Developing Cities with Low Footprints

This Monday, we continued our Sustainability Speech Series by hosting an event on the topic of “Developing Cities with Low Footprints” at East China Normal University.

To help students to gain a better understanding about the topic, we invited Fabien Pfaender,Associate Professor at Université de Technologie de Compiègne; Tom Ford, Practice Area Leader, Planning & Urban Design at Genlser, to share their insights based on their respective experience.

Both speakers have intensive experience working with urban city projects. Fabien has expertise on gathering data from web related services (social network, websites scraping), data exploration with data science techniques, design of meaningful interactive visualizations on various platforms with various languages. His research focuses on exploring urban systems using quantitative methods and interdisciplinary cooperation with data analysis as a common language. Being a motivated member of multiple project teams and providing senior leadership and urban design expertise to Gensler projects throughout the Asia Region, Tom is particularly interested in the cultural and physical contexts in which large and complex projects are envisioned, planned, and developed.

Speaking in front of students at East China Normal University, Fabien started off by talking about the difference between ‘complex’ and ‘complicated’, and then he shared his experience working on the ‘complex city’ project, and how his team connected studies, science, data, and citizens in their work. He explained that studies help researchers to use data by providing them with methods, and science help to visualize the data, and data help to capture the analysis.

Tom started off by discussing the concept of skyline and ground plane as being the observer and the participant respectively, and then he talked about his experience in urban design projects in China, and shared his vision of urban design moving forward.

The speeches were followed by a Q&A session, which allowed students to engage with the speakers, deepen their understanding of the complex city system and urban design, and gain valuable insights for their ongoing research projects.

Should you be interested in the Sustainability Speech Series, please reach out to Chuli at [email protected] or Yuxin at [email protected]

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