Speaker:

Luís M. A. Bettencourt, Director the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, Professor of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago

Title:

Understanding Cities as Complex Systems: Two applications to Human Development in the US and Infrastructure Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract:

Cities are some of the most complex systems in nature, coupling human social and environmental dynamics, and creating new structures where human cognition, behavior and socioeconomic life become self-consistent with engineered built environments. Over the last decade, much progress has been made understanding cities in fundamental and quantitative ways. This progress is now able to propose new transformational approaches to issues of human development and urban planning.

In this talk, I will start by describing the emerging scientific framework for understanding cities as complex systems, made up of interconnected social and infrastructural networks, and channeling human agency towards societal change. I will then provide two illustrations of new research characterizing i) processes of human development in US cities and neighborhoods and ii) the spatial structure of African cities, measured via massive building footprint datasets. I will argue that this sort of evidence and tools together with the imperatives of fast sustainable development require new frameworks for collaborative planning which bring together bottom-up processes characteristic of the dynamics at the household and local communities with more traditional top-down approaches.

Speaker Bio:

Luís M. A. Bettencourt is the Inaugural Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, as well as an External Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. He has worked extensively on complex systems theory and on cities and urbanization, in particular. His research emphasizes the creation of new interdisciplinary synthesis to describe cities in quantitative and predictive ways, informed by classical theory from various disciplines and the growing availability of empirical data worldwide. He is the author of over 100 scientific papers and several edited books. His research has been featured in leading media venues, such as the New York Times, Nature, Wired, New Scientist, and the Smithsonian.

Location:

In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/94257896953
Passcode: NICO23

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

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