Technological Challenges of the City of the Future

Abstract

The natural bond between human communities and the organization of the living and the inert registers trends in the technological organization of societies, differentiated by mnemonic memories, values, and knowledge, which resolve in specific ways the transfer of information from the natural environment to the human environment. This paper explores, along the historical trajectory of the technologies of habitation, the traces that have shaped culture and the memory of the technological gesture. It emphasizes the productive and transferential process of technology, characterizing from this inflection point the problem of habitation and identifying its common characteristics and its cultural particularities. It highlights that, in both natural and artificial design, technology configures convergent knowledge for the appropriation and transfer of information from natural, human, and technical environments. The latter functions as a multimedia processor of combined meanings and behaviors, and likewise acts as a device for human adaptation to an environment from which it extracts and to which it returns energy material, configuring chains of non-reciprocal energy relationships with nature. From the perspective of the achievements of digital technologies in replicating the natural environment, including humankind, the paper proposes a neither apodictic nor apocalyptic interpretation of the impact the digital gesture produces on professions as the core of the most complex handmade artifact of the modern world: the city.