+Lab @ University of Bristol
@pluslab.bsky.social
Advancing our understanding of urban places, people, processes, systems and environments with the aim of building the evidence base needed to pursue more sustainable urban and global futures. https://pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/
In case you missed any.... the +Lab launch symposium short talks can now be viewed as a YouTube playlist 🍿 youtube.com/playlist?lis... #urbanscience #cities
+Lab lightning talks - YouTube
youtube.com
+Lab @ University of Bristol@pluslab.bsky.social · 4w agoFind out more about the +Lab launch symposium in our short overview video. Short talks from the event being added daily here: pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... @bristoluni.bsky.social
Here's my pitch for what are and why we need to pay attention to "alien" data, from the @pluslab.bsky.social fantastic launch event. If you want a written version, I put it down on words at: me.darribas.org/2026/06/10/a...
Alien Data in Urban Science
My one slide at the +Lab launch in Bristol.
me.darribas.org
+Lab @ University of Bristol@pluslab.bsky.social · 3w agoMost of the data cities need will be “alien" - so says @darribas.bsky.social, posing an unresolved problem in urban science.
Who measures a city, who computes it, and who cares about the answer? @levijohnwolf.bsky.social argues cash-strapped local governments increasingly outsource these questions leaning on external datasets and tools, including AI, which "launder this experience from elsewhere”.
"It's there. It can't be changed. It's not adaptable." Nancy Grimm argues cities are built on an outdated "control" premise - treating social, ecological, and technological systems as separate and knowable - rather than the entangled, complex systems they actually are.
“The critical issue is where do we define the boundary?” Every model of a city has to stop somewhere - where, is never a clean answer. Michael Batty traces this unresolved problem back to the systems approach to architecture and planning in the 1960s.
Platform firms are moving into Global South cities where huge shares of the workforce already sit outside the formal economy. In this lightning talk, Anand Sahasranaman calls this "digital dualism": digital platforms reorganizing formal sectors while large informal sectors persist.
Why do cities exist at all? Luis Bettencourt sees that as a fundamental unresolved question in urban science, and one from which all others may follow.
Some really fun discussions with some brilliant urban science minds. check out the others too!
+Lab @ University of Bristol@pluslab.bsky.social · 3w ago@timonm.bsky.social argues that cities face multiple, sometimes existential, challenges – yet decisions are still made in silos, by hazard or by sector, even as climate extremes cascade across infrastructure systems.
How do you build global liveability models that still hold up when validated locally? Angela Abascal argues that satellite data measures urban form and infrastructure at scale but misses lived experience.
"We know more about rivers in the Arctic than we do about urban rivers" That's the unresolved problem posed by Josh Dean in this lightning talk. Cities are shaped and used by people daily, yet we understand their ecological systems far less than remote wilderness.
"We don’t know if this is a good idea. We don’t know if this is necessary. We don’t know what the costs are of trying to impose such a limit." Lewis Dijkstra notes that many major policies treat urban sprawl as inherently bad.
Too much information can be as paralyzing as too little. In this lightning talk Madison Lore examines "noisy information environments" – settings where excessive, conflicting information makes it hard to plan well.
We're good at predicting cities as they are — but what about cities as they're about to become? Markus Schläpfer highlights that urban predictions largely rely on observing cities in their existing state.
Urban scaling gives us elegant ‘laws’ – Zipf’s law, gravity, percolation – but do we understand the behaviour behind them? In this lightning talk Chris Webster argues urban science and urban studies "don't know enough about each other" to connect these patterns to real economic theory.
Cities are built one material decision at a time — and those decisions may lock in for centuries. Hadi Arbabi points to a global material debt in cities, with carbon and energy demands still rising just to maintain them.
"How can cities build the capacity to adapt to futures they cannot yet imagine?" Juan Carlos Duque argues urban science is good at studying known trends — but not the changes we can't yet describe.
What happens to infrastructure in fast-developing African cities under climate stress?
Most of the data cities need will be “alien" - so says @darribas.bsky.social, posing an unresolved problem in urban science.
@timonm.bsky.social argues that cities face multiple, sometimes existential, challenges – yet decisions are still made in silos, by hazard or by sector, even as climate extremes cascade across infrastructure systems.
Cities are no longer urbanizing the same way - and we don't fully understand the implications. Ella McCoshan asks the unresolved question: what growing divergence in urbanization pathways means for land, resources, infrastructure, demography, wellbeing, and the economy?
"Who is likely to live where?" In this lightning talk, Felix Agyemang proposes that – despite decades of progress in urban land-use modelling – predicting where development happens, and who ends up living there, remains a key unresolved problem in urban science.
Steam 🚂 Jet engines ✈️ Air conditioning ❄️ Teleconferencing 🖥️ Now AI. Emmanouil Tranos unpacks the feedback loop between new technologies and cities — tech is born in cities, then reshapes what cities are and do.
More data won't save urban planning. In this lightning talk, @geoffboeing.com argues that the field's toughest problems — congestion, air pollution, and beyond — aren't just technical puzzles waiting for one more coefficient.
“You will be more influential than Jane Jacobs. More than Patrick Geddes. Not because you're smarter — because more people are living urban lives today than ever before, and the ideas we act on now will shape more of them than any generation's have.”
In this lightning talk, Somwrita Sarkar asks one of the most important (and unresolved) questions in urban science: "When do 'good' inequalities turn into 'bad' inequalities?" See Somwrita's full lightning talk at youtu.be/GFOOTqpbMEw pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #urbanscience #inequality
And now for a fiendish (unresolved) question from @martinfleischmann.net: "What is a building?" Sometimes questions with apparently obvious answers are very confusing on closer inspection!
Find out more about the +Lab launch symposium in our short overview video. Short talks from the event being added daily here: pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... @bristoluni.bsky.social
What is urban? Director @seanurban.bsky.social's opening talk from our symposium on "unsolved problems in urban science". More short talks from the event being added daily here: pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo...
📽️ 🎬 🎞️ The first videos from the +Lab launch symposium on "Unsolved problems in urban science" are now available! First, a short overview explaining why we organised the symposium and what we want it to achieve. pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... ⚡Individual lightning talks to follow soon...
