Syllabus

Short Course Description

The unprecedented growth of population in cities over the last decades, now combined with the aftermath of a global pandemic, makes the smartification of cities and the fusing together of technology and urban planning an urgent and essential topic. While urban life transforms increasingly into digital life, we will explore the integration of urban data from different sources, and try to better frame and understand the current human condition in relation to the cities in which we live, considering economic, ecological, and societal aspects that impact and are affected by the accelerated pace of digitization.
How will the interactions we experience in urban environments affect future behavioral patterns? The appropriation of the smart city by the citizens is a major component of urban-tech utilization.
Students will examine how digital life can evolve in ways that tackle social and environmental issues. Open data initiatives are already creating opportunities for data scientists, spanning nearly every discipline, to enrich knowledge in urban contexts. We will focus on (a) integrating data sources to analyse spatial behaviors; (b) studying approaches to ethical use of data, data politics, data sovereignty, digital identities and social scoring; and (c) defining the civics of data creation and ownership.