The Urban Alchemist | Smart Cities, AI’s Involvement & Curious Outlooks with BODW 2025’s Dr. Carlo Ratti

Bridging design with academia, practice and policy, Dr. Carlo Ratti challenges how smart cities, AI and his own curiosity come together to operate, perform and inspire collective futures through design thinking at BODW 2025.

Words by Monisha Sivanesan | Images courtesy of BODW 2025

Carrying a powerhouse reputation that resonates across the realms of architecture, technology and urban imagination, Dr. Carlo Ratti is the Italian visionary standing at the forefront of how cities and the built environment think, breathe and evolve through the intersection of design and data. Currently a Professor of the Practice of Urban Technologies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Ratti—trained as both architect and engineer—directs the celebrated Senseable City Lab, a pioneering research hub decoding how digital technologies reshape urban life. He also serves as Full Professor in the Department of Architecture, Built Environment, and Construction Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano. In 2025, he took on one of architecture’s most influential roles as Curator of the Venice Biennale Architettura.

As one of the founding partners of Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA), an international design and innovation studio, Ratti’s work spans continents and disciplines. Among his most poetic achievements is the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic torch, aptly named Essential; it’s a minimalist object charged with symbolism, elegance and purpose. Ratti’s academic journey is as cosmopolitan as his practice. Educated at the Politecnico di Torino and Paris’s École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, he later earned his MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge, completing his doctoral research as a Fulbright Scholar at MIT. Along the way, he founded multiple tech start-ups across Europe and the United States, translating research into real-world impact.

Having co-authored over 500 publications, holding several patents and exhibiting worldwide at famous institutions, including the MoMA, Venice Biennale and London’s Science Museum, Ratti’s influence is both scholarly and cultural. Two of his most notable projects—the Digital Water Pavilion and the Copenhagen Wheel—have been recognised under TIME Magazine’s “Best Inventions of the Year” list. From presenting at TED Talks stages as well as serving as both a member of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Cities and special adviser on Urban Innovation to the European Commission, to writing pages for The New York Times, Washington Post and the BBC, the man who has been featured in Esquire Magazine’s “”Best and Brightest”” list and in Wired Magazine’s “”Smart List” doesn’t just design cities; he helps the world rethink them. Bold, brilliant and unapologetically forward-looking, he is shaping tomorrow’s urban life today.

At Business of Design Week 2025, Ratti shared the urgent necessity of design thinking, cross-disciplinary solutions, and cross-generational collaboration in addressing the issues of climate crisis and declining population faced all over the world. With the utmost passion and know-how, he further expanded on his thoughts on design through an insightful interview with designspeak.asia:

1. The Olympic torch for Milano Cortina 2026 is titled “Essential.” In an age when excess and restraint co-exist, and the relationship between AI and humanity grows more intertwined, what does “essential” mean to you as both a design philosophy and a human value?

For me, “essential” begins with subtraction. You ask: what can I remove without losing meaning. With the Milano Cortina torch we started from the only thing that really matters: the flame. Around it, we stripped away weight, ornament and distraction. The reflective surface, the reduced geometry, the way the object almost disappears and leaves you with an atmosphere of light: all of that is an attempt to frame a phenomenon rather than compete with it.

2a) With AI’s large presence at the exhibition, where do you draw the boundary between algorithmic efficiency and human intuition or imagination?

At the Biennale we treat AI as a microscope, not as a muse. It helps us see patterns we could not otherwise see, but it does not get to decide what a city should become. At the Senseable City Lab we use deep learning to read the urban landscape: to map trees from street-level images, for instance to measure how walking speeds and social interactions have changed since William H. Whyte filmed New York’s plazas in the 1970s. Tasks that once took months of manual observation now take minutes. That is algorithmic efficiency at its best.

But all these systems share the same constraint: the training set. They can recombine what already exists, they cannot yet step outside it. Bruno Zevi wrote about the difference between architects who write “prose” within an existing language and the very few who invent new grammars. AI is excellent at the prose. Imagination begins when you question the language itself. So the boundary, for me, is here: AI explores the space of known possibilities, humans decide when and why to leave that space.

b) What do you have to say to the sceptics and critics of AI’s role in the design sphere?

