Envisioning Urbanism for the Automation Age

A candidate for master’s degrees in both architecture and landscape architecture, Gruber is also a graduate research fellow at Perry World House, along with seven other master’s and PhD candidates in various schools at Penn. And in April, he presented research at the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy in Vienna. 

The theme of this year’s seminar was “Public Diplomacy in Moments of Geopolitical Transformation.” It’s a theme that dovetailed neatly with Gruber’s primary research project: Designing for a world without work. In an abstract describing his work for the fellowship, Gruber cites research suggesting that nearly half of American labor could be automated within the next 20 years. The prospect of a society that is less tethered to the strictures of a traditional work life is the background of his research. 

“How are people thinking about the policy implications of this?” says Gruber, who was invited to the Milton Wolf Seminar as part of its Emerging Scholars Program. “There’s a lot of talk around universal basic income and things of this sort. So that turned into, what does a universal basic income urbanism look like?” 

Gruber’s work looks at how the built environment could be designed to anticipate a world where much more work is automated. The question that drives his thesis, entitled 21st Century Boomtown: How can design intelligence be integrated into an increasingly automated and migratory 21st-century labor force? He answers with three theories. 

1. Flexible housing and planning strategies must be employed to anticipate an increase in migratory labor.
2. The domestic and public realm should aide in the advancement of leisure activities and knowledge creation.
3. Infrastructural and material scenarios must allow individuals to take advantage of new technologies and see themselves in their production.

Gruber's thesis was advised by Richard Weller, Meyerson Chair of Urbanism and Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture, and Annette Fierro, Associate Professor of Architecture and Associate Chair. He is going into practice with New York landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz this summer, but hopes to publish a version of the thesis, and carry the overall research project into his career.

“Our cities have evolved, particularly in the last 200 years, to deal with a certain predictability in domestic and public life, as far as time and space,” Gruber says. “I don’t have the exact answers, but my hunch is that the existential problem of [automation] is going to be significant … People need to find a way of creating knowledge that fulfills them and gives purpose. The public sphere and domestic sphere can both change as a result.”