WCS Science of Cities Symposium

The WCS Science of Cities Symposium convenes international researchers, city and industry leaders to share their scientific insights and methodologies on tackling urban challenges. This year, the Symposium spotlights research on the application of complexity science and data analytics in understanding cities, and the utilisation of a scientific, evidence-based approach towards sustainability and regenerative development in cities. These insights and methodologies will be presented and discussed through two panel discussions.

Held on 31 July 2022, the WCS Science of Cities Symposium will feature two panel sessions:

Panel 1: Complexity Science for Adaptive and Sustainable Cities

The world we inhabit is increasingly known as a VUCA world – a world confronted by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity – with interconnected challenges such as climate change, changing demographics, ageing population, changing local and global economic structures, among others. The unpredictability of a VUCA world makes planning for an adaptive, liveable and sustainable future challenging, due to the many possible yet uncertain factors and circumstances that could change its evolution. This growing complexity of improving our daily lives is due to the increasingly interconnected and emergent interactions, relations and flows, at the global, regional, national, town, neighbourhood and individual scales, between the city’s many different urban systems and people. An integrated systems approach that brings together the technical expertise of complexity science and the contextual expertise of cities will thus be needed to scientifically examine the interdependencies of urban systems and scales, which this theme will focus on.

This theme welcomes abstracts on the applications of complexity science thinking and/or methods in the urban domain, relating but not limited to, the understanding of integrated urban systems, analytics and data platforms for urban management, complexity and artificial intelligence in urban planning and design, etc. Proposals that consider urban adaptability, liveability and/or sustainability are preferred.

Keynote Speakers

	Professor Luís M.A. Bettencourt Director, Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovations, University of Chicago
	Associate Professor Ying Long Assoc. Prof, Tsinghua University; Founder, Beijing City Lab
	Mr Sanjeev Sanyal Member, Economic Advisory Council to India Prime Minister; Secretary, Government of India

Oral Presenters

	Dr Lock Yue Chew Assoc. Prof, Applied Physics, NTU
	Dr Sam Conrad Joyce Asst. Professor, Architecture & Sustainable Design, SUTD
	Mr Nishant Kumar PhD Researcher, FRS, SEC
	Professor Thomas Schroepfer Professor, Architecture & Sustainable Design, SUTD; Co-Director, FCL Global
	Ms Anjanaa Devi Srikant PhD Researcher, FCL Global

Cities are continuously evolving and growing in response to the population demands. Sustainability has been a goal for cities to ensure its ability to meet present-day needs without compromising future needs. However, tackling present-day demands and challenges require a paradigm shift in urban planning, design and lifestyles. It is no longer sufficient for cities to minimise environmental losses and repair damaged systems; instead, cities need to shift towards maximising ecological gains such as restoring ecosystems and moving towards building self-sustaining and regenerative cities that improve both human and planetary health. To facilitate regenerative urbanism, the many years of research on harnessing science, technologies and innovations for sustainable cities can be taken a step further, to develop a holistic understanding of planetary and human health, supported by an ecosystem of multi-stakeholders across urban domains, and enabled through scientific thinking and digital tools.

This theme welcomes abstracts that are concerned with the physical, economic and social regeneration of urban spaces and communities, where systematic and scientific analysis was used to understand how to enhance the human-nature symbiosis and/or establish a concerted multi-stakeholder governance model.

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P1: Urban Planning in the Digital Age – The Singapore Perspective	P2: Sensitivity Analysis for Urban Design Optimisation	P3: Vertical Cities: Complex Emergent Patterns of Movement and Space Use in High-Density Urban Context	P4: Network Science-Based Analysis of Evolutionary Park Systems
P5: The Planning and Design of Resilient Spatial Networks	P6: Identifying Urban Functional Zones by Analysing the Spatial Distribution of Amenities	P7: Spatial Structure of Places in Singapore from a Complexity Perspective of Public Transit Network	P8: Deciphering the Spatial Co-occurrence and Co-change of Industries at the Scale of City
P9: The New World Order of Airports: A Population-and GDP-driven model for Forecasting Aviation Demand in 2050	P10: Limits to Adaptive Capacity of Airports using Aerial Imagery and Machine Learning	P11: Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Response on the Government's Handling of COVID-19	P12: Smart Cities and Crime: Mapping the Impact of Urban Form on Crime Occurrenc
P13: Hybrid Art Places: Exploring the Relationship between Social Media and Art Venues in Singapore	P14: New Launch: International Journal on Smart and Sustainable Cities	P15: Adapting Cities for Climate Change – A Regenerative Approach using Nature-Based Solutions	P16: Cooling Singapore 2.0 and Climate Resilient Development
P17: Mitigating Urban Heat Islands by High-fidelity Modelling and Climate Sensitive Planning	P18: Enhancing Urban Planning in Singapore using Supercomputers	P19: HPC to address Singapore’s Rising Temperatures	P20: Urban System Resilience through a Digital Twin-enabled Approach
P21: Can Demand-side Management Save Space for Solar PV Installation? A case study within the NUS campus, Singapore	P22: For Regenerative Urban Ecologies: Integrated Community Hubs	P23: The Role of Microbes in Regenerative Cities	P24: Intelligent Platform for Urban Farm Design
P25: Influence of Complex Adaptive Systems Theory on Urban Resilience Approaches	P26: NUS Cities - An Open and Inclusive Collaborative platform for Education, Research, and Advisory Services to Address Complex City Challenges

Should you have any queries, please reach out to Ms Tan Yi Xuan (tan_yi_xuan@mnd.gov.sg), Ms Claudia Tan (claudia_tan_from.tp@mnd.gov.sg) or Ms Teo Zhiyi (zhiyi_teo_from.tp@mnd.gov.sg).