CoCi (Co-Evolving City Life)

Main Question: What implications does the requirement of cities to become more resilient have for their organization?
Main Hypothesis: Decentralization, diversity, backups, solidarity and digitally assisted, participatory approaches are principles that can help to make cities and their operation more resilient.

Publications:
external page Participatory resilience: Surviving, recovering and improving together
external page Design and development of an open-source framework for citizen-centric environmental monitoring and data analysis
external page Less can be more: Pruning street networks for sustainable city-making

Main Question: How can self-organization principles be used to make cities more efficient and resilient to disruptions? How can they be improved with machine learning and swarm intelligence approaches?
Main Hypothesis: When optimization problems are NP-hard (i.e. computationally challenging and complex), self-organization approaches based on short-term anticipation and local coordination, can outperform conventional state-of-the-art centralized control approaches, particularly if the entities learn different behavioural parameters on different time scales (i.e. some fast, some slow).

Publications:

external page Analytically Guided Reinforcement Learning for Green It and Fluent Traffic
external page Adaptability and sustainability of machine learning approaches to traffic signal control
external page Getting Real: The Challenge of Building and Validating a Large-Scale Digital Twin of Barcelona’s Traffic with Empirical Data

Main Question: How can self-organization and resilience principles be used in a way that makes cities more sustainable?
Main Hypothesis: A multi-dimensional measurement, feedback, and coordination system, based on a combination of Internet of Things and Blockchain Technology, can be used to support efficient self-organisation of material flows and supply networks such that a circular and sharing economy is boosted.

Main Question: How can more participatory cities be organized such that they do not get chaotic, inefficient, and dysfunctional, but more innovative, coordinated, and efficient over time?
Main Hypothesis: Digitally assisted self-organization supporting particular kinds of interactions can serve to significantly increase creativity, co-creation, coordination, efficiency, and functionality.

Main Question: How can we understand the dynamics and development of (networks of) participatory cities? How do they compare over time with other organisational paradigms (e.g. more top-down organized approaches) in terms of resilience, sustainability, and cooperation level?
Main Hypothesis: Methods, as they have been developed and studied in mathematical ecology, can be extended by elements such as innovation, co-creation, and learning such that estimates can be made about certain features of the co-evolutionary dynamics of cities.

• MOOC on Self-organization in Pedestrian and Traffic Systems and Logistics
• external page Socio-Economic Implications of the Digital Revolution
• external page Ethics of Smart Cities
• external page Soc-IoT: A Proof-of-Concept for Citizen-Centric Environmental Monitoring
• external page Vayu: An Open-Source Toolbox for Visualization and Analysis of Crowd-Sourced Sensor Data
• external page Getting Real: The Challenge of Building and Validating a Large-Scale Digital Twin of Barcelona’s Traffic with Empirical Data
• external page Digital Twins: Potentials, Limitations, and Ethical Issues
• external page How networks shape diversity for better or worse
• external page Next Civilization