Imagine a kind of system where you have lightweight electric vehicles relatively small battery capacity, and then picking up charge wherever they park. You never have to worry about filling up your car, never go to the gas station, never plug it in, never do any of these things.

What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.

Everybody thinks an automobile needs an engine. Well, an automobile doesn't necessarily need an engine. What we do is shift electric motors into the wheels of our automobiles and so we have a completely different kind of thing where we have four independent intelligent wheels rather than a traditional internal combustion engine and power train and so on.

There is no magical solution because urban traffic congestion arises from the fact that a lot of people want to be in the same place at the same time often.

We [MIT Smart Cities research group] try to identify the fundamental underlying design assumptions that everybody takes as a sort of given and unchallengeable when you think about solving these problems. And we try to challenge those assumptions.

Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.

That's not a utopian vision. It is a set of ideas that we think are important to discuss. Those ideas largely have to do with sustainability of cities. The ability of cities to, over time, remain in balance with the resource streams that are available to them, and they have to do with social justice and equity of the fundamental conditions of satisfactory citizenship.