Global urbanization raises challenges and opportunities related to density and scale in areas including transportation, food production and distribution, human health and wellbeing, education, social policy and services, and management of water and energy. The accelerated creation of city-scale developments and regional megalopolises brings urgency to understanding their impact on the local and regional environment and inhabitants. New computational and information capabilities, along with unprecedented and growing volumes of relevant data, suggest new opportunities to understand the state of urban social and economic systems and to develop calibrated, validated computational models to explore the potential impact of new policies, investments, and accelerating expansion of urban built infrastructure.
Researchers recognize the potential for new insights and more effective policy and planning if research teams had the ability to explore these data as an integrated corpus, yet the equilibrium state is one of daunting fragmentation and access restrictions that can only be overcome by a critical mass of researchers and a compelling, broad research agenda that resonates with the near- and long-term challenges of policymakers and citizens. Moreover, new data organization and analysis approaches will require partnerships between social, behavioral, education, and economics scientists and computational scientists.
The project will create a research coordination network that brings these communities together to develop an integrated research agenda for an interdisciplinary, data-driven approach to urban research, analysis, and planning, exploring and prototyping methods, processes, tools, and infrastructure necessary to support such science. The RCN will leverage a unique and growing collection of data sets and research teams spanning The University of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the City of Chicago, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, a global architecture firm designing city-scale urban infrastructure.
