Bottazzi delivered this peer-reviewed paper, 'iPlanning: Urbanism and big data', at the British Council-sponsored international conference ‘Masterplanning the Future’, held at Xi’an Jiaotong - Liverpool University in Suzhou, China in 2012. The paper critically reflects on two of Bottazzi’s projects, which used remote sensing and augmented reality: the ‘Xiamen Interactive Model’ exhibited at the Xiamen International Energy Efficiency Building Expo 2010 (China, 2010) and ‘Molecular City’ presented at the Future Places Festival (http://futureplaces.org/) in Porto, Portugal in 2010, and at the prestigious ACSA 100th Conference at MIT, USA in 2012. An abstract describing the project was included in the conference proceedings (www.acsa-arch.org/docs/conferences-files/abstractbook_am12.pdf). It was one of the 20 projects selected out of some 120 entries by an authoritative panel including Professor Dana Cuff (UCLA) and Professor Preston Scott Cohen (Harvard University). Other speakers included Professor Alan Dunlop, Distinguished Victor L. Regnier Visiting Chair in Architecture at Kansas State University; Anu Leinonen, Associate, OMA; Ben Hughes, Visiting Professor at China Central Academy of Fine Arts School of Design, Beijing; Chris Twinn, Arup Fellow, Director and senior sustainability consultant at Arup; and Penny Lewis, Head of the Foundation for Architecture & Education, UK.
Bottazzi’s paper re-evaluates the methods by which master plans are designed and managed. Digital data allow us to monitor environmental performance, study and design cities as they evolve, and connect people and professionals to construct more open, cross-disciplinary forms of urbanism. He argues that, conceived as such, master plans will resemble websites more than traditional blueprints; they will aggregate and link data, and tag them to physical locations as hyperlinks and social media do. The paper concludes that what will result is a dynamic planning tool, able to absorb ever-increasing data sets, a platform for experimentation (through simulation and scenario planning) and collaboration between diverse experts.