BCC-SBE: An Urban Sciences Research Coordination Network for Data-Driven Urban Design and Analysis

全球城市化在交通、粮食生产和分配、人类健康和福祉、教育、社会政策和服务以及水和能源管理等领域提出了与密度和规模有关的挑战和机遇。城市规模的发展和区域特大城市的加速形成，迫切需要了解它们对当地和区域环境和居民的影响。新的计算和信息能力，沿着前所未有且不断增长的相关数据量，为了解城市社会和经济系统的状况以及开发经过校准和验证的计算模型提供了新的机会，以探索新的政策、投资、研究人员认识到，如果能够实现这些目标，研究团队有能力将这些数据作为一个综合的语料库进行研究，但平衡状态是一种令人生畏的碎片化和获取限制，只有通过足够数量的研究人员和一个与决策者和公民的近期和长期挑战相呼应的令人信服的广泛研究议程才能克服。此外，新的数据组织和分析方法将需要社会、行为、教育和经济学科学家与计算科学家之间的合作。该项目将创建一个研究协调网络，将这些社区聚集在一起，制定一个综合研究议程，以跨学科的、数据驱动的方法进行城市研究、分析和规划，探索和原型化方法、流程、工具，以及支持这类科学的基础设施。RCN将利用一个独特的和不断增长的数据集和研究团队的收集，跨越芝加哥大学，芝加哥艺术学院，芝加哥市，和斯基德莫尔，奥因斯和梅里尔，一个全球性的建筑公司设计城市规模的城市基础设施。

Global urbanization raises challenges and opportunities related to density and scale in areas including transportation, food production and distribution, human health and wellbeing, education, social policy and services, and management of water and energy. The accelerated creation of city-scale developments and regional megalopolises brings urgency to understanding their impact on the local and regional environment and inhabitants. New computational and information capabilities, along with unprecedented and growing volumes of relevant data, suggest new opportunities to understand the state of urban social and economic systems and to develop calibrated, validated computational models to explore the potential impact of new policies, investments, and accelerating expansion of urban built infrastructure.Researchers recognize the potential for new insights and more effective policy and planning if research teams had the ability to explore these data as an integrated corpus, yet the equilibrium state is one of daunting fragmentation and access restrictions that can only be overcome by a critical mass of researchers and a compelling, broad research agenda that resonates with the near- and long-term challenges of policymakers and citizens. Moreover, new data organization and analysis approaches will require partnerships between social, behavioral, education, and economics scientists and computational scientists.The project will create a research coordination network that brings these communities together to develop an integrated research agenda for an interdisciplinary, data-driven approach to urban research, analysis, and planning, exploring and prototyping methods, processes, tools, and infrastructure necessary to support such science. The RCN will leverage a unique and growing collection of data sets and research teams spanning The University of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the City of Chicago, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, a global architecture firm designing city-scale urban infrastructure.