TechniCity: The Course Begins Again

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Michael Batty

Technicity-New

The second version of this online course starts on 26th February. Register here. I posted a comment when the course began and that is still relevant. Click for this. There is a shortish neat manual that tells you about last years course that you should download here if interested. Taken from the course web site, the course begins “….by examining how our cities are changing. We then jump into how technology is used to engage with the public to support decision-making and the creative ways that every-day people are using technology to improve their cities.   Students will be examining tools for analyzing the city. Then we move into exploring the fascinating ways that cities are using real-time, technology. You’ll hear from technological innovators and thought leaders about all of these topics. You will get to engage around a topic you are most interested in to create a project in your own city.”

Posted in Big Data, Complexity, Connectivity, Flows, Information, Planning Support, Smart Cities | Leave a comment

Science and the City 2014

Posted on February 7, 2014 by Michael Batty

hackfest

Science and the City is an annual weekend-long hackfest, co-organized by NYU’s ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Programme, and CUSP, the Center for Urban Science and Progress. The theme is citizen science for exploring and improving our urban environment. Some of the featured technologies we’ll be hacking on this year are Google Glass, DIY drones and software for crowdsourcing experiments. You don’t have to be a geek to participate – good citizen science projects need a range of skills, from design to communication to local knowledge about New York’s urban environment. And for those interested in these ideas and can’t get to NYC, then in Europe, there is The 3rd Citizen Cyberscience Summit: Feb 20 – 22, 2014 to be held at UCL. (The image above is from the Science and the City blog where the allusion to Liberty’s use of the earphones advertises a project on sampling noise levels from 311 calls in the five boroughs).

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City 1.0, City 2.0, City n.0 … City t

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Michael Batty

Kaleidoscope

A major problem in understanding contemporary (and future) cities is the fact that they ‘appear’ to be changing faster than we can keep up. Our theories which were culled in the last half century about how cities are spatially organised now seem passe. New notions of interaction and the shortening of our attention spans are changing what we consider important in cities. In my current editorial in Environment and Planning B (Volume 41, pages 1-2, 2014), I elaborate this thesis and argue that we may well have to learn to live in a world where our theories are as liquid and as temporary as our behaviours and the processes that determine the structures of what in the past we have taken for granted and considered as being long-lived.

Posted in Big Data, Complexity, Interactions, Smart Cities | Leave a comment