Urbanization and the science of cities

Just came across a fascinating documentary on urbanization, which in the last 200 years since the industrial revolution has been occurring at an exponential rate and represents the largest impact humans have had on the planet.  Some of the statistics are mind-boggling

• 52% live of world's population live in cities.
• There are 200 000 new urban dwellers every day.
• By 2050 6 billion people, equivalent to today's total population, will live in cities.
• On average over the next 30-40 years, a million people will move into cities every week.
• Cities are responsible for 70% of the world's energy use.

The documentary focuses on the need to better understand how cities work, to develop a serious science of cities in Geoffrey West's words, because althought the major problems we are facing are generated by cities, cities are creative and we should expect that the solutions to these problems will also be generated in cities.

The documentary makes the point that ICT, which enables real-time monotoring, control and automation, will be central to making citiies work, and work sustainably, in the future.

A fascinating example of how technology can be used is an MIT Senseable City Lab project "Trash Track" described by Carlo Ratti in which a micro device was attached to 3000 pieces of garbage and used to track what happened to this stuff after people threw it away.  Incredible to see the diverse places all over the country where stuff we throw way ends up.

Thanks to Melanie Ensign for pointing me to this.