Co-Evolving City Life

ended

How could networks of innovative cities contribute to the solution of humanity’s existential problems? Given the on-going digital revolution and our present-day sustainability challenges, we have to reinvent the way cities are operated. We propose that the requirement of organizing cities in a more resilient way implies the need for more decentralized solutions, based on digitally assisted self-organization, and that this concept is also compatible with sustainability requirements and stronger democratic participation. The CoCi proposal will investigate, whether such a decentralized, participatory approach could compete with a fully centralized approach in terms of efficiency and sustainability, or perform even better than that. This requires in particular to figure out, how distributed co-creation processes can be coordinated and lifted to a professional level in a scalable way. The main questions of the CoCi proposal are: How could more participatory smart cities work, and how can they meet the requirements of being more efficient, sustainable and resilient? What are their risks and benefits compared with centralized approaches? How could digital societies fitting our culture, for example, based on values such as freedom, equality and solidarity (liberté, égalité, fraternité) look like, and what performance can be expected from them? The CoCi proposal brings together two research directions: first, the automation of mobility solutions based on the Internet of Things and Machine Learning approaches, as they have been pursued within the “smart cities” paradigm and, second, novel collaborative approaches as they have been recently discussed under labels such as participatory resilience, digital democracy, City Olympics, open source urbanism, and the “socio-ecological finance system”.