Interesting visit at The Crystal house in London

Bonjour,

An interesting 1-2h trip in London at the Crystal House : click here.
The Crystal house is a showcase of all the Siemens infrastructure products (power, water, smart grids...) amd how they can integrate to create "sustainable solutions".

On the website, you can watch the video of the City of the future, which is really only 5 years ahead.
Siemens seems to bank a lot on smart grids, small renewable generators and collective means of transportation.

The upside of the Crystal House (free visit by the way) is probably that most technologies presented are being developed and will exist in the next few years, bringing control to emissions and resources consumption.

The downside: those solutions require a good level of development - smart grid and smart information systems require savvy users and information networks in place which is not the case in a lot of countries.
But my regret is the following: Siemens is presenting fairly conventional ideas. The City of the future will look like the ones we are living in today. It is the same concentric model, with a super dense city centre and less density as you go further away.
It would be good to think of how to build better designed cities, especially for emerging countries, since they are still in urbanisation mode and can still change the usual development patterns.

For my part, rather than a concentric model where offices are in the center and housing on the outskirts, I would favour a multi-island plan, where offices and housing are mixed together. It implies a constant medium-density development, which is probably more efficient in terms of cost and resource use than super high or low density.