Driverless Urban Futures ― A Speculative Atlas

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.

AnnaLisa Meyboom is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia. She is Director of the Transportation Infrastructure & Public Space Lab (TIPSlab). Her area of expertise is integrated design of architecture and engineering. Her research and teaching looks at applications of technology in our environment where the highly technical meets the human environment. Her areas of teaching emphasize the ability to integrate the highly technical, the beautiful and the environmental simultaneously and seamlessly into a built form.