What will cities of the future look like? There is little doubt that the world is changing. The covid19 pandemic has in some ways accelerated that change, with more people working at home among other factors.
One of the things rapidly changing is how a city is supposed to look and what makes a city. Trinidad and Tobago (TT), too, has seen the need to restructure its capital with the Prime Minister announcing last year that there were major plans in place to revitalise the capital, Port of Spain.
CEO and founder of Sidewalk Labs Daniel Doctoroff sees all that has been happening as an opportunity for cities to change.
Its website says, “Sidewalk Labs was founded in 2015 as Google’s arm for urban innovation, becoming an Alphabet company in 2016. From the start, we focused on solving cities’ greatest challenges through forward-thinking urban design and cutting-edge technology.”
Doctoroff was also New York city’s deputy mayor under former mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg was mayor from 2002-2013. Doctoroff spoke at Collision Conference’s one-day City Summit conference done collaboratively with oil company Shell. The one-day summit ran from 1 pm-3. 30 pm and Newsday was invited to attend. The summit had opening remarks by Shell’s president Gretchen Watkins. Doctoroff spoke in one of the breakout sessions called It’s time for cities to rebound. Cities of the future need to be more sustainable and inclusive, he said as he spoke with American business magazine Fast Company’s technology editor Harry McCracken.
The ideas at Sidewalk Labs will be more relevant in the future, Doctoroff said. But one particular area of focus for the company is its Mass Timber Buildings factory.
“And we have been focused on it for the last three years. We have invested a lot of money in developing a concept for a company that will focus on mass timber building,” Doctoroff said.
Naturallywood.com said mass timber products are, “thick, compressed layers of wood, creating strong, structural load-bearing elements that can be constructed into panelized components. They are typically formed through lamination, fasteners, or adhesives.”
Doctoroff said if mass timber buildings are done right one can, “meaningfully reduce the cost of buildings. That would be particularly important for affordable housing.”
But more importantly mass timber building and construction was dramatically more sustainable.
“The actual carbon emissions of a building built out of mass timber compared to concrete or steel could be 80 per cent or more lower
“So the impetus for doing this existed before but I think it has only accelerated in the post-covid period,” he said.
But Doctoroff did not only address the change in focus on sustainable materials for building construction but what does it mean for a city with so many people, globally, working from home.
Doctoroff said it was too early to tell whether people would be able to live anywhere and work from anywhere minus the need to migrate to big cities where large companies have huge headquarters.
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