Innovating the city

You could make a case for the elevator being responsible for the modern world.

It's certainly enabled the modern city. But for Elisha Otis' 'safety elevator' 160 years ago, we'd still be living in three-storey walkups and cities – not to mention economies - would be much smaller than today.

On its way out? Elevator core in Aurora building, Taipei.

It was a simple and extremely robust technology. Not unlike the telephone, another late 19^th century innovation, the elevator continued without any fundamental change for a hundred years. Even today's lifts are based on Otis' concept.

The one big change in has been to add smarts to allocate lifts in large building to riders in the most efficient way. The inventor of destination control, as it's known, Schindler’s research chief Paul Friedli, was in Hong Kong for the Innovation Summit last week, this time hawking the idea of smartphone-controlled elevators.

OK, there's an app for that, you might be thinking. But Friedli and his team figured out pretty quickly that this is more than just another piece of software on your phone screen. Once you untether people from the elevator call button you also make redundant the last 150 years of urban building design. You no longer need a bundle of steel and glass around an elevator core. You can even separate the 'elevator' from the building.

Now you're talking about not reinventing the building, but the entire urban environment. Schindler's concept designs, showed to media last week, include buildings that hang from spiral structures and environments that are horizontal, not vertical, and that create rather than consume green space.

These ideas matter because we are in the middle of one of the great shifts in human history. Billions are moving from the countryside to the city in India, China and elsewhere. The chances are high they will live in a ghetto. A billion people live in slums today, and this is forecast to double by 2030. If they are lucky enough to find housing, it will be in a vertical stack of energy-guzzling apartments surrounded by hundreds of others.

So, an innovation challenge. Governments like to talk of innovation as an industry policy that will create jobs. And cities are defined by their forests of banal skyscrapers. But if anything demands innovation - that is, fresh thinking to come up with the best and most feasible solutions - it is this.