Their doubts are necessary. Many AI systems are opaque, data-and-energy-hungry, and can reproduce existing biases at scale. If architects ignore that, we are being naive. At the same time, refusing to engage is not a solution. Cities are already being shaped by algorithms: in mobility, logistics, housing markets. If designers stay out of the conversation, others will decide how these tools see and sort the urban world.

I would tell sceptics: keep your suspicion, but bring it to the table. Use AI where it can clearly help: to analyse public space, to surface overlooked voices, to test scenarios. Keep humans responsible for meaning and ethics. And always ask about the training data. Curiosity plus critique is more powerful than rejection.

c) In the quest to enhance civic engagement, how can the design community make smart cities not just technologically intelligent, but also emotionally and socially intelligent?

A city can be “smart” in the technical sense and still feel cold. The goal is different: places where people recognize themselves, and can argue with the future that is being built around them. Some of our projects point in that direction. Our project at the MIT Senseable city lab, Treepedia, began as a computer vision exercise, measuring canopy cover from Google Street View. Once the maps went public, citizens used them as arguments: to demand more trees in overheated neighbourhoods, to question unequal access to shade. Data became a civic instrument, not just a dashboard.

In our project for the 2025 Venice Biennale with the municipality of Naples, we are used large language models to translate residents’ stories into design prompts for the renovation of a surviving “Vela” building. People speak in memories, idioms, fragments. AI helps summarise those narratives into shared priorities and visual options that can be discussed and changed. A socially intelligent city, for me, is one where information flows in both directions: from sensors to citizens and from citizens back into the design loop. Technology is present, but intimacy and conflict are allowed to surface.

3a) How do you know when an idea is ready for the city, and how would academic research and experimentation at the Lab translate into real-world, human-centred implementation?

Citizens should be involved at all stages of a project, and they should be the ones to decide if and when an idea should translate into the real world. This is why we try to be as close as possible to different cities and their citizens through our network of global labs – in Singapore, Seoul, Dubai, Amsterdam, Milan, and Rio de Janeiro.

b) If “Senseable City Hong Kong” existed, what unique urban challenges would you seek to address?

Hong Kong is like a vertical laboratory. Extreme density, steep hills, one of the world’s best transit systems, and a harbour on the front line of climate risk. A Senseable City Hong Kong would have many options of things to explore…. One question I would be interested in is housing – using data to understand the everyday reality of subdivided units.

c) With the data acquired from all the countries where the programme operates, describe your ideal city of 2050.

I do not believe in “the one” ideal city. I believe in many cities, each with its own genius loci: the grain of history, climate and culture that you cannot copy and paste. If I assemble a composite city from our work, it would have public transport as clear and frequent as Hong Kong’s, a food culture as inventive as the great Asian and Mediterranean metropolises, and public spaces where trees, shade and encounter are treated as essential infrastructure.

It would be dense enough to generate ideas, but porous enough that you can reach the countryside, water or forest quickly. Above all, it would be a city that can change its mind. Buildings, streets and digital systems would be designed for adaptation: to demographic shifts, to new forms of work, to climate shocks. The point of data is not to fix 2050 in advance, but to give future citizens room to manoeuvre.

4. What’s one piece of advice you believe is outdated and will no longer give to upcoming architects and designers?

For many years, I told students to focus on perfect drawings and immaculate renderings. In a pre-AI world this was understandable: representation was hard, so it became a proxy for quality. Today I find that advice less useful. I now say: show how you think, not just what you draw. The portfolios that stay with me are not always the most polished. They are the ones where you see questions being asked, constraints being negotiated, ideas taking shape.

AI can automate a lot of representation, but it cannot invent meaning on its own. Start from the strength of your ideas: the argument behind the form, the curiosity that leads you to a site or a material. We also need architects who can work like a choir director, coordinating many voices rather than insisting on a single authorial tone. To borrow Buckminster Fuller’s words, we must be architects of the future, not its victims. That starts with what you choose to value in your own work.

5. Of all the designs you’ve brought to life, which has challenged your degree of curiosity to the maximum?

Lately, Alpine architecture has tested my curiosity. High mountains are beautiful, fragile and unforgiving at the same time. Every design decision feels moral as well as technical. For the Milano Cortina Olympics we have been involved in several mountain projects, including a new kind of bivouac: a small emergency shelter whose geometry is tailored to specific rock formations through digital surveys and fabrication. After being previewed at Milan Design Week, it will be helicoptered to the Alps and left there as a permanent refuge. The most interesting moment came after the first images circulated. A mountaineer friend called and said, in dialect, “It is too beautiful,” worried that such an object might attract influencers to dangerous terrain. At first I smiled, then I realised he was pointing to a serious tension: can design be too seductive in a vulnerable place. Do we respond to overtourism by building less, or by building differently?

