CUPPA Speaker Series with Michael Batty
May 1, 2019
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location
CUPPA Hall, Lower Level
Address
412 S. Peoria St., Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileJoin us on May 1st for the CUPPA Speaker Series with Michael Batty from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London. Batty's argument in this talk is that we can never predict the future because we always invent it. But if we cannot predict, we can never predict what we might invent. This view poses a major dilemma for those of us who seek to plan, to solve problems that we would hope would lead to more sustainable and more equitable cities, perhaps to more efficient and liveable cities. Although we have invented a lot of technical machinery over the last 50 or more years to help us think about the future, that we have encoded into digital tools and techniques, specifically, we are still not very comfortable in dealing with ways in which we can use these to inform the urban future that we wish to design. In this talk, Batty will explore these dilemmas, drawing from an array of examples that he has been involved in which have been developed for making predictions about the urban future and which we know before we begin cannot give us predictions of what this urban future is with any confidence. Many of these ideas are developed in Batty's recent book Inventing Future Cities (MIT Press,2018) although I will draw on various examples that pertain to the work of my own research group.
Date posted
Mar 4, 2019
Date updated
Apr 3, 2019