The emergence of data rich urban science and its consequences for planning

Abstract

Worldwide urbanization, the growing availability of data, new uses of technology and the urgent challenges of climate change and equity are all profoundly changing how we understand and plan cities.

In this talk, I will start by describing the emerging scientific understanding of cities as multi-scale complex systems, made up of interconnected social and infrastructural networks.

I will discuss in this light new tools for planning, supporting human centric approaches and working with urban processes of change and development. I will then provide an illustrations of new research characterizing the changing structure of fast developing cities measured via remote sensing and massive new building footprint datasets.

About the Speaker

Luís M. A. Bettencourt is the Inaugural Director the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago and Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the College. He is also Associate Faculty of the Department of Sociology and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He conducts interdisciplinary research on complex adaptive systems in biology and society. His research focuses on the identification, modeling and theory of the systemic processes and properties that create and sustain cities. This work uses interdisciplinary concepts together with many different forms of evidence and data to create new theoretical and methodological syntheses that account for the complex properties of urban environments and produce new science-based solutions. His work is well-known academically and has been influential in developing new theory and new creative approaches to challenges of urbanization worldwide. His new book Introduction to Urban Science (MIT Press, 2021) provides an interdisciplinary synthesis of these ideas and a vision for the future of cities.