On 21 January I was invited to give a lecture at the Master in Smart Cities and Sustainability of the Complutense University (UCM) on how data and processes can help to design a public space that improves both the urban experience and the climate footprint of cities as a whole.
The urban problem
Before the Big Data boom, urban planner Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, said that cities were not a problem, but the solution. A few years after this statement, I decided to do a small test, combining three dimensions: GDP per capita, CO2 emissions per capita, and ‘urbanisation rate’. This is what I got: