Massachusets Institute of Technology Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning Fall 2023 Seminar on

Local Index: Introduction; SPEAKERS; Guidelines; Dates & Schedule; Participation; Moderators; Topics; Research Questions; Science Committee; Book; REGISTER (elsisi@mit.edu)

Urban Science and Digital Transition: e-Planning, twenty years later

updated: 7 December 2023 (reload page for last update)

The Department of Urban Studies & Planning (DUSP) at MIT is offering this fall 2023, the Lunch Speaker Series Seminar on "Urban Science and Digital Transition: e-Planning: twenty years later", on Mondays, 12h30-2 PM, City Arena, Room 9-255. The kick-off, welcome session, was Tuesday, October 3, 2023

This Seminar is associated with a Joint undergrad / graduate for-credit course ("e-Planning & Digital Transition"), and linked to an international symposium (ICPPT23), to (re)examine the impact of information technologies on community life and governance, anticipate the implications for urban futures, and debate relevant DUSP strategies for the next twenty years.

Fall 2023 is the 20th anniversary of our first ‘e-Planning Seminar,' also offered as a Speaker Series with guest talks and MIT faculty as discussants, an accompanying weekly for-credit seminar, and an International Conference on "Information Technologies and Public Participation" (ICPPT03). That conference plus the weekly for-credit seminar, was organized by Pedro Ferraz de Abreu shortly after he finishedv his DUSP PhD. Many DUSP faculty, together with Joseph Ferreira, like Bish Sanyal, Larry Vale, Karen Polenske, Mel King and others, worked with Pedro Ferraz de Abreu and participated in the 2003 events.

The Fall 2023 e-Planning Seminar is a good opportunity to reflect on our framing of ‘urban science' issues two decades ago in order to stimulate deeper discussion of what we mean by the term today, how its pursuit furthers DUSP strategic objectives, and the ways in which we think urban science-related education and research should progress. By looking carefully at past and current thoughts about information technology's influence on community life, urban redevelopment, and governance, we hope to foster a deeper look into the impacts and implications of the ongoing ‘digital transition' on social inequality and participatory planning, examining multi-disciplinary perspectives on the community planning and local governance

The Fall 2023 seminar and symposium complements current DUSP classes.

[more in-depth discussion, further down this page, "e-Planning Research Questions Revisited"]

Moderators:

Joseph Ferreira Jr. (jf@mit.edu)
Pedro Ferraz de Abreu (pfa@mit.edu)

Guest Speakers:

For the International Symposium, check ICPPIT23 Program

The e-Planning Seminar benefits from several MIT Faculty Speakers and Discussants, as well Speakers from other Institutions and Countries, Researchers and / or Practioners, that bring added value insights.

