Urban Systems Collaborative / Webinar on Friday February 15, 2013 and Update

[Colin Harrison]

Webinar

Our speakers this Friday at 12:30 pm EST are two masters students in planning at the Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy at Rutgers University.  They are Greg Contente and Ellie Wendell.  As co-chairs of the graduate student organization the International Development Interest Group, Greg and Ellie are leaders in the program's global planning discourse.  They will speak on "International Development & the Urban Planner: A grassroots perspective of how new technologies can boost global action in the 21st century".

To join the Webinar go to join.me/openplans and also dial into our conference bridge 1 888 426 6840, passcode: 35107042  Please do not use the telephone conference built into join.me as I have no way to bridge these two systems at present.

The London Meeting

We have discussed on January 11, 2013 some of the core themes we have in mind for the USC meeting at Imperial College on September 10-11, 2013.  Since then we have begin to plan logistics with our contact, Richard fulsome, at Imperial College. On Tuesday February 19, 2013 we will begin a monthly call for the USC community in which we start to develop the themes and structure for the meeting.  All members of the USC are welcome to join and I hope that we will find a small group of dedicated people who will make the meeting happen.  I will set up a calendar entry with the call details.

Global Systems Science

I am leaving at 05:30 am tomorrow morning to travel to Brussels for a two day meeting of the Global Systems Science and Policy (GSS) group.  The members are mainly from Europe and a few from America.  It was launched in part by Ralph Dum, an Austrian scientific officer at the European Commission, which is where we are meeting this week.  He is responsible in part for developing the European equivalent of the US National Science Foundation programmes of research.  These are called Foundation Programme n, where n is currently 7 and GSS is working towards the 8th.  Another of the founders is Carlo Jaeger, a Swiss now living in Potsdam, who previously founded the Global Climate Forum and is now mainly developing an economics research institute in China.

GSS is trying to develop a research agenda for looking at some of the world's problems from a systems science perspective. Traditionally science is a reductionist philosophy, reducing problems to their simplest example, where a single kind of interaction can be studied.  But more and more of the problems we face today consist of interactions among different systems.  Systems science attempts to handle these inter-actions and inter-dependencies.  GSS is holding four meetings during February, two of which are devoted to Systems Sciece and Urban Development, including the one this week.

Meeting of the Minds Webinar

The Meeting of the Minds team have been running a series of very popular annual conferences on Smart Cities and are now launching a monthly Webinar series.  The first of these is on March 15, 2013 with the Senior Vice President for Smart Cities at Schneider Electric in Paris.  Details of the Webinar are here: http://cityminded.org/cal/schneider-webinar/