[MUSIC] Hi everybody. We are together here because the four of us, that's Neave, Aromar, I'm Sue and this is Michael. And we've all been working together for the last four or five years on a project called Peak Urban which is interested in why cities are so difficult to understand from just one perspective. And we've got quite different entry points. And I just wanted to kind of pull out from each of us how this issue of why it's so important to understand how you are approaching cities but also knowing that you're not doing everything all of the time, works for you and your domain. So we come from quite different sorts of areas. So Neave, I mean you're a data scientist. What does it mean for you to look at cities as a data scientist? >> Thanks Sue. It's actually a really exciting time to be a data scientist when it comes to cities because we have unprecedented access to really detailed data on cities on how people move in cities, taking information from mobile phone data. We know quite a lot about how people interact in cities by mining social media data. We know quite a lot about how cities are changing over time by looking at satellite data. And so it's a really exciting time to be involved in applying data science to urban questions for these reasons. >> Is one entry point of that. Is data science more interesting than any other part of that or geospatial data more interesting than any other part of that? >> I think that there are a lot of different dimensions. I think that certainly there's a spatial data science is very much a hugely growing field, but we also have network analysis which enables us to probe relationships between people and how cities faster this dense density of interactions. That's really at the core of why cities are high functioning and economic spaces. >> I mean when I think of error, I think of somebody who operates at the local national and the global scale on cities. Is it possible, is one better than the other? Talk to us about the question of scale. >> Scale is an interesting question, especially because most of the power of cities is the ability to do things at one scale and do it well. Unlike national governments which are often very siloed and you separate out health from education and you separate that out from economic development, cities and especially city leadership have to deal with all those questions in a place they're accountable for it. So that's a great scale to bring things together and integrate. But then cities are embedded in regions and regions provide them critical things like employment, infrastructure, ecosystem services. So they have to then negotiate across space because scale is not only about levels, it's also about about a territory. And then regions are constrained in many parts of the world because national governments in a sense control and manage and govern things in their own ways. And then in some senses have the constitutional right to actually set up and and reorganize things. So, you really have to have a dialogue, especially in federal systems like India between all these levels. And the interesting thing between, let's say, India and South Africa is India's looked at as a multi tier system and there's a sort of implicit hierarchy while in South Africa because of the history of your transition, they're different spheres of government. So there are different ways of looking at how scale can play itself out. And the critical thing is things succeed when there is dialogue, when there is equity, when there is a whole range of processes that move back and forth and sort of subsidiarity drives the agenda in some ways. When it doesn't, then it becomes quite difficult, especially for the most disadvantaged for the poor, people who are at the margins, they get the worst of a system, which is very hierarchical or exclusionary. >> That's really useful. I want to come back to that in a second. But first I just wanted to check in with Michael because Aro's talking about in the sense understanding different scales and understanding how they work together. In peak we've been also trying to use lots of different disciplines. Are some disciplines better than others for approaching the urban question? >> No, I don't think that that would be the right way to put it. I think one of the things that we worked out very early on is that in understanding the city, we have to start from a viewpoint that different ways of thinking, different ways of working different ways of doing research, different traditions of scholarship. Actually make visible very different cities. They work through different lenses. They make visible city through the lens of economics in a different way that you make the city visible through thinking about public health, which might be slightly different from thinking about optimizing the transport system. So an economist might measure the logic of the utility, optimizing individual health specialist, maybe thinking about what kinds of institutional configurations you have between particular specialisms. What level of cancer care turns into what level of geography across the city as opposed to more direct forms of primary care with doctors working individually with one with patients, different geographies, different speeds. When you think about transport, it would be the case that if you're prioritizing people walking through the city about 15 minutes, city sometimes help promote good public health. But if you if you prioritize a certain kind of mode of transport walking, then that might be at the expense of other kinds of transport about speed through the city. There's a tradition of thinking about cities almost designing cities for the car that ran through much of the 20th century, that's caused problems for the 21st century, precisely because the tyranny of the car begins to dictator logic. So, these different logics are based on very different values, but it's also the case that different disciplines actually make different sorts of things visible. So as we heard from Neave, certain kinds of data science are now able to use very different techniques to see the city from afar using things like satellite technology. But other traditions are based on understanding the invisible city. The traditions of ethnography engagement up close with cultures of people working on the ground. But in places many sites across parts of the world structured by informality and large concentrations of people in informal settlements, you can only understand the dynamics of that by working with people on the ground up close understanding people, co producing your work with them. And it's not that these things, that one is better than the other. We have to think about how we bring these knowledges together. >> Just let me push both of you on this question about how you use different parts of the toolkit, if you like. The disciplinary toolkit, the methodological toolkit. I mean, Michael, you talk about there being different questions that are best used invoking discipline x rather than discipline y. Does it also follow that there's some cities where you're more likely to want to have deep anthropology or more some cities