Driverless Urban Futures A Speculative Atlas for Autonomous Vehicles

Since the industrial revolution, innovations in transportation technology have continued to re-shape the spatial organization and temporal occupation of the built environment. Today, autonomous vehicles (AVs, also referred to as self-driving cars) represent the next disruptive innovation in mobility, with particularly profound impacts for cities. At a moment of the fast-paced development of AVs by auto-making companies around the world, policymakers, planners, and designers need to anticipate and address the many questions concerning the impacts of this new technology on urbanism and society at large. Conceived as a speculative atlas –a roadmap to unknown territories– this book presents a series of drawings and text that unpack the potential impacts of AVs on scales ranging from the metropolis to the street. The work is both grounded in a study of the history of urban transportation and current trajectories of technological innovation, and informed by an open-ended attitude of future envisioning and design. Through the drawings and essays, Driverless Urban Futures invites readers into a debate of how our future infrastructure could benefit all members of the public and levels of society.

Chapter 1: Envisioning Future Infrastructures Chapter 2: Notes on Drawing Chapter 3:Into the Future: Analytic Scenarios Chapter4: Historical Trajectory of Transportation Infrastructure Chapter 5: Urban Scale Impacts Chapter 6: Urban Theories and Autonomous Vehicles Chapter 7: Street Scale Impacts Chapter 8: Public Transportation Chapter 9: Technology, the City, and the Autonomous Vehicle Chapter 10: Utopian Visions

AnnaLisa Meyboom is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA) as well as the Director of the Transportation Infrastructure and Public Space Lab (TIPSlab). Her research focus is the interrogation of future applications of technology in the design of our built environment. She emphasizes the need to integrate the highly technical, the beautiful and the environmental simultaneously and seamlessly into built form. She holds a degree in engineering from University of Waterloo and a Masters of Architecture from the University of British Columbia. She designs and writes about future infrastructures and the use of advanced digital tools in the design and fabrication of architectural form.