly fast. In 2013, Elon Musk outlined a concept for a new mode of mobility, the “fifth mode of transportation,” called the Hyperloop. This past May, Hyperloop One, a startup founded by former SpaceX engineers, completed the first full hyperloop test in the world in the deserts of Nevada. (Disclaimer: the Dallas AECOM team led the design of the Texas Hyperloop proposal) Locally, the stretch of I-30 between Dallas and Fort Worth has been established by the Department of Transportation as an autonomous transportation test bed. Additionally, Uber announced Dallas-Fort Worth as one of its two global test grounds for their flying car project, Uber Elevate.

All of this has occurred in the last five years. If the proliferation of the automobile heavily influenced land development in the U.S. after World War II, manifesting itself in concepts like affordable exurbs and complex highways, what does the imminent sea change in transportation technology mean for the future city? Are the things we are building today going to be relevant in five years?

This question is already influencing future designs of residential and commercial infrastructure. Many expect personal mobility to shift from a commodity to a service. Instead of owning a car, you will just hail an autonomous vehicle. Skip the car payments, lower the safety risk, skip the two-car garage, and get yourself a larger house. The multi-family build up in Dallas has inevitably also led to a vast build up in parking garage infrastructure. If people no longer need parking garages for cars they no longer own, it becomes more important to have queuing space for passenger pickups. Parking garages could be transformed into office buildings and include helipads on top to accommodate flying cars and delivery drones.

On a larger macro scale, we see a change in the traditional urban-suburban relationship. The new transportation paradigm could cause denser, nodal development around autonomous transit hubs, or the proliferation of autonomous vehicles could cause a sharp increase in roadway infrastructure, galvanizing suburban development even further in North Texas. Alan Berger, Professor of Advanced Urbanism at MIT, argues that the future is closer to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City than Jane Jacobs’ Brooklyn. He reasons that roadway infrastructure will expand greatly, expanding the automobile’s domain over personal mobility.

These rapid changes make planning for the future city difficult, yet even more vital for urban planners, designers, architects, and developers. Whichever path comes our way, we know the change is coming faster than we think. The future city is not coming to the next generation. It is already on the road, in that Tesla that just passed you by.

Steven Duong is the Texas studio lead for AECOM’s Design + Planning group.

 

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