Scope
About half of humanity lives in urban environments today and that number will grow to 80% by the middle of this century; North America is already 80% in cities, rising to 90% by 2050. Cities have to be efficient, resilient, and sustainable, and they must address quality of life issues for their citizens. To achieve these goals, one has to understand the various processes and phenomena that determine the functioning of cities. Examples to be addressed in this workshop include climate, traffic, energy and resource conservation. We expect that concepts from statistical physics can take us beyond today’s imperfect and often anecdotal view of cities. Today, new technologies provide opportunities for sensors to acquire a plethora of data with high spatial and temporal resolution, including light, temperature, wind, pollution, traffic flow, and even personal information on location, activity, and physiology. Remote sensing also offers new possibilities. Instruments on tall buildings can monitor visible, infrared, and radar images, and hence provide another valuable source of experimental data. Statistical analysis of these data can help to build models that describe observations and help explaining them and ultimately lead to a better understanding and an optimization of processes in cities.
The scope of this workshop is to bring together experts from urban “observatories” that collect various data within cities, and theoreticians that can build models based on those data and deduce from them general laws and concepts that can be applied to planning and optimizations of cities. Employing a “by-analogy” strategy, we expect to apply successfully smaller scale concepts of statistical physics and corresponding results to study related effects at the much larger scales of cities. Particular aspects of urban physics are the following, to name a few: (1) so-called urban heat island that refers to an elevation in urban surface and air temperatures over rural air temperatures, (2) the study of vehicular traffic flow, the formation of traffic jams, and the related optimization of travel times and energy consumption.
Registration
For registration, please go to www.regonline.com/UrbanPhysics.
No registration is needed for invited speakers.
Invited Speakers
- Edith Ackermann (MIT)
- Milad Aghamohamadnia (NYU-CUSP)
- Mehdi Akbarian (MIT-CEE)
- Jean-Paul Bailly (TheCamp, Aix-Marseille, France)
- Yaneer Bar-Yam (MIT & New England Complex Systems Institute)
- Johan Bencivenga * (TheCamp, Aix-Marseille, France)
- Luis Bettencourt (Santa Fe Institute)
- Eric Burkel (TheCamp, Aix-Marseille, France)
- Frédéric Chevalier (TheCamp, Aix-Marseille, France)
- François Creton (TheCamp, Aix-Marseille, France)
- Greg Dobler (NYU CUSP)
- Philippe Dumas (Marseille Polytechnique)
- Valery Freland (Consul General of France, Boston)
- Masoud Ghandehari (NYU-CUSP)
- Filip Gluszak (TheCamp, Aix-Marseille, France)
- Marta Gonzalez (MIT-CEE)
- Thomas Houdaille (TheCamp, Aix-Marseille, France)
- Brian Vant Hull (City University of NY)
- Andreas Karpf (NYU-CUSP)
- Constantine Kontokosta (NYU-CUSP)
- Paul Molga (TheCamp, Aix-Marseille, France)
- Christoph Reinhart (MIT, Head Sustainable Design Lab)
- Michael Schreckenberg (University Duisburg, Germany)
- Jake Sobstyl (MIT-CEE)
- Olivier Tresquet * (TheCamp, Aix-Marseille, France)
- Bernd Widdig (Director of international affairs, MIT)
* to be confirmed
Program
The program of the workshop and the booklet of abstracts and short-bios of the invited speakers
can be downloaded via the links below.