Luis Bettencourt: “What Urban Science can tell you about the cities of the present, past and future”

The confluence of world wide urbanization and of bigger data of many kinds and from many places is enabling a new, more systematic and more scientific understanding of human societies and of cities in particular. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of the emergent field of urban science, a body of evidence-based, interdisciplinary and predictive knowledge about the general processes that create, sustain and expand human settlements of all sizes, from small towns to megacities.  I will show that classical models of geography, economics and sociology must be integrated and expanded to produce a simple but very generative synthesis of cities as socioeconomic networks, with specific properties tied to the space and the built environment. I will show how the study of human settlements across scales provides an integrative nexus for concepts and evidence (data) across the social sciences, including a deeper understanding of agglomeration effects, social heterogeneity and inequality, neighborhood effects, learning, decision-making and growth. I will finish with some considerations of present and future challenges of sustainability and resilience, which require the kind of scientific knowledge about cities that generalizes to new and unprecedented circumstances.