Future Cities

ETH Zurich

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Start Date: 01 Apr, 2016
Self-Paced
Study Content: Videos

Understand a city’s people, components, functions, scales and dynamics, as precondition for its sustainable design and management.

Course Fee: Free

Certificate Cost: 50.00 USD

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Introduction

Introduction Video

Course Description

This course is made available through the eLearnAfrica and Edx partnership.

Understanding a city as a whole, its people, components, functions, scales and dynamics, is crucial for the appropriate design and management of the urban system. While the development of cities in different parts of the world is moving in diverse directions, all estimations show that cities worldwide will change and grow strongly in the coming years. Especially in the tropics over the next 3 decades, it is expected that the number of new urban residents will increase by 3 times the population of Europe today. Yet already now, there is an extreme shortage of designers and urban planners able to understand the functioning of a city as a system, and to plan a sustainable and resilient city. To answer questions like: Which methods can contribute to the sustainable performance of a city, and how can we teach this to the next generations, the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore has produced over the last 3 years many necessary research results. “Future Cities” aims to bring these latest results to the places where they are needed most.

The only way to better understand the city is by going beyond the physical appearance and by focusing on different representations, properties and impact factors of the urban system. For that reason, in this course we will explore the city as the most complex human-made “organism” with a metabolism that can be modeled in terms of stocks and flows. We will open a holistic view on existing and new cities, with a focus on Asia. Data-driven approaches for the development of the future city will be studied, based on crowdsourcing and sensing. At first, we will give an overview of the components and dynamics of the future cities, and we will show the importance of information and information architecture for the cities of the future. The course will cover the origins, state-of-the-art and applications of information architecture and simulation. “Future Cities” will provide the basis to understand, shape, plan, design, build, manage and continually adapt a city. You will learn to see the consequences of citizen science and the merging of Architecture and information space. You will be up-to-date on the latest research and development on how to better understand, create and manage the future cities for a more resilient urban world.

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ETH Zurich

ETH Zurich is one of the leading international universities for technology and the natural sciences. It is well-known for its excellent education, ground-breaking fundamental research and for putting its new findings directly into practice. It offers researchers an inspiring working environment and its students a comprehensive education.

Founded in 1855, ETH Zurich today has some 18,000 students from over 100 different countries, 3,800 of whom are doctoral students. About 500 professors currently teach and conduct research in the areas of engineering, architecture, mathematics, natural sciences, system-oriented sciences, and management and social sciences. ETH Zurich regularly appears at the top of international rankings as one of the best universities in the world. 21 Nobel Laureates have studied, taught or conducted research at ETH Zurich, underlining the excellent reputation of the institute.

Transferring its knowledge to the private sector and society at large is one of ETH Zurich's primary concerns. It does this very successfully, as borne out by the 80 new patent applications each year and some 260 spin-off companies that emerged from the institute between 1996 and 2012. ETH Zurich helps to find long-term solutions to global challenges. The focal points of its research include energy supply, risk management, developing the cities of the future, global food security and human health.

This institution is available on eLearnAfrica through partnership with Edx.

You may be able to download course materials after enrolling in this course. If not, all of the necessary course materials provided by the course instructor will be available on the provider's course page.

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Effective Date: September 22, 2016