Enhancing Urban Sustainability with Data, Modeling, and Simulation Proceedings of a Workshop (2019) / Chapter Skim
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4 Challenges and Opportunities for Cities
4 Challenges and Opportunities for Cities
Pages 41-48
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From page 41... ...
Bettencourt directs the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago,1 where he tries to triangulate concepts and methods from ecology, evolution, and the natural sciences with emerging perspectives from the social, political, and economic sciences and new empirical evidence. Bettencourt showed participants an image from Apollo 8 in 1968, which changed people's perspectives about the state of the Earth and is credited with the beginning of the environmental movement, when sustainability entered mainstream public consciousness.
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From page 42... ...
He explained that a societal transformation related to communication and information technology lies ahead and that universal urbanization is occurring along with the digital technologies revolution. Data computing and comparative analysis enable the practice of urban science and urban analytics and present new ways 2 For more information about the United Nations' plan, see http://nua.unhabitat.org, ac cessed March 12, 2019.
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From page 43... ...
Bettencourt emphasized that cities, at their essence, are socioeconomic networks of people and organizations concentrated in space and time. Many researchers are presently aiming to redefine the foundations of social science from this richer and more unifying perspective, based on better empirical evidence and with a renewed focus on human cognition and behavior in complex urban environments.
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. It follows from elaborations of these models that cities express strong network effects, which relate the outcomes of socioeconomic variables nonlinearly to measures of city size, such as population.
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From page 45... ...
volume of infrastructure in a city is not proportional to its population: as cities become larger, there is less area of infrastructure per person but simultaneously an increase in gross domestic product per person and many other socioeconomic outputs that result from human interactions. Bettencourt continued by noting that the density of people within cities, both in terms of space and time, promotes diverse interactions that can be measured in relation to production, consumption, and crime, for example.
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DISCUSSION Aniruddha Dasgupta, World Resources Institute, noted that cities are trying to connect economic growth, environmental footprint management, and quality of life. He asked how innovations in data science and modeling could help to balance those three entities.
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Auroop Ganguly, Northeastern University, wondered how to hold policy makers and citizens accountable for their roles in urban sustainability. Bettencourt explained that almost all large cities are setting up quantitative targets for their energy consumption and carbon emissions, and quantitative harmonized standards have now been developed to measure energy expenditures across cities.
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From page 48... ...
He asserted that cities benefit from incubating these ideas, typically through advocacy at the civic-sector level, which could improve innovation, mobilize public opinion on larger scales, and increase the pressure to create change in politics.
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