Data-driven design
Two global trends — bigger cities and more data — converged last week at MIT, where an international conference on computing and urban studies showed how researchers are harnessing more and more information in an attempt to help cities grow, improve transportation, and prepare for a changing climate and potential disasters. “The challenges and opportunities the planet faces have converged in cities,” Assaf Biderman, associate director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, said in one of the conference’s keynote talks. The four-day Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM) conference sprawled like a large city, featuring over 150 presented papers from a wide variety of scholars and policymakers. With a general theme of “support systems” for planning, the event encompassed new urban analytics, modeling, and urban information infrastructures, among other topics. “There’s an enormous volume of new data we’re collecting about the city [that] does lead to an opportunity to do better logistics...