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

全球城市化在交通、粮食生产和物流、人类健康和福祉、教育、社会政策和公共服务以及水和能源管理等领域带来了与密度和规模相关的挑战和机遇。城市规模的开发和区域特大城市的加速创建带来了了解它们对当地和区域环境和居民的影响的紧迫性。新的计算和信息能力，以及前所未有的和不断增长的相关数据，表明有新的机会来了解城市社会和经济系统的总体状况，并开发经过校准和验证的计算模型，以探索新政策、新投资和加快城市基础设施扩张的潜在影响。如果研究团队有能力将这些数据作为一个综合语料库进行探索，研究人员认识到新见解的潜力，并制定更有效的政策和规划。然而，这种平衡状态是一种令人望而生畏的碎片化和准入限制，只有通过拥有足够多的研究人员和令人信服的广泛研究议程才能克服这一点，该议程必须与政策制定者和公民的短期和长期挑战产生共鸣。此外，新的数据组织和分析方法将需要社会、行为、教育、经济学科学家和计算科学家之间的合作伙伴关系。该项目将创建一个研究协调网络，将这些社区聚集在一起，为支持此类科学所需的跨学科、数据驱动的城市研究、分析和城市规划、探索和原型方法、流程、工具、技术和基础设施制定综合研究议程。RCN将利用日益独特且不断增长的数据集和研究团队，这些数据集和研究团队横跨芝加哥大学、芝加哥艺术学院艺术学院、芝加哥金融城，以及斯基德莫尔、奥文斯和美林，后者是一家设计城市规模城市基础设施的全球领先建筑公司。

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.