Complexity in Cities

Lecture 01 | Explaining the Complexity of Cities Through Digital Twins

Cities are getting ever more complex as new technologies emerge and new challenges to their sustainability appear. Our science is fighting to keep up with this increasing complexity and to this end, it is now recognized that there are many different perspectives needed to achieve a requisite understanding of their form and function. To this end, multiple models of the same phenomena are being developed raising the need to integrate different viewpoints often held by the same person associated with the same place.  

In this quest for an integrated understanding, the idea of the digital twin – models that are close to the real thing – have emerged. The lecture would introduce the notion of the digital twin, speculating on its many meanings and then illustrate how different models of the same place are increasingly characteristic of urban problems, posing the key dilemma of how close a model might come to the real thing without it being the real thing, the actual city.  

 Speaker Bio

Professor Michael Batty (CASA, USL)

Prof Batty is Bartlett Professor of Planning at University College London where he is Chair of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). Prior to his current position, he was Professor of City Planning and Dean at the University of Wales at Cardiff and then Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and the Royal Society (FRS). He is known for his monographs Cities and Complexity (2005), The New Science of Cities (2017) and Inventing Future Cities (2018). He is an expert in the use of computer models to guide urban planning, analyse cities and explore what they could be. He is concerned with the issues of the unpredictability of cities and how these can be met through modelling to tackle issues of urban resilience, such as the recent COVID pandemic.   

Lecture 02 | The Science of Cities from the Bottom-Up: Implications for Urban Planning and Uses of New Technologies

Cities are complex systems involving the integration and coordination of behaviour across many scales from individual behaviour, to entrepreneurship, and to public policy. Traditionally, urban planning adopted a top-down approach, where it was hoped that master planning would deliver economic development and quality of life but where linkages between tools and outcomes remained poorly understood, sometimes with severe negative consequences. Recently, this situation has led to an inversion of perspectives, such as in the New Urban Agenda, calling for urban planning and policy to be more people-centric, and to directly address issues of livability and equity from the bottom-up.  According to this perspective, cities are primarily networks of people and organizations experiencing built, publicly managed environments that act as platforms for social, economic and civic behaviour.  

The lecture would discuss how urban science is built at the intersection of these two perspectives, and provides both predictions and tools for understanding and acting in cities. These approaches would be elaborated in light of new technologies and models of community engagement, towards people centric design in the present, and addressing difficult issues of climate change and sustainable development in the decades ahead.      

 Speaker Bio

Professor Luis Bettencourt (University of Chicago, Santa Fe Institute) 

Prof Bettencourt is the Professor of Ecology and Evolution and Associate Faculty in Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is also the Inaugural Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and External Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of over 100 scientific papers and several edited books, and has been featured in leading media venues. Prof Bettencourt has worked with the UN and NGOs such as Slum Dwellers International (SDI) to pioneer ways in which mathematical analysis of slums can empower communities to create better networks in their urban environments, making services accessible and socio-economic connections possible. Prof Luis Bettencourt is an expert in the use of mathematical models and complexity science to analyse the structure of cities and how they create and can be made to facilitate the potential for socio-economic interactions that produce knowledge, innovation and creativity. 

Date: 3rd August 2023, Thursday
Time: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (SGT)
Venue: Lecture Theatre (LT)425, Level 4, NUS SDE 3, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566