Senseable City: Data-Driven Urban Research – Open Lecture by Carlo Ratti

Carlo Ratti is an architect, engineer, inventor, educator and activist. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the MIT Senseable City Lab, and he is a founding partner of the international design and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati based in Torino, Italy.

For the academic year 2021/2022 he will be visiting professor at the ABC Department of the Politecnico di Milano.

With his Opening Lecture Senseable City: Data-Driven Urban Research he starts his course Strategic vision for the building engineering for the future.

Uncovering the mathematical laws that shape our cities, and harnessing them to reshape our future – with practical studies carried out in the cities of: Paris, Helsingborg, Trieste, and The Bronx, New York

The course will be taught simultaneously at MIT and at the Politecnico di Milano, and students will attend class meetings all together in a hybrid format. Final projects will be conducted in groups exclusive to each university to facilitate in-person collaboration. What brings us together or tears us apart in cities? How do we move, socialize and behave in cities? How does data science help us uncover these hidden patterns, and inform the design of better cities?

Since their emergence around 10,000 years ago, cities have evolved into the most magnificent and consequential artifacts of human culture. Today, Big Data and new computational tools are empowering us to study the forces that shape cities quantitatively for the first time in history. This course helps uncover the laws of urban life through the exploration of new methods borrowed from experimental physics and computational sciences. The resulting equations and models hold the keys to our cities — and to our common urban future.

The event will be held in english both in presence and online.