The City as a Classroom
18 July | Cities can learn from one another’s experiences, said Professor Peter Edwards, Director of Singapore-ETH Centre at the Commonwealth Science Conference 2017.
As reported in external pageBiotechin.Asia on 17 July 2017
–––
Prof Peter Edwards Director of the Singapore-ETH Centre (SEC), spoke at the recent Commonwealth Science Conference held in Singapore about the possibility for cities to learn from each other's experiences.
“It’s not true that every city is different. They follow the same physical, economical and social laws, so it is possible to come up with patterns and rules that might inform how other cities might develop,” he said. The linear relationship between the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect and cities' populations, discovered by SEC researchers, is an example of one such pattern.
Prof Edwards also spoke about an agent-based model that is being developed into a transport planning tool with Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) and Land Transport Authority (LTA).
The model, MATSim falls under the Engaging Mobility project by SEC's Future Cities Laboratory (FCL). It attempts to reproduce the activity and travel decision-making behaviour of an entire commuting population, and the performance of the transport in response to these demands. Such a transport planning tool would help planners understand and evaluate the effects of land-use and transport policy interventions on transport system performance.
“Cities are key to sustainability for all kinds of reasons, including the assembling of creativity, opportunities for solving problems at appropriate scale, and synergy," said Prof Edwards. "But all of that is only possible with much better knowledge about cities, and that is why the new urban sciences are important.”
About the Conference
The Commonwealth Science Conference was jointly organised by Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF) and Britain’s Royal Society and took place on 13-16 June 2017. It brought together scientists at different career stages and from 40 different states to celebrate excellence in science across the Commonwealth.
About the Singapore-ETH Centre
The Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability (SEC) in Singapore was established as a collaboration between ETH Zurich and the external pageNational Research Foundation (NRF) and is part of the CREATE Campus. Research programmes under SEC includes the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) Future Resilience Systems (FRS) and the external pageCooling Singapore project (CS)