October 3, 2023 Tuesday 4h30-6 PM Inaugural Session Joseph Ferreira (Moderator) Speakers: former DUSP Heads in the past 25 Years MIT-DUSP Head, 1994 to 2002; chair of the entire MIT faculty 2007 to 2009. Bish Sanyal, Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning and Director of the Special Program in Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS)/ Hubert Humphrey program at MIT-DUSP. MIT-DUSP Head, 2002 to January 2009 Larry Vale, MIT-DUSP Associate Dean, Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT-DUSP. MIT-DUSP Head, 2013 to 2020. Eran Ben-Joseph, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at MIT-DUSP Discussant: Pedro Ferraz de Abreu,Professor of e-Planning, Catedratico Conv. (ret, U. Lisboa), MIT Visiting Scholar	Prof. Joseph Ferreira, Intro Prof. Bish Sanyal Prof. Larry Vale Prof. Eran Ben-joseph Prof. Pedro Ferraz de Abreu Prof. Joseph Ferreira, Closing
October 16, 2023 Monday Lunch, 12h-2PM TOPICS: Geography of Inequality, Digital Sovereignty, Technology Innovation and Property Rights Speakers: Christopher Zegras, Professor of Mobility and Urban Planning, Department Head Welcome Joseph Ferreira, Professor (Post-Tenure) of Urban Information Systems e-Planning & Urban Science Seminar Roadmap Pedro Ferraz de Abreu, Professor of e-Planning, Catedratico Conv. (ret, U. Lisboa), MIT Visiting Scholar The Cost of Free: Understanding the new equation relating technology, market economy, regulation, privacy and power. Discussants (MIT-DUSP): Amy Glasmeier, Professor of Economic Geography and Regional Planning Jason Jackson, Associate Professor in Political Economy and Urban Planning	Session Leaflet Chris Zegras, Welcome Pedro Ferraz de Abreu slides Talk
October 23, 2023 Monday Lunch, 12h-2PM TOPICS: Urban Mobility and Smart Cities, Urban Science, AI & Computing Pedro Ferraz de Abreu (Moderator) Speaker: Jinhua Zhao, Professor of Cities and Transportation, MIT-DUSP A.I. for Human Capital Development in the Future of Work Discussants (MIT-DUSP): Andres Sevtsuk, Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning Joseph Ferreira, Professor (post-tenure) of Urban Information Systems	Session Leaflet
October 30, 2023 Monday Lunch, 12h-2PM TOPICS: Digital Social Media, Local Government and Citizen Empowerment Speaker: Lucie Laurian, Chair of the Planning Department, SUNY at Buffalo, NY, USA Elected officials' planning priorities and decisions: Mining social media data for transparency, not curated manipulation Discussants: Sarah Williams, Associate Professor of Technology & Urban Planning, MIT-DUSP Cong Cong, Lecturer of  Urban  Science and Planning, MIT-DUSP	Session Leaflet
November 6, 2023 Monday Lunch, 12h-2PM (City Arena, Room 9-255) TOPIC: Climate Change and Energy & Digital Transitions Speaker: Vera Viviane Schmidt Abomorad, Assessora de Inovação e Integração, Prefeitura Municipal de Santa Helena-PR, Brasil Energy transition in the digital age: sustainable and intersectoral cases from western Paraná State, Brazil Discussants: David Hsu, Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, MIT-DUSP Claudio Ballande, Professor, IFSP, Brasil	Session Leaflet
November 9, 2023 Thursday, 2h30-4PM "Open Class" (MIT-DUSP Stella Room) TOPICS: Sovereignty, Externalities, and Property Rights; Public Policy, Institutions and Regulation in the context of new ICT; Geopolitics of Development in the Information Society Moderator: Joseph Ferreira, Professor (post-tenure) of Urban Information Systems Speakers: Christopher Zegras, Professor of Mobility and Urban Planning, Department Head Welcome Omar Razzaz, Harvard U. & MIT-DUSP Alumn, Former Prime-Minister of Jordan Governing Global Public Goods and Bads Discussants: Pedro Ferraz de Abreu,Professor of e-Planning, Catedratico Conv. (ret, U. Lisboa), MIT Visiting Scholar	Session Poster
November 9, 10, 2023 - ICPPIT23 November 9, 2023, Thursday 2h15 PM: Registration & Reception (MIT-DUSP Stella Room) 2h30 PM Welcome By Chris Zegras, DUSP Head (MIT-DUSP Stella Room) 2h40-4h00 PM Keynote, Omar Razzaz (MIT-DUSP Stella Room) 4h15-6h00 PM Welcome Meeting (MIT-DUSP Stella Room) 7h00 PM: Conference Dinner November 10, 2023, Friday 8h30 AM Registration, Room 9-255 8h45 AM - 6h00 PM Conference Sessions, Room 9-255 6h15 PM Closure (MIT-DUSP Stella Room)
November 13, 2023 Monday Lunch, 12h-2PM TOPICS: Digital Inclusion, Local Government and Citizen Empowerment Speaker: Bárbara Barbosa Neves, Faculty, Monash University, Australia Designing and evaluating emerging technologies to address loneliness in later life: promises and pitfalls Discussants: Catherine D'Ignasio	Session Leaflet
November 13, 2023 ICPPIT23 Talk, 3h30-5PM Room 9.217 TOPICS: Digital Transition, Geopolitics and Citizen Empowerment Speaker: A Conversation with... Carlos Branco, Major-General Conflict resolution in Bosnia: Was it achieved almost twenty years after Dayon? Discussant: Pedro Ferraz de Abreu,Professor of e-Planning, Catedratico Conv. (ret, U. Lisboa), MIT Visiting Scholar	Session Poster
November 27, 2023 Monday , 12h-2PM In Memoriam, Melvin King Communities, Technology & Citizen empowerment e-Planning Tutorial & Praticum Pedro Ferraz de Abreu Q & A on e-Planning Theory & Praxis How to build an expert system How to build a state machine
December 4, 2023 Monday Lunch, 12h-2PM Joint SPURS & e-Planning Fall 2023 Seminar Panel Session TOPIC: Promises and Pitfalls of Technology and Data in Planning Panel: Catherine D'Ignasio, Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning, MIT-DUSP Eric Robsky Huntley, Lecturer in Urban Science and Planning, MIT-DUSP Sarah Williams, Associate Professor of Technology & Urban Planning, MIT-DUSP Pedro Ferraz de Abreu,Professor of e-Planning, Catedratico Conv. (ret, U. Lisboa), MIT Visiting Scholar	Session Leaflet slides CDI ERH SEW "Technology in Planning: we need a Theoretical Framework", PFA
December 12, 2023 Tuesday snack, 4h30-6PM, 9.217 QVO VADIS, DUSP TOPIC: e-Planning Fall Series Report, and DUSP Community Discussion Pedro Ferraz de Abreu Joseph Ferreira Discussants: DUSP Faculty	Session Descriptor

