caption: UCBerkeley's campus, site of this year's Urban Systems Symposium. Link to event page: http://urbansystemscollaborative.org/usc-fall-2012-meet-university-of-california-berkeley/ Link to livestream:https://www.youtube.com/ucberkeleyevents

Read below for the description and schedule for this year's Urban Systems Symposium to be held at Berkeley September 11 / 12, 2012. The text also includes background information about this group which includes several members of Public Lab (Lela Prashad, Liz Barry, and more). See attached PDF for the detailed schedule.

The core focus of the Urban Systems Collaborative is the role that information plays in the planning, development, construction, operation, and management of infrastructure and services in cities. At our April 2012 meeting in Chicago we began by looking at this role in the planning and design phases. At the September 2012 meeting in Berkeley, we will be looking at some aspects of the operational phase. Although we bring – deliberately – many different perspectives to these meetings, we suggest that we have a common view of cities that we summarise as follows:

“A city is collection of processes – public, enterprise, and personal – that are founded on the natural and built environments, that are driven by and are intended to support the needs of the inhabitants, and that produce and consume various resources and social outputs. It is a complex system operating on multiple spatial and temporal scales.”

The intent of this work in the operational phase is to enable the inhabitants and the managers of the city to make better decisions: the inhabitants as they exploit the city in living their daily lives and the managers as they seek to provide the best services to the inhabitants.

The two major themes of our Berkeley meeting: 1) performing preliminary mapping of information flows for two domains (Emergency Management and Citizen Engagement) and 2) considering the roles of centralized (Operations Centre) and distributed (Open Data) approaches to regulation. We believe that these are new and important problems, that they are in need of broad study by multiple communities, and that the USC has a vital role to play in this process.