City Planning: a new interdisciplinary approach?

Workshop organized by François Pitti, Director of strategic foresight, Bouygues Construction, Davide Ruzzon, University of Venice School of Architecture (NAAD program), Alain Berthoz, Collège de France, avec la contribution de Gretty Mirdal, director of the "Brain, Culture and Society" Program of the Paris Institute of Advanced Study.

Workshop closed to the public.

Presentation

The unprecedented acceleration of demographic, social, economic and environmental changes represents a challenge for cities that traditional urban approaches have difficulty in grasping.

Solutions in terms of urban vision, resource management, design as well as construction approaches will need to view the city's highly complex system from a fresh perspective.

Three major obstacles must be overcome:

1) Partitioning:

One of the major problems in the design, implementation and monitoring of urban projects is the compartmentalization of trades and functions. The complexity of the challenges makes imperative an interdisciplinary approach through large and international ecosystems integrating among others public and private actors, the academic sphere and allowing a systemic approach.

2) The question of scales: 

The city is too often seen through a very local scale (building), or too global (City) with a lack of understanding, rules, data ,models, of the intermediate levels, especially that of the district or the block ( in French “le quartier” for example).

3) Decision.

What lessons can living beings and the brain offer us to feed decision-making methodologies that take into account simultaneously the needs, desires, uses, cultures of city users and the global, functional or ethical imperatives ?             

The sciences of the brain offer a very rich set of data and models on the three topics. The aim of this workshop is to reflect on the potential of bringing together city design and neuroscience to tackle these challenges. It is the first step in the preparation of a scientific symposium on the topic.

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Workshop closed to the public.