Augmented Social Evolution (ASE)

Managers: Ulrich Gehmann, Martin Reiche

How does a future world look like? And why?

The project ASE (Augmented Social Evolution) wants to provide answers to the question of how our future cities may look like, but from a very pracitical point of view. As a community of people in the times of global interconnectivity, we – as humankind – now have the chance to create and share our own view of how our future world should look like to be the utopian world we want to live in. One important facet of this visualization is the very ground and pound we live on: the city and their inhabitants as the primary community in our everyday life.

ASE wants to create the vision of such a city. A city that is created collectively by all of us as one community. By this means, the goal of the project is to create a common ground that lets everybody participate in creating the perfect city: building houses, gardens, parks, shopping malls, community centers and so on. By doing so, we will not only be able to build a collective vision of our desired future, but we will have the unique chance to scientifically analyze the social and individual implications that such a development will face – and learn about our reality. ASE provides a way to share our vision by ultimately describing it in a visual and therefore easy-to-digest way while at the same time raising the awareness that we – as a people – have the control over how we want to live our life in the future.

Central questions of the project therefore are:

• How does a collective utopian city look like?
• How can we model such a city?
• How does the development of this city look like and what does that mean for the current and very real development of real cities, like New York, Shanghai or Johannesburg?
• What can we learn about the ability of a community to create such a collective vision?
• How do individual utopias diverge from a collective one?
• How can we connect this virtual world with the real world we live in?
• And how can we use this insight to improve our lives within existing cities?