Reconfigurable Cities

Last week, I was reading the British "lad" magazine FHM on the way back from Europe, and came across a picture of GMC's new concept truck for Los Angeles - the "PAD" (click on the image at right to enlarge). The PAD is envisioned as a combination vehicle/residence, what GM calls "an urban loft with mobility". While cars.com gives this an official "zero chance of production", I think its a lot more realistic vision of the future than it may at first appear.

IFTF's Technology Horizons program is focusing its research this year on the theme of "lightweight infrastructure. These new infrastructure designs will emphasize smaller, smarter, more independent components that can be organized in ways that are more efficient, more flexible, and more secure than the capital-intensive networks of the 20th century.

While at first, the PAD concept may appear as the culmination of the ever-bigger trend in SUVs in America, we can also see it as a lightweight alternative to the traditional home or apartment. IFTF has noted the emergence of temporary cities like Burning Man as an important trend in our 2005 Map of the Decade, but if the concept embodied by PAD really caught on, we could see a whole new form of urbanism based on nomadism and reconfigurable cities. Lightweight infrastructure might allow us to rapidly prototype new forms of settlement as needs and constraints shift from day to day.

Comments

[Nicholas Weaver]

PAD is hardly new. It's called an RV. Seniors tend to migrate to Florida every year in them.

[m@]

Hardly just a concept.
"but if the concept embodied by PAD really caught on, we could see a whole new form of urbanism based on nomadism and reconfigurable cities. "

This already exists.

[Dan]

If GMC made my house, I could plan on leaky windows and obscene ergonomics. I'd be looking more forward to the 'GMC RV chassis with interior by '. In additon, think of the infrastructure costs of fleets of these. electric, sewer, water... what a mess. Why not go with cheap and efficient modular construction of traditioanl buildings?

[NomadWannabe]

Infrastructure for a PAD highrise wouldn't be too hard actually, just design a parking ramp with sufficient room to manuever and run your utilities in bolt-on conduit along the prestressed concrete. Probably a lot cheaper even than modularized traditional architecture. I'd buy one of these in a heart beat.

[dan]

Am I missing something? Or is this just a streamlined RV? Seriously?

[e-lan']

I wish I had one of these in my college days.

Hell. I wouldn't mind having one now.

[Sketchmonkey]

Hm, I appreciate how wannabe futurists see stuff like the PAD and get all tingly on the right side of their brain with visions of a future full of roving hip (hop) mobile lofts, veritable roving swankfests, like outta some IKEA-meets-Bladerunner vision of the future... but really, if you guys are trying to establish street cred as some emerging trends think tank/ research collective or whatever... I'd say you're not casting far enough out from shore to get catch the really big ideas that are floating out there in the emergent future… like GM’s E85 story! (Those green and yellow paint schemes look so much better on GM’s Ethanol-powered vehicles than the poor John Deere’s they stole... er, appropriated… the color scheme from! But I digress…)

At any rate… I take it that the author of this article has never stepped foot into an end-of the year Industrial Design student show? That’s about what this project looks like it rolled out of...

Um…here’s thought… How 'bout GM concentrates more on saleable, relevant product as opposed to a one-off waste of R&D like this?!? Are things that slow down in the bowels of APEX or GM's West Coast Advanced Design Studio (or whatever the hell they are calling the Advanced Concepts Studio these days) that this futuro-RV concept is the best they can trot out? And it is freakin' winning awards no less??? WTF? Oh wait, I see that two of the judges were Art Center and CCS judges. No surprise then, coming from that incestuous circle jerk of design-think…

People were painting the sides of their vans in the 70s, remember? C'mon, dontcha'll remember those hot Boris Vallejo-style Valkyries on the side of some junky ol’ van? So let me get this straight: putting ‘hip’ urban graffiti on the side of the PAD makes it new and cool? Um, no. Hello, once a company like GM is trotting the idea out its gotten the piss taken out of it. Buh-bye street cred!

Much as I am loath to give the guy any more PR than his already capable PR machine is able to muster, Mr. Syd Mead was showin' concepts like this some 20 or more years ago in Playboy… and his stuff had that groovy 'mod' style thing goin' on! The PAD looks like some POS outta Demolition Man. OH WAIT, former GM designers were involved in the concept work for that stellar example of cinematic trash can liner too…

C’mon sheeple! The PAD is nothing more than a roving advertisement for ‘services’ that GM offers … oooo its got Direct TV, XM Radio, Wi_Fi… blah blah… is it supposed to be a Gen Xer’s retirement future-wet dream? I mean WTF… c’mon people! Design something that is relevant for the future! This is just a fancy platform to sell unnecessary crap like OnStar ‘cause GM isn’t actually capable of marketing cars that people actually want… if they keep wasting time on design offal like the PAD those car sales won’t be pickin’ up anytime soon either!

