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| | Dan O'Brien (Northeastern University) | | | Dan O'Brien (Northeastern University) |
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| | Matt Petersen (LA Cleantech Incubator) | | | Ryan Keisler (Descartes Labs) |
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| | Time to Discuss Projects | | | Time to Discuss Projects |
| | | More time for Projects |
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| | 5-7:45 Welcome Reception Dinner | | | 5-7:45 Welcome Reception Dinner |
| | 8:00pm | | | 7:45 Shuttles Depart |
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| | Phil Enquist | | | Phil Enquist |
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| | Ryan Keisler (Descartes Labs) | | | Matt Petersen (LA Cleantech Incubator) |
| | Discussion | | | Panel Discussion: Petersen, Bettencourt, and Santa Fe Mayor Webber |
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| | 5:15pm | | | 5:15pm |
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| | Saturday July 20 | | | Saturday July 20 |
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| | Unofficial Gathering - TBD | | | Free Day - use the wiki to organize group activities |
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| | Unofficial Gathering - TBD | | | Free Day |
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| | Unofficial Gathering - TBD | | | Free Day |
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| | Unofficial Gathering - TBD | | | Free Day |
| | Unofficial Gathering - TBD | | | Free Day |
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| | Sunday July 21 | | | Sunday July 21 |
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| | | Free Day - use the wiki to organize group activities |
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| | | Free Day |
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| | Thursday July 25 | | | Thursday July 25 |
| | 8:30 AM | | | 8:30 AM |
| | TBD | | | Time to work on Projects |
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| | Mani Vajipey | | | Mani Vajipey |
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| ==Speaker Abstracts==
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| ===Chris Kennedy===
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| History and applications of the study of urban metabolism; insights
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| from a study of the metabolism of the world’s megacities; introduction to greenhouse gas
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| “Urban Metabolism”
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|
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| ===Dan O'Brien===
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| <b> Urban Informatics and How Data Are Reshaping Urban Social Science and Policy</b>
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| Many have heralded the arrival of “smart cities,” but wherein lies their promise? This
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| talk will explore the opportunities presented by urban informatics—smart cities’ more
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| mundane cousin—and how data and technology can advance our understanding of social
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| phenomena in cities, in turn enabling new and enhanced policies and programs. Importantly, it
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| will concentrate on resources that are available now to nearly all communities, rather than the
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| less accessible futuristic innovations often associated with smart cities. The talk will walk
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| through how novel digital data and crowdsourcing technologies lay the groundwork for a civic
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| data ecosystem of researchers, policymakers, community leaders, and private corporations that
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| can translate new information into both innovations in policy and a deepening of urban science.
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| The talk will discuss this trend across the United States, often using Boston and the Boston Area
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| Research Initiative as a primary example.
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| <b> Maintaining the Urban Commons through Civic Technology: Exploring Questions of
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| Custodianship, Sustainability and Equity</b>
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| Hundreds of municipalities across the United States and Canada have implemented
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| 311 systems that provide constituents with convenient channels (e.g., hotline, smart phone
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| app) to report issues in public spaces, like potholes, graffiti, and litter. Such problems are no
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| one person’s responsibility but affect everyone’s quality of life, and the 311 is a novel channel
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| for everyday urbanites to address the age old problem of maintaining shared spaces and
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| infrastructure—that is, custodianship in the urban commons. The rich database of reports
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| generated by the 311 system tells the story of how, when, and why people act as custodians.
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| But in doing so, it also reveals broader lessons regarding the potential and limitations of “civic
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| technologies” that engage constituents in the collaborative deployment of public services. This
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| talk will explore what an extended collaboration between the Boston Area Research Initiative
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| and the City of Boston and other local partners has revealed about the dynamics of
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| custodianship and the maintenance of the urban commons; the sustainability of this
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| collaborative, technology-forward approach to such maintenance; and the challenges that arise
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| for questions of equity.