where geospatial work is more possible than others. I mean, how do you feel about how your work lands in different places? This is what I was trying to get from you. Let me take Michael first. >> What I would say is that at the heart of the work we've done, there is a disposition that we kind of bring to the table which is rooted in understanding cities as not just systems but systems of systems. They are rooted in complexity that lends them a degree of instability. But also that very location in the sciences, complexity allows room to acknowledge that geography is very different histories are not always shared. The legacies of history in one part of the world are very different from another part of the world. Configuration of Geography makes every city different. So in a sense part of what we're doing, recognizing that different cities have different path dependencies is actually working from a starting point, which tries to link up both those things that are more universal approaches ways of thinking but recognizing that they need to be made particular and bespoke to individual cities. Because there's never a time It's more important to think about how we understand the past and the context of cities to make sense of their own future. >> What difference does it make? Yeah, I think when it comes to data science and looking at developing cities in particular in a sort of experimental phase, right? So there's a lot missing in the picture you have when you think about developing cities typically in wealthy cities, in highly developed countries, you have very well endowed statistical bureaus, yo spend a lot of time and energy collecting very detailed data. We know a lot about what happens in developed cities. When it comes to developing cities, it's a much more patchy story. And so traditionally mathematics and data science really had no root into these type of questions. There wasn't really an overlap. But now that we see some innovative techniques coming in that enables data sciences to construct in some cases datasets that opened doors to studying new questions. For example, one of the projects I've been involved in review Google street imagery to infer the location of commercial firms in the city where there was no previous data at the firm level. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for experimenting, but it's a very new and fertile ground at this stage. >> So we've heard twice about the sort of fertility of using different entry points into the urban. But Aro, I wanted to put a slightly different question to you. And I mean, they both emphasized the importance of difference and nuance. When you're working on cities at the local scale, I can see that the local difference nuance, different approaches, a sensitive understanding to the data that you've got. But you also talked about a national and importantly, a global agenda for cities. Is the global agenda the same for all cities? Is it important that there is a global agenda, universal urban agenda? >> Well, the thing is like Michael said just now and they've sort of alluded to it. We're talking about systems of systems, fine? The city itself is a system of systems and they're embedded into settlement systems that span both space and time. And we're living in the anthropocene just now, where you're living in a global urban civilization, which is highly connected. I mean, of course on the data side, but just the flow of goods and services and people increasingly that's a big yeah, of course. And all the other things that come with people doing interesting things. So in that context, I think the interesting thing for us is because these are not only systems of systems, but they created a set of interlocking wicked problems for us, right? The question for us is when you're dealing with a wicked problem which is situated in both space and time, because the history and geography is as Michael was saying, then how do you move solution sets or how do you move responses from one geography to the other? First question. Second question is how do you move it across time? I mean, can we learn from what happened in Latin America's hyper urbanization from the 60s to the 90s, that may be useful for parts of Africa or parts of Asia. And that's the question that's moving across space and time at the same thing. So I think that's where we start exploring the sort of integration of disciplines looking at urban science and complexity, things coming from other disciplines, from the biological sciences, from other areas and trying to apply them in this context. I think the really interesting thing is theory is very important because theory allows you to move things out of context and move them into other contexts, whether it's special time, and that's why theory building is very critical. You need to find solutions and processes that work locally. But if you don't have the theory, you can't actually scale solutions. And in a world in which all of these things are interacting, you'll be run over by the complexity of emergent behavior, which is what we see in many parts of the world. So, in that sense, theory is very critical and very important. >> Because it's also important that I agree completely with Aro, it's important to think about how theory relates to practice which is in terms of how we think about how the work itself translates into practical context. Is something that has been very close. >> Yeah, I mean, I think Michael for me, what all of these things say, and which is what I think the project that brought us together was ultimately about was how do we develop the skills and the knowledge that we need to have legitimacy and coherence and integrity at the local scale in a particular discipline, with a particular method asking a particular question. But also be able to scale it up to understand how it relates to other variables to other places to other times. And then to be able to think about what difference does this make in practice? Because at the end of the day the people who have to run cities and you have to live in cities, have to make decisions which media and which adjudicate these very conflicting imperatives. And I think that's really what what we've been trying to do here isn't it? Is to say this isn't a black box, it's not just a case of being incredibly complicated all of the time. We can actually be quite ordered through it and say there are things that we need to know, but there are many and multiple and we've therefore got to be very clear that we probably can't do it alone. We do have to learn to listen to others, we have to respect other traditions, other places, other skills at times, but then to have the confidence to bring it together to scale up in the way that you're talking about. So yeah, I think that's never been more important as the globe becomes urban has become urban then it is never more important to understand these dynamics work at the interfaces of these different cities, different systems within the cities themselves, regardless of where you sit in the world and regardless of what your entry point is into cities, whether you work in or live in them. Thanks. Thanks colleagues