[Bob Henrickson]

The concept makes sense. GM's direct involvement may be suspect, but how much easier would it to be to move a city for environmental reasons if every house had wheels? Sure its farfetched, but if over time sea levels are going to rise and CA is going to slide into the sea and stuff, a little advance planning wouldn't hurt. If we're no good at handling the aftermath, perhaps we can get better at handling the foremath.

[Blahdeeblah]

Looks like they found a chunk of debris from the space shuttle and put wheels on it.

[hmmm]

ARK II.
http://www.retrojunk.com/details_tvshows/644-ark-ii/
http://www.70slivekidvid.com/ark.htm

[Peter]

Don't these already exist?

They are trailer parks only not so nice looking.

[Josh]

"IFTF has noted the emergence of temporary cities like Burning Man as an important trend"

Are you for fucking real?

[mikelietz]

Read more about it. I noticed on the ad copy that they're not quite sure what they're writing: see the bit about a "teraflop of onboard memory".

[Angus McIntyre]

I have seen the future, and it consists of trailer parks full of yuppies.

[alex]

Y'know, it's all blobby and futuristic, and it looks like the actual usable interior space is tiny. The angled walls force you to stick to the center of the floor, you'll be knocking your head everytime you get up from a seat along the wall or bend down to get into a storage bin. It's typical GM design--shiny but crap.

You'd get more usable space out of a standard 20' shipping container. And you can buy one of those for $1200.

I also failed to find any sleeping or sanitary facilities in the pictures. Are you supposed to sleep on that aweful curved bench, and what about restrooms or showers? I guess you would have to line up at the GM service station to use theirs.

[jimr]

Funny, we are now playing 'Stripes' in our test lab....

Remember the 'urban assult vehicle'?

[Kent]

At least you can get the bicycle today ;-) http://www.bromptonbicycle.co.uk/

[morose]

I second the motion that it's just an RV. I suspect currently available models of RV have more usable space, too, given the remarks about the angled walls and such. If they must repackage the wheeled livingspace to hopefully sell to a younger crowd, why not just apply a new exterior design over an existing model with more usable space?

plus, I suspect these wouldn't sell to people in cities. Cities have higher costs of living and scarce parking space. What good would their startrek-shuttle-styled RV do if the owner has to park it on the farthest edge of their home-city's mass transit system and just take the subway/busses everywhere?

I can see it selling in the suburbs, to aging genXers who want an RV that looks different from their grandparents' RV, but increasing the number of big gaz-guzzling vehicles rumbling around suburban sprawl is not going to make anything better.

[QrazyQat]

I've already got an RV, thanks. Mine is square and therefore has a lot more space inside for its length than this showpiece. Curves in the outer wall of an RV make for a lot less room inside (which is one reason Airstream dropped their old rounded motorhome style in favor of slabsided units). In addition, now many, if not most, RVs have slideouts, a section of the wall that slides out, giving you much more room inside for the length and width of the unit.

This showpiece is nonsense (BTW, a unit that size shouldn't need a tag axle -- the extra rea wheels).

[Dave Chiu]

How much material is required to build one of those things, and how many people is it meant to house? My sense is that the person-to-resource ratio is severely misaligned.

How does it operate within existing infrastructure? Are they suggesting that we pave the world into one great big parking lot so that we have the freedom to move wherever and whenever we please? What's the use context?

What are the resource requirements to support such a lifestyle? I'm talking fuel, electricity, gas, water, sunlight, physical space (you can't stack these things on top of one another...), and the infrastructure needed to support a nomadic workforce.

Car companies need to move away from the personal ownership model and start embracing services. They already make more money off of financial services than they do from manufacturing the actual cars, so the conceptual link is already present.

[futureboy]

If this "IFTF" can't discriminate between a modified Airstream with way shittier ergonomics, and the real future, then I hope they have nothing to do with *my* future.

Oh, and good job, GM, with all the typos and technical illiteracy in your literature like "In Coming call" and "6 M-Sq" or the aforementioned "megaflops of storage".

[Pascal Krzeminski]

The concept is very interesting.
I would like to buy a mobile/home like this for travelling around countries.
Great idea GMC !
Congratulations !
The design of this vehicule is very nice too.
Hoping a production for a nice price ! Go on GMC !
Regards from France / Europe.

[Jolly]

This is just a remake of the GMC MotorHome from the late 1970s, just have a look at this site:

http://www.gmcmotorhome.com/

And This one;

http://www.gmcmi.com/