Cannes Reloaded is a workshop project carried out by WJ Mitchell's students at MIT in 2003.
CANNES today functions mostly as a tourist, festival, and retirement destination. But it has the potential to play a new, far more dynamic role. Its climate and lifestyle attractions, its connections to the film and media world, and its proximity to the Sophia Antipolis technopole, position it to become a leading center of the creative industries. The focus of this workshop is on innovative development, urban design, and technological infrastructure strategies to achieve that goal. The recent Nation Academies report "Beyond Productivity" will provide a starting point. Cannes has partnered with MIT to develop an approach for a new high-technology neighborhood on one of the last available waterfront sites (more than 30 ha) near the downtown. The workshop will challenge students to develop specific architectural, urban, and technological interventions that will initiate beneficial urban change.
There are some spare document about it on the web like this analysis, some pictures, the user profiles and so on.
The participants came up with various ideas like (great development/concept designs about it here:
- Monitors in public places
- Media juke-box
- Moving images, moving projections, moving audience
- Hot spots, hot things (Plugged-in zone)
- Site-specific light installations
Why do I blog this? this ideas of an über-technopole in Cannes really reminds me the Super-Cannes book by JG Ballad. It's interesting to see how this partnership occurs and what it aims at. It's a pity the documents about their "study on inluence of wi-fi to the built environment and work-life scenarios" is not more developed because it's definitely a topic I am looking forward to know more (Mitchell deals with it in his book but not that much). Any good reference about how wifi/cell phones/locative tech reshape urban planning/urban practices? Apart from Do Android Crows Fly Over the Skies of an Electronic Tokyo?: The Interactive Urban Landscape of Japan by Akira Suzuki, I don't have so much things. I am looking for stories like in the XIXth century rich people lived on the second or third floor (and poor people on the last floor). After the introduction of lifts, rich people ended up living on the last floor whereas poor people lived "closer to the sidewalk" on the first floor...