As we continue to move through the 21st century, the experience of life in the contemporary has surpassed the classic development models of the 20th century.

We are now living in a fluid presence between the virtual and physical worlds. This way of living is shaping alternative modes for how we exist, providing us with the potential to manage and create multiple realities and stories which influence how we want to be seen and understood.

The major issue we face is how to adapt and understand ideologies, structures and systems in this new way of living, modifying the definition of cities to encompass the experiences of the invisible cities that extend beyond physical infrastructure.

Emotions experienced at the personal level have created new layers of interactions in urban spaces that are often completely overlooked by planning processes because of a lack of the tools necessary to design policies that better incorporate them. As the digital landscape evolves, humans have more frequent opportunities to interact with interfaces as they navigate the city and its experiences, creating a series of micro-interactions that occur across and throughout urban spaces.

The intention of creating policy that integrates and embraces these new layers of interactions is not to enforce micro-regulation of micro-interactions, but instead to treat the city as a space of greater potential to support and facilitate new people-to-people and people-to-object interactions. Encouraging this new way of approaching interaction, policy and city building has the potential to develop more adaptive service delivery and relationships within the city in the future.

The underlying goal for the City of Experiences project is to continue questioning how cities are constructed and who they are constructed for. The popular discussion and ideas around the smart city and tech-utopias are not new, although maybe the technology used to drive them is. What is needed now, as a society, is to stop waiting for the acceleration of technology to determine how we will live, and instead be active in creating the necessary platforms for society to imagine what experiences they see in their lives as a driving force for design. The City of Experiences is a project that, through different experiments and engagements, will continue to explore this hypothesis.

Project Goals

To engage audiences from all walks of life and illustrate how to reframe the thinking around city design. By putting emotions and feelings at the forefront.

To experiment with tools and methods that better engage residents and designers to find new methods for city design.

To create a series of systems and prototypes in order to visualize a wide variety of experiments.