e-Planning Research Questions Revisited

DUSP Seminars on Technology and the City have contributed to understanding the urban planning implications of modern information and communication technologies (ICT). 20 years after the first edition of this Seminar, The new Seminar / Speaker Series 2023 on "e-Planning" builds on this experience and focuses on the new challenges and opportunities for ‘e-planning' as the reach of ICT extends far beyond the automation of traditional tasks.

Towards a research agenda on e-Planning

1. In the last 20 years, e-government became a normal standard, both in the US and abroad. Initially, we saw a multitude of independent initiatives towards improving the use of ICT in public services and public administration, mostly focused on using the Internet to facilitate information access and automation of services. Then, the trend has been toward centralization and consolidation of e-government efforts and, in some cases, a restructuring of the agencies involved. We are now observing the consolidation of central plans and central authorities, or even multi-national regional plans and agencies, which reach far beyond the traditional government IT branches, and are developing e-government strategies and policies touching all sectors in society and all branches of government.

2. As expected, these "e-Government" efforts are impacting planning and setting the agenda for what might be called ‘e-Planning'. Such a trend is forcing planners to look beyond the (relatively) simple and obvious examples of service automation or public access to government information. In effect, will the centralized services move beyond efficient publishing and broadcasting in ways that promote meaningful dialogue among citizens and public/private interests? Shouldn't e-planning differ from e-government in that improved planning processes might involve many partners and less government?

3. This evolution raises many new questions that go beyond re-shaping services. The trend towards a more central role of technology in Government and in Planning has come, somewhat paradoxically, as the technologies have greatly enhanced the prospects for disaggregated, spatial analyses and decentralized, community level planning.Reduced cost and improved technology has stimulated the rapid expansion of detailed, disaggregated data about land use and ownership, geography, infrastructure, environmental conditions, etc. along with new, sophisticated analytical tools and visualization techniques to make the best use of them.

4. This dual trend poses new intellectual challenges at community/neighborhood as well as city/global levels, and it raises research questions on a breadth of issues, with emphasis on Public Participation, Privacy, Security and Freedoms, Institutional reform, and Environmental Planning. Furthermore, its study requires considerable knowledge and understanding of ICT's potential, not only of hardware and software, but also of powerful analytical tools, data mining, and communication strategies. "Big Data" is here to stay.

5. Technology is bringing to the table a new wealth of data and parameters, at multiple levels, that were not available to planners before. Besides the well known issues of data filtering and evaluation, how does this data availability impact planning processes, levels and scope? How does it relate to the emergence of "neighborhood planning"? Can ICT facilitate de-centralization of urban revitalization and development efforts? Will it enable new forms of measuring the "performance" of a City, and of City Plans? Will these measures benefit ‘outside' regulators and lobbies or ‘inside' residents and community organizations? What kind of "Smart" do we want in our "smart cities", and how citizen agenda may differ with the "smart industry" business that grew to trillions of dollars?

6. Technology is also the focus of attention in a world troubled with increased levels of insecurity and conflict / competition. How can Planning and IT contribute to a better grasp of the trade-offs among issues of security, human rights and freedoms? What are the new threats to privacy posed by the level of detail and accuracy of data collected in planning procedures and policy implementation? Do we accept the emerging "Curator" model, giving private giant technology companies, like Facebook, Twitter, Google, the power to regulate speech?

7. Technology is facilitating citizen access to information at levels never experimented before. But this new trend towards government centrality, and IT business consolidation, may inform citizens without empowering them. What forms of public participation in decision-making are sought, enabled or deterred by the new policies? Are current technology development policies favoring citizen participatory models, or pushing back citizens to a consumer role?

8. Technology is rapidly changing the public administration landscape. How is it impacting institutions and regulations? Is the new technology challenging the current institutional and regulatory framework for plan-making and urban development? What are adequate paths towards institutional and regulatory reform?

9. New challenges in Planning, with or without an "e", cannot be understood separated from the challenges faced by the people that embody it. What is the role of a planner in this new scheme, between e-Government oriented policies and increased citizen pressure towards interactive planning? What new technology and analytical skills and competencies are required for the new generation of planners? How can we improve our current school curricula to correspond to these new requirements?

