Georgetown University has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to explore the boundaries of the dedicated academic discipline of Urban Science. This research workshop is being convened by principal investigator Evan Barba (Communications, Culture & Technology), and co-principal investigators Robin Dillon-Merril (McDunough School of Business) and Uwe Brandes (Urban & Regional Planning). Approximately 40 academics will participate representing many diverse disciplines at Georgetown University and over a dozen other insitutions across the United States.
Our cities, and the larger urban systems in which they exist, are facing unprecedented challenges requiring new research thinking that spans the boundaries of established academic disciplines. Traditionally, social scientists, natural scientists, and engineers have developed theories and models for studying individual components of urban systems (e.g.,water, buildings and infrastructure, transportation, waste removal, schooling, health care, law enforcement, etc.), but this approach has only made incremental progress in solving our sustainability challenges.
Likewise those in policy, governance, and municipal finance circles engage with the problems of urban systems on the ground and have unique insight into how scientists and engineers can best implement and support improvements to our urban sites. Still others, such as artists, laborers, and those in marginalized and vulnerable populations are often the first to see and respond to the issues that make urban systems liveable and give them character.
Developing truly sustainable urban systems (SUSs) will require new transformative research across classes of people and problems that approaches cities and citizens from a convergent systems-level perspective. This means recognizing the interdependencies among the system components and across scales of observation and measurement. This new convergent urban systems perspective will provide researchers with transformative research questions, innovative methods to study these new research questions, and activities to transfer these new knowledge to communities for substantial broader impacts.
This two-day workshop brings together researchers from multiple academic disciplines with practitioners from municipalities and nonprofit organizations to articulate the key features, metrics, and processes that define and regulate SUSs. Our approach recognizes that cities have similarities and can learn from each other’s successes and failures, but also acknowledges that cities come with unique characteristics that often make sharing solutions challenging. In addition to assembling a transdisciplinary and multi-role team with a newly-defined perspective on sustainable urban systems, our conference will have the following, generalizable contributions to the burgeoning science of sustainable urban systems:
-- Elaborate a “comparative method” for analyzing SUSs
-- Isolate comparative features that define SUSs
-- Identify the metrics, data sources, and instrumentation that reflect the health of SUSs
-- Determine how to integrate metrics into the processes that regulate SUSs
-- Name the drivers and roadblocks of collaboration in SUSs
