ABSTRACT
At the advent of this research into the impact of automated vehicles (AVs) on urban form itself, it was necessary to place ourselves, as researchers, in the future. As with other new technologies, such as the iPhone, it is not easy to understand the implications of a technology until it is already well-established. Being trained in architecture, we could formulate a future and inhabit this imagined design future (as per the exposition on drawing in Chapter 2); this could potentially give us a better perspective on the impacts of the technology, but the major problem becomes the inability to determine which futures are most likely. In the case of AVs, there are very large differences in potential outcomes depending on many factors; two of the strongest determining factors in the configuration of cities are arguably the modes and technologies that define urban transportation. There is clearly also a strong relationship between the interurban transportation system and the spatial form and organization of the city as discussed in the next chapter and borne out
in analytic studies.2 To respond to this problem, the researchers at the Transportation Infrastructure and Public Space Lab (TIPSlab), a research group headed by the author, researched future-visioning methodologies. The outcome is described in this chapter.3