10. 20 years ago, we raised many similar questions. What lessons did we learn from our experience? What new questions arise, that must be addressed? Where should we focus our future Research Agenda?

• Ground each presentation with one or more societal objectives of particular concern to DUSP that might be furthered through the use of digital technology e.g., improvements in sustainability, social equity, consensus building, or multi-racial democratic governance,
• Explain the rational for improving urban planning and local government practices through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) - e.g., administrative efficiency, transparency, or clarity of spatial implications,
• Present examples of case studies and empirical research examining particular ‘best practice' efforts to improve urban planning practices through innovative use of ICT,
• Identify unanticipated difficulties or unintended consequences that limited the effectiveness of ICT-lead interventions e.g., data availability/biases, control of data access and analytic capacity, erosion of trust through disinformation, imbalances in cross-and debate relevant DUSP strategies for the next twenty years; anticipate the implications for urban futures, sectional and temporal tradeoffs, absence of business models and organizational support to build consensus for changed behavior,
• Discuss multi-disciplinary contributions to understanding interventions and ICT impacts through, for example, problem restructuring, programmatic design, behavioral modeling, social policy analysis, and organizational theory,
• Draw conclusions and suggest paths forward for advancing urban science education and research and improving our capacity to understand, design and plan equitable and sustainable urban futures.
  
  

Dates, Schedule, Location:

International Symposium: 9-10, November 2023
- City Arena, Room 9-255

Participation & Fees:

- Open for all MIT students (Undergrad/Graduate), faculty & fellows (no fee) [REGISTER]
- Fee-based participation for external participants, by invitation. Interested prospective participants may contact Seminar / Symposium moderators (jf@mit.edu, pfa@mit.edu)

Seminar & Conference Topics

Moderators: Joseph Ferreira Jr. (jf@mit.edu) & Pedro Ferraz de Abreu (pfa@mit.edu)
(dates for session topics to be confirmed)
ICT - Information and Communication Technologies

• e-Planning Research Agenda, Roots and Boundaries
• Urban Science & Computing in Planning
• The Qualitative Leap of modern ICT and its Impacts
• Geopolitics of Development in the Information Society
• Geography of Inequality and Spatial Analysis in Planning
• Digital Sovereignty, Technology Innovation, and Property Rights
• Public Policy, Institutions and Regulation in the context of new ICT
• Public Participation and Decision in Planning in the context of new ICT
• The Cost of Free: new models of Politics and Business
• ICT Ubiquity and the Challenges of new Digital Social Media
• The Challenge of Privacy & Liberties vs. Efficiency & Security
• Digital Charter for Human Rights & Social Justice
• Digital Inclusion, Local Government and Citizen Empowerment
• Urban Mobility and Smart Cities
• Climate Change and Energy & Digital Transitions
• The Challenges of Transdisciplinarity in Academia
• Teaching and Research Agenda for the Future

Science Committee for Seminar Speaker Series and Symposium

co-chairs:

• Joseph Ferreira Jr., MIT, USA
  
• Pedro Ferraz de Abreu, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, MIT (Visiting)
  

• Adriano Pimpão, Universidade do Algarve, Portugal (Jub)
• Andres Sevtsuk, MIT, USA
  
• Barbara Neves, Monash University, Australia
• Bish Sanyal, MIT, USA
  
• Catherine D'Ignazio, MIT, USA
  
• Christopher Zegras, MIT, USA
  
• Cong Cong, MIT, USA
  
• David Hsu, MIT, USA
  
• Eric Huntley, MIT, USA
  
• Ezra Glenn, MIT, USA
  
• Filipe Teles, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal
• José Pinto Paixão, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal (Jub)
• Larry Vale, MIT, USA
  
• Laura Colini, University of Venice, Italy
  
• Lucie Laurian, University of Iowa, USA
• Maria Mavroudi, Berkeley UC, USA
• Manuel Assunção, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal (Jub)
• Muriel Gavira, Universidade de Campinas, Brasil
  
• Sarah Williams, MIT, USA
  

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Book on "e-Planning":

Based on recommendations from the Scientific Committee, Speakers for the "e-Planning" Speaker Series and the International Symposium will be invited to contribute chapters to  a book, "e-Planning for Digital Transition - With No One Left Behind," edited by the e-Planning co-chairs.

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• 2003 Conference (ICPPIT03): web.mit.edu/uis/icppit03/ and www.citidep.net/icppit03/, organized by CITIDEP and MIT

• 1999 Conference (ICPPIT99) : www.citidep.net/icppit99/, organized by CITIDEP and UNL

e-Planning Seminar 2003 - ICPPIT03 - ICPPIT99 (slide show)

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