Transcript Global City Systems & ICT - The Global Systems Science Blog

Global City Systems & ICT
Global City Systems & ICT
• Developing GSS for Cities
• Evolution of intra-city systems
• Evolution of inter-city systems
Developing GSS for Cities
• Improving inter-disciplinary communication
– Technologist / ICT / Social Scientist gaps
• Barriers
– Emphasis on quantitative modeling – consider unstructured information
analysis as bridge
– Emphasis on uniqueness – consider development of formal hierarchies
of abstraction and scales
• Formal development of “urban science”
– Development of next generation of planners administrators
• Shaping the futures of specific cities through collaborative narrative
development
• Roles of ICT
– Identifying quantitative and qualitative patterns
– Understanding how cities work and how people live in cities
– Understanding the futures of cities
Evolution of intra-city systems
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Need for adaptability of cities in era of rapid change – lack of adaptability in traditional
design/planning methods
Transition from 19th Century industrial models of service & infrastructure management
to 21st Century decentralised management
Emergence of ICT as the fifth utility
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Making the invisible visible
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Knowledge aggregation and dissemination
Decentralised decision-making
Improving perceived Quality of Life
Changing connectedness
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Open/closed, centralised/distributed
Impacts of high-speed transportation and virtualization/dematerialisation on intra-city and
inter-city structures/systems
Maslow’s hierarchy / low -> Local connectedness, physical resources & infrastructure
dependencies
Maslow’s hierarchy / high –> Global connectedness, virtual resources & ICT dependencies
Roles of ICT
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New flexibilities, new dependencies
Governance of information
Impacts on democracy
Evolution of inter-city systems
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National and global coupling among cities
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Forces driving urbanisation
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Pollution
Need for diversity in skills and economies
Alternatives to GDP as key metric – Genuine Progress Indicator (M Porter), Better Life Index
(OECD)
Questions
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Resource efficiency, economic opportunity, innovation
Abandonment of countryside
Specialised roles in global ecosystems
Countervailing forces
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Decay of 19th Century “feeder network” model with hierachy of economic roles
End-point of current urbanisation – a small number of mega-cities?
Can failing cities be brought back to life?
Minimal threshold of size for social & economic survival?
Is there a maximum or optimal size for a city?
Role of ICT
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Globalised ecosystems
Dematerialisation of work
Macro-economic modeling, policy decisions