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|
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| ===Matt Petersen===
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| <b>Creating Sustainable Cities: Using the pLAn as a Case Study</b>
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| How do cities create commitments to sustainability that are comprehensive and
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| address equity, economy, and the environment? We'll explore the origins of the Sustainable
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| City pLAn, its architecture, and comprehensive nature, and how it evolved upon the required 4-
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| year update as LA's Green New Deal. We'll also explore the origins of the Climate Mayors, the
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| original focus on deep leadership (i.e., in its initial incarnation as Mayors' National Climate
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| Action Agenda and commitment to bold commitments, deep climate action plans, and annual
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| or regular municipal GHG inventories), and the shift to a broader, more inclusive call to action
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| post-election to include over 400 mayors – including smaller cities who don't have sustainability
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| staff or resources for annual inventories, etc –who committed to adopt the Paris Climate
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| Agreement after Trump declared the US would pull out.
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|
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| ===Audrey de Nazelle===
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| <b>Air Pollution in Cities, Part 1: Problems and solutions</b>
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| The state of air pollution problems around the world will be briefly discussed. We will
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| identify solutions, but also trade-offs and co-benefits. An important aim will be for students to
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| get a sense of the complexity of air quality research and policy, and also to learn to propose and
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| evaluate health promoting urban strategies.
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| <b>Air Pollution in Cities, Part 2: smart innovations in air pollution research and policy</b>
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| The aim is still to recognize the complexity of air pollution research and regulation,
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| and to evaluate health-promoting urban strategies. A brief overview of tools in air pollution
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| research and regulation will be provided, followed by examples of how digital technology can
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| be used in air pollution research, engagement, and decision-making.
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|
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| ===Ryan Keisler===
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| <b>Sensors and Semantics: Understanding Earth from Above</b>
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| ===Jagan Shah===
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| <b>India Smart Cities Mission: lesson in disruption</b>
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| Imagine the urban sector in India: 1.25 billion people living frugally in about 60,000
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| villages and wastefully in about 8000 towns and cities; cities that produce wealth, but also
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| consume and pollute in damaging ways. Imagine most city governments being neither
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| financially self-reliant nor capable of delivering services at acceptable levels. Now imagine the
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| Indian government launching a ‘Smart Cities Mission’. Can Indian cities leapfrog with data-
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| driven governance, artificial intelligence and resource management? Can the ‘smart city’
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| concept help India to honour its commitments on the New Urban Agenda and the SDGs? The
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| lecture will address such questions with data, anecdotes and insights. India’s Smart Cities
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| Mission is designed to be disruptive; it is nicknamed ‘Mission Transform-Nation’. Its logo is a
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| digital butterfly. In just four years, the Mission has succeeded in running a nation-wide ‘Smart
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| City Challenge’ to select 100 cities for investment and has promoted integration across
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| domains, convergence of local resources and the creation of a ‘special purpose vehicle’ to plan,
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| implement and operate the assets created. Over 27 billion USD has been committed and 6000
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| projects have been grounded. The lecture will discuss the successes and failures of ‘Mission
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| Transform-Nation’.
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| <b>Making Urban India Sustainable: needs, challenges, opportunities</b>
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| Given their current growth and expansion, Indian cities seem to be en route to
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| becoming unsustainable. Precisely for that reason, they must be the frontline for sustainable
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| development in India. Sustainability and resilience are necessary for protecting the most
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| vulnerable citizens, yet the exact opposite – conspicuous development (read: “poured
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| concrete”) – defines the political economy. This is the situation in urban India, comprising over
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| 8000 cities and 60,000 villages. Economies of scale are easy to identify, smart solutions can
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| replicate faster, but cities suffer from congestion of various kinds. There is the congestion of
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| housing, the congestion of narrow economic self-interests, indigent populations pitted against
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| migrants and start-ups, and there is the congestion of identities; proximity breeding ghettoes.
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| Making urban India sustainable requires the reinvention of citizenship and civic responsibility –
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| a nudge towards substantive democracy – such that India can achieve the ‘decoupling’ from
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| resource-intensive pathways. The systems and networks comprising the city must be low-
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| carbon, buildings must be ‘green’, renewable energy must get locally generated and
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| distributed, water must be regulated, and public transportation must keep pace, both
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| numerically and spatially, with growing demand. While state-of-the-art planning and design are
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| necessary for sustainable cities, the imperative is social sustainability and active citizens.
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|
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| ===Emily Talen===
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| <b>Cellular Dynamics of Urban Change: The Neighborhood Basis of Urban Resilience</b>
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| Resilient cities are neighborhood-based, but few cities are composed of
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| neighborhoods that meaningfully function as the spatial units that urban dwellers relate to.
