CEPT AU Lecture Series: An emerging Science of Cities and its Significance to Sustainable Development
Speaker: Prof. Luis Bettencourt
Monday 31 July 2017, 6.00pm to 7.30pm
Venue: Auditorium , CEPT University
Brief of Talk:
In this talk, Professor Bettencourt will argue that we now have the means and the emerging science and practice – because of spectacular progress in information technologies and a new institutional context - to create a model of planning that combines the best features of top-down and bottom-up approaches to generate and assess progress towards inclusive human development and economic growth.
He will discuss how new ubiquitous GIS technologies, collaborative mapping and new models of community organization and participatory planning can coordinate necessary information between communities and institutional actors, such as local governments, NGOs and businesses. He will give some examples from his recent work in US Cities and in urban informal settlements in India and Africa, and will use these cases to illustrate current difficulties and how they can be overcome through the incorporation of new data, scientific knowledge and collaborative information technologies.
Professor Bettencourt will finish with a vision being developed at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation to create a global network of neighborhoods and local governments, working together with NGOs, scientists and technologists to develop best practices and peer-to-peer collaboration networks towards attaining the Sustainable Development Goals in urban neighborhoods all over the world.
He will argue that this type of systematic effort is the critical essence of Smarter Cities, and the entry point for the use of new science, data and technology in cities, while respecting and promoting human agency, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Speaker Brief:
Professor Luis Bettencourt is a leading researcher in urban science and has worked extensively on cities and urbanization. His research emphasizes the creation of new interdisciplinary synthesis to describe cities in quantitative and predictive ways, informed by the growing availability of empirical data worldwide. His research interests also include the modeling of innovation and sustainability in developing human societies, the dynamics of infectious diseases and aspects of general information processing in complex systems. This work has identified several general properties of cities in terms of their built up space, infrastructure networks, innovation, economic productivity and energy use. Professor Bettencourt is the author of over 80 scientific papers and several edited books.
The Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation aims to bring together programs in the social, natural, and computational sciences and in the humanities to enhance the University’s strengths in urban scholarship and education. Professor Bettencourt leads the Mansueto Institute in supporting innovative urban research projects while providing rigorous training for the next generation of urban scholars and practitioners.
The CEPT AU Lecture Series invites globally renowned intellectuals and professionals to share their work and their experiences with the public at large in Ahmedabad. For further information contact us ceptau.lectures@cept.ac.in. Ahmedabad University (AU), a non-profit private university, offers programs in life sciences, engineering and management and is planning to introduce a liberal arts program. It was found by Ahmedabad
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