New-Tech Europe | March 2019

be encouraged – and even made compulsory – by the authorities in order to relieve some of the pressure on urban mobility. Vehicles will not be delivered to each individual home any more, either. Micro-hubs of letterboxes could be set up to service each street or district. These would be two-way letterboxes: so you could put your laundry in the box for one service-provider to pick up, while another supplier deposits your shopping in the same box. Everything is then orchestrated through a single integrated delivery service. You can see this happening already with the Bringme and Cubee boxes that are used flexibly by different users and delivery providers to handle packages. Here’s the winter collection: now let’s use the 3D printer Another way of relieving urban logistics is to produce locally. This might mean having greenhouses attached to supermarkets, city garden areas, or vertical farming in which plants grow in artificial light in layers above each other and so on. But other things, such as clothes, can also be produced locally. For instance clothes can be produced to our exact size and needs at 3D printer centers in the city. Not resorting to mass production would be an enormous leap forward for the environment, and – better still – the clothes would fit us better. This would certainly suit people in wheelchairs who need special clothes that take account of the fact that they spend much of the time sitting. But would this mean saying goodbye to those lovely designer stores in the city? Certainly not! We will still

Fig 5: Today, there are already Bringme boxes, which provide a more efficient way of delivering packages. In the future, systems like this will be expanded further for each district to make urban logistics more efficient. (Copyright photo: Bringme)

Fig 6: In the future we will produce our clothes with 3D printers, either at home, or at the 3D printer centers in the city. Designers will still create their own collections. It’s just that they will no longer be produced in such large numbers, but to the customer’s size and requirements at 3D printer centers. This dress from fashion designer Danit Peleg comes from a 3D-printed collection. (Photo credits: Daria Ratiner); video: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3s94mIhCyt4]

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