#UrbanScience
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dr-mohsin.bsky.social
📢 Call for papers: “AI-Driven Urban Circularity,” a Special Issue of Urban Science (MDPI).

Research on AI, circular cities, smart waste, digital twins and resource recovery is welcome.

Deadline: 31 Oct 2027
www.mdpi.com/journal/urba...

#UrbanScience
September 21, 2026 at 4:12 PM
diegorybski.bsky.social
"Modeling the spatial growth of cities" review by Ulysse Marquis and Marc Barthelemy: arxiv.org/abs/2510.03045 @ulyssemarquis.bsky.social #MarcBarthelemy #urbanscience
October 9, 2025 at 4:39 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
In case you missed any.... the +Lab launch symposium short talks can now be viewed as a YouTube playlist 🍿

youtube.com/playlist?lis...

#urbanscience #cities
July 30, 2026 at 11:43 AM
pluslab.bsky.social
He's equally wary of neat answers from causal inference: "we're asking too much of our tools to answer these questions".

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 28, 2026 at 9:22 AM
pluslab.bsky.social
It means some city infrastructure can't bend when the world changes. The result is lock-in: aging infrastructure, siloed departments, short-term fixes.

See Nancy's full talk at youtu.be/oFQDXGEsMuo?...

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 27, 2026 at 9:02 AM
pluslab.bsky.social
Michael argues we have to accept that many things lie beyond the limit of a system, and we need new tools to deal with closure in space and time.

See Michael's full talk at youtu.be/L0u4uaot4DQ?...

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 23, 2026 at 12:09 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
Cab drivers and other gig workers stay poorly paid, with little path to formalization or better productivity – a pattern he warns could produce a winner-takes-all divide.

See Anand's full talk at youtu.be/vP2E65u4BJE

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 23, 2026 at 9:10 AM
pluslab.bsky.social
See Luis's full talk at youtu.be/QXY9pIjJNEE

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 23, 2026 at 9:07 AM
pluslab.bsky.social
Citizen science captures that experience but is uneven, resource-intensive, and hard to scale globally. Plus there is no broadly agreed definition of "liveable" in the first place.

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 21, 2026 at 4:40 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
Environmental data on cities is often inconsistent, inaccessible or privately held – leaving basic questions like what's "natural" in a city largely unanswered.

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 21, 2026 at 8:27 AM
pluslab.bsky.social
But is this always the case? And before weighing the costs and benefits of urban sprawl, or the measures used to contain it, we first need to agree on how to define and measure it.

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 20, 2026 at 2:35 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
Underneath it all sits a harder question: "What is urban". People often aren't even working from the same definition.

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 20, 2026 at 2:28 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
But the biggest infrastructure decisions - a new metro line in New York for example - don't just respond to a city's dynamics, they "change the very system we seek to predict".

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 17, 2026 at 2:57 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
Big data complicates things further: as he puts it, "they dispense with theory but demand theory". Building a genuine theory behind these distributions, he says, is a top research priority.

See Chris's full talk at youtu.be/wT8PWcXQ1CY

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 17, 2026 at 12:04 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
We still don't know how a city's 3D form shapes the materials it needs, or the minimum required for decent living standards.

See Hadi's full lightning talk at youtu.be/bTyib8VcP1E

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 16, 2026 at 3:02 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 16, 2026 at 10:54 AM
pluslab.bsky.social
See Anni's full lightning talk at youtu.be/qHJ2pnXOKTk

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 15, 2026 at 3:12 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
The real challenge is making sense of data expressed the way computers "think," using methods we're not yet trained for or comfortable with.

See Dani's full lightning talk at youtu.be/EsXNs-dMmRI

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 15, 2026 at 3:07 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
So how do we move governance from incremental change to real transformation, and match decision-making to systems and scales that cut across municipal boundaries?

See Timon's full lightning talk at youtu.be/0zdgMeQVXLI?...

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 14, 2026 at 3:06 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
@bristoluni.bsky.social
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 14, 2026 at 10:21 AM
pluslab.bsky.social
pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
@bristoluni.bsky.social
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 13, 2026 at 2:02 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
So where does AI take us? Driverless cars? Wealth redistribution? Cities will have to react - but slowly given the sunk cost locked into buildings and infrastructure.

See Emmanouil's full lightning talk at youtu.be/0GGdmlviLno?...

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 13, 2026 at 11:16 AM
pluslab.bsky.social
He calls it something of an existential crisis for the field — and makes the case for thinking harder about how we actually get solutions implemented, not just modelled.

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#UrbanScience #Cities
July 10, 2026 at 12:47 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
Prof. Susan Parnell on how urban science actually compounds: ask the normative questions first, don't retreat into pure computation, then get operational — collectively.

See Susan's full lightning talk at youtu.be/3sQNcz8XmdM

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#urbanscience #cities
July 9, 2026 at 7:27 PM
pluslab.bsky.social
In this lightning talk, Somwrita Sarkar asks one of the most important (and unresolved) questions in urban science: "When do 'good' inequalities turn into 'bad' inequalities?"

See Somwrita's full lightning talk at youtu.be/GFOOTqpbMEw

pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
#urbanscience #inequality
July 9, 2026 at 3:08 PM