Intelligent Environments

Digitalization permeates conversations about society's future - ever since the 1980s when the informatization of the economy also emerged as popular urban development theme. The promises and realities of digital innovation have come to suffuse everything from government to finance, art to medicine, astronomy to cities, politics to warfare - and from genetics to reality itself. This astonishing advance presents enormous opportunities and risks. It carries with it great responsibilities. Digital systems augmenting physical space, buildings and cities occupy a special place in the wider evolutionary discourse about advanced technology. The two Intelligent Environments books edited by Peter Droege span a quarter of a century across this genre. The second volume, Intelligent Environments: Advanced Systems for a Healthy Planet, goes further than the first and asks: how does civilization approach thinking systems, and more specifically intelligent spatial models, design methods and support structures that are designed or applied for spatial sustainability, in ways that could even counteract current challenges to terrestrial habitability? The result of this quest is useful, practical, and informative: it opens a door to what must now become a rapidly growing and overarching existential focus. This book presents a range of practical, typical, systemic but also unusual and even sublime ideas and initiatives to regenerate a sustainable world freed from the dogma of blind development: innovation without societal purpose. These are visible in endeavors as diverse as the planned guidance of industrial change across regions, currency innovation, infrastructure architecture, network protocols of energy transaction, geodesign, net-positive design, remote work, integrated transport - or notions of artificial intelligence in understanding our most immediate spatial setting: the human body.