Understanding the Future City

Abstract

This course is an introductory course designed for researchers, PhD students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. It is intended to give an overview of common concepts and research vocabularies relevant to all work conducted in the Future Cities Lab Global, and to be an opportunity for researchers and PhD students to work together across disciplinary lines and project groups.

Objective

The objective of the course are two folds: • Via introducing research conducted in the Future Cities Lab Global from various disciplines, the course enables researchers and PhD students to establish a systemic and comprehensive understanding of urbanisation with a global perspective. • Based on the conveyed knowledge, researchers and PhD students are able to think, communicate and work together across disciplinary lines; and ultimately initiate creative and sound ideas and frameworks for their own research.

Content

The course has two parts. One part consists of ten thematic lectures given by research modules at Future Cities Lab Global. These lectures address themes related to understanding and managing rapid urbanisation with case studies from Singapore and Zurich. Urbanisation is fast surpassing the city boundaries and even its immediate region today, leading to unequal dependencies within and beyond city boundaries. The resource demands of this expanding urbanisation threaten the environment and ultimately exceed the biophysical limits of the planet. As the settlement footprints expand, the interconnections between them become even more complex, and traditional methods of urban analysis and planning become increasingly insufficient to understand and manage this emerging condition. Research at Future Cities Lab Global takes a ‘settlement systems’ view of the city, which includes both physical/spatial and temporal dimensions of analysis. This could be over years (shaping of riverine landscapes), months (seasonality of crop production), or over the course of a day (daily commuter flows). These temporal dynamics are essential to understand the interdependencies in the system, and to build resilience to shock and change, and requires a multi-disciplinary approach to examine them. These Common grounds course reconciles myriad approaches to studying settlement systems, relevant to new and emerging urban challenges, through ten thematic lectures, including topics such as circular systems and economies of cities, urban energy production, consequences of densification, climate-resilient blue-green infrastructures, emerging mobility technologies and their impacts on cities, and the relationship between urban and rural territories. The second part is composed by two exercises. 1. Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) 3MT is an exercise designed to cultivate academic, presentation, and research communication skills. The competition supports the capacity of researchers to effectively explain their research in three minutes, in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience. 2. Keywords Exercise The keywords exercise is designed to build a common vocabulary for future cities research. It draws inspiration from Raymond Williams’ famous book Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (1976). Additional examples of the keywords academic genre include David Harvey’s essay ‘Space as a keyword’ (2004). Keywords are clustered in groups of three, usually with an internal coherence. This selection of keywords is dominated by verbs – imagine, design, develop, relevant to each thematic lecture. However, it is intended that they trigger discussion on concepts too. The exercise involves working in small teams with no more than 3 people to consider the three words individually and collectively. It requires: 1. Overview statement on the three words (300 words) 2. Etymology of each word and current use (300 words each) 3. Critical reflection the three words in relation to future cities research agendas (500 words) 4. N-gram study on word use over time 5. Relevant visuals (photographs, drawings, diagrams, charts) properly captioned 6. Bibliography of cited sources The exercise shall be submitted as a written essay from each small team two weeks after the last lecture. The keywords entries as a whole may be submitted as a booklet, folio or in the form of a special issues of FCL Gazette. The design of the booklet or folio would be a separate task taken on by a working group voluntarily. The Gazette has an existing format and is ready to use.

Resources