Urbannet is a Satellite Workshop of the European Conference on Complex Systems ECCS 2013 hosted in Barcelona. The workshop will take place in the afternoon of Wed. September 18 and will encompass 3 invited talks of 45 minutes each and 7 contributed talks of 15 min each.
The concept of the ‘smart city’ emerged during the last decade as a fusion of ideas about how ICT might improve the functioning of cities, enhancing their efficiency and contributing to sustainable development and high quality of life. Currently the central role of ICT lies at the core of the concept, but the term ‘smart city’ goes beyond the idea of ICT-driven cities, embracing also the investment in human, social, and environmental capital.
Thanks to the pervasive access to information, citizens’ activities can be more easily monitored, but also affected and modified. ICT tools empower citizens to make more informed decisions (e.g. regarding their travel behavior, energy and resources consumption habits, etc.) and are leading to new forms of social relationships, as well as to the introduction of new activities such as e-shopping or telework. At the same time, the penetration of ICT is turning individuals into passive and/or active ‘sensors’ that produce, exchange and consume an increasing amount of information, generating a variety of heterogeneous data on citizens’ preferences and behavior. Such feedback loops between citizens and city planners and managers are therefore modifying urban dynamics, as well as opening new opportunities for understanding such dynamics and developing new approaches to the design and management of urban systems. The explosion of available data and the development of new forms of data analysis can inform the development of better urban theories and simulation models. Recent advances in areas such as spatial networks or agent-based computational modelling, and more generally the intrinsically holistic and eclectic approach advocated by complexity science, appear as a suitable theoretical framework for the integration of different modelling approaches into a comprehensive toolkit to address the many different questions related to smart cities.
The objective of the workshop, which is mainly related to Conference Track 3 ‘Infrastructures, Planning and Environment’, is to create a space for exchanging state-of-the-art results and innovative ideas on how to address the problems and opportunities opened by smart cities through complex systems theory and methodologies. Particular attention will be devoted to new data-driven approaches to the study of the formation and evolution of urban networks, as well as to new strategies for improving the planning and management of urban infrastructures, such as transportation, energy, or water distribution.
Invited speakers
Marc Barthélemy (Institut de Physique Théorique, CEA & CNRS)
José Manuel Galán (Social Systems Engineering Centre INSISOC, Universidad de Burgos)
The workshop programme can be found here.
These are the slides of the workshop presentations:
José J. Ramasco (IFISC, CSIC-UIB)
Oliva García-Cantú (Nommon Solutions & Technologies)
Alex Serret (Institut Municipal d’Informàtica - Ajuntament de Barcelona)
The workshop will be organized in the frame of the European project EUNOIA. The organization can be contacted through the email account urbannet2013@eunoia-project.eu