That question sent me back into the history of mountain shelters, from early modular huts carried up on human backs, to today’s overtouristed routes in the Alps and beyond. It forced me to think about incentives, digital tools, and how architecture might reward slow, engaged forms of mountaineering while discouraging hit-and-run tourism. I have come to see high-altitude architecture as a laboratory for the future: lightweight, reversible, precisely tailored to context, built with the knowledge that conditions can change fast. If we learn to build with that level of humility in the mountains, perhaps we can carry the lesson back to the cities.

6. If you could collaborate with an unexpected creative field (films, fashion, luxury cars, etc.), how exactly would that curiosity unfold? Tell us your pitch.

I would start in the kitchen. Food is a kind of edible architecture: you work with constraints of material, time and temperature to produce a small experience that can change how people feel and relate to one another. I would love to collaborate with chefs who are friends like Davide Oldani or Rafa Costa e Silva on a hybrid between restaurant and research lab. We could design everything together: the space, the sequences of courses, the choreography of staff and guests, the flows of energy and waste. Imagine a place where table layouts respond to the way conversations evolve, where the menu acts as a map of local ecosystems, and where zero-waste principles are treated as a design brief, not as an afterthought. For me, that would be a delicious way to think about cities.

7. You’ve worked at the intersections of design, academia, entrepreneurship and governance.
a) What keeps your curiosity for them all alive after decades of pushing boundaries?

I often think about Sturgeon’s law: ninety percent of everything is mediocre. It sounds bleak, but I take it as encouragement. If you stay curious long enough, you keep stumbling onto the ten percent that is remarkable. Moving between disciplines increases those chances. A problem that looks stuck in an academic paper can unlock when you discuss it with a mayor, or with a startup founder, or with an activist. Curiosity survives because the same question looks different from each vantage point.

b) Thanks to your experience in each of them, what’s the greatest lesson learnt about being not just a good designer, but a good leader too?

Leadership in design is less about having the final word and more about asking the right first question. In a lab, in an office, or in government, the best moments come when people feel authorised to bring their own perspective to that question. So the main lesson for me is simple: create the conditions for others to think well. That means being clear about goals but flexible about methods, protecting time for reflection, and making sure that data and credit circulate instead of getting trapped at the top. A good leader in design is a good editor. You do not write every line, but you help the story make sense.

8. What’s something unexpected that you are currently curious about, and what’s something in today’s design landscape that you wish people were more curious about?

Lately I have become obsessed with maintenance: how things are cleaned, repaired, adjusted. From ski lifts to traffic lights, a large part of our built environment is really a choreography of people who keep systems alive. We rarely design with them in mind. In the broader design landscape, I wish there were more curiosity about population decline and ageing, especially in countries like Italy. Much of twentieth-century planning assumed endless growth. Today many cities and regions are shrinking. That shift will transform housing, public space, even the economics of infrastructure. It deserves as much creative attention as the next shiny district.

9a) What are the central principles of your keynote, and what is the most important lesson that the business-of-design world should take away from it?

The keynote turns around different ideas: curiosity, collective intelligence, and adaptation. Curiosity, because in an age of AI the unique human skill is to ask new questions, not just to answer old ones faster. Collective intelligence, because meaningful projects now emerge from coalitions of disciplines, sectors and communities. Adaptation, because climate change and demographic shifts are rewriting the brief for every building and every city.

For the business-of-design world, the lesson is that efficiency is no longer enough. Digital tools and AI can certainly streamline workflows, but their real value lies in expanding the search space: seeing overlooked users, testing alternate futures, revealing hidden constraints. The firms that will thrive are those that invest in relationships and learning as much as in software.

b) Among the speakers, whose talk are you personally most curious to watch and learn from, and why?

I am always most curious about the people farthest from my own discipline: the game designer, the behavioural economist, the chef. They often describe problems that architects also face, but in a different language. Listening to them is a good reminder that design is bigger than any one field.