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| Most neighborhoods tend to be ill-defined and exist only as convenient geographic locators or
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| worse, social separators. In these sessions, I explore how the neighborhoods of resilient cities
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| could be better defined and experienced: place-based, locally governed, centered, bounded,
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| and named—but at the same time not defined by insularity or exclusion. This sets up a series of
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| internal complexities and tensions that need to be resolved in order for neighborhoods to
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| function as meaningful building blocks of sustainable and resilient cities. The existence of
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| multiple conceptions of neighborhood—individualized, cognitive, digital, global—the allure of a
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| looser, contested neighborhood definition, and the complacency that neighborhoods are little
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| more than “valentines” are countered with an aspirational view that neighborhoods can and
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| must be something more.
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|
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| ===Christa Brelsford===
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| <b>Heterogeneity and Sustainability in Cities</b>
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| Quantifying interactions between social systems and the physical environment we live
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| within has long been a major scientific challenge. A better empirical understanding of dynamic
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| interactions between the built environment and urban social structure is necessary to support
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| predictions of how cities will respond to climate change, ensure energy and water security for
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| their residents, and to facilitate urban sustainability and resilience. In this talk, I’ll explore both
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| the spatial and temporal dimensions of heterogeneity in access to urban infrastructure, and
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| consider how these change overall urban sustainability.
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| <b>Using Digital Trace Data to describe Urban Social Processes</b>
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| As the global urban population grows, there is a substantial need for both a universal,
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| quantitative perspective on what a city is, and also sub-city representations of neighborhoods
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| and social processes. We need definitions of urban boundaries which can be updated more
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| rapidly that the decadal censuses which traditionally form the basis of most definitions of
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| ‘cities’, and are more inclusive that pure remote-sensing strategies. Some combination of
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| remotely sensed information and digital trace data are the most likely strategy for more flexible
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| maps of urban environments. We demonstrate that it’s possible to use geo-tagged tweets to
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| distinguish between urban environments in the US and UK based on a spatially embedded
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| network of social contact and describe how these methods can be extended to generate a
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| measure of urban areas that can be consistently applied anywhere there is sufficiently
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| widespread use of the underlying data source. We show how this same data process can also
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| be used to describe within and across city social connectivity, and describe how these social
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| communication maps might be used to inform our understanding of the evolution of coupled
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| social, physical, and economic processes.
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|
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| ===Anni Beukes===
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| <b>From data collection to actionable intelligence: integrating community local knowledge
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| and science for sustainable and equitable cities.</b>
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| Rapid urbanization in emerging cities creates a need to rethink urban planning from
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| the neighborhood level with impact and benefits for the city at large. Creative methods are at
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| our disposal to integrate the power of interdisciplinary approaches to human development with
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| innovations in mapping technologies and local community knowledge. This lecture will trace
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| the trajectory of collaborative work with organized community groups in slums, scientists and
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| technologists in generating reliable and verifiable data on slums premising local community
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| needs and their development agenda. From making the invisible visible, to holding the middle
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| ground where we combine community local knowledge and mobilizing capacity with state-of
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| the-art technology and science, for actionable intelligence. We’re seizing a transformational
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| opportunity to advance a vision for neighborhood equity and empower residents to advocate
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| for improved opportunities locally through collaborative processes and knowledge making. This
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| all creates a new framework for how people engage with planning technologies and practices,
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| the built and natural environment and how these inform human development theory.
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|
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| ===Doug Arent===
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| <b>From Molecules to Markets: How Innovation in Clean Energy Solutions are Changing Our
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| World.</b>
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| The rapid growth of clean energy solutions and their ability to address both
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| distributed and centralized infrastructure, as well as differences in cost structures relative to
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| other energy solutions are driving dramatic change in energy systems. The accelerating
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| advances in materials, components, systems and integrated systems of systems, combined with
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| digitization, decentralization, computing, design and analytic tools offer increasing
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| opportunities for rethinking our energy infrastructure, energy services and development
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| challenges.
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| These dynamics—which are proving out via various experiences—imply opportunities and
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| challenges for development strategies and institutional reform. They also have implications for
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| advanced R&D portfolios, the formulation and evolution of policy; the role and reform of state-
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| owned enterprises; as well as privatization and regulation. In addition, the dynamics engender a
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| particularly active debate regarding decentralization and the balance between central and local
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| approaches to energy and infrastructure for environmental sustainability and economic
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| productivity.
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