Workshop Cities
Cities and regions as collective intelligence
Thu 17 Nov - Salon Honnorat
Denise Pumain
Danièle Bourcier
Jean-Pierre Aubin
Theme
Systems of cities and regions are evolutionary territorial organisations. Over hundreds of years they have changed their social content and spatial organisation, according to political and demographic events as well as economic fluctuations. They were both adapting to social change and creating this change. Due to their strong and long lasting interdependences through exchanges of information, artefacts and people, they are co-evolving in a coherent way. They have developed for long under the regulation of political states that they contributed to create and maintain. But recently they have become more and more submitted to new challenges through networks and globalisation. The multinational firms as well as the telecommunication technologies are playing new games with the territories. The social and environmental impacts of these new pressures are tremendously threatening the sustainability of the cultural variety of urban and regional models that were historically invented in all parts of the world. Can cities and regions develop a collective intelligence for facing the difficult issues that are puzzling each of them? A possible solution would be to shift from the former self-organisation of cities and regions into systems of cities and regions towards a conscious coordination, for a better adaptation. Discussions with experts in the science of complex systems could help in the process by sharing knowledge and experience.
A lot of information, knowledge and know-how can be shared by towns and regions: data from observatories, different kinds of inquiries under different media, discussion forums about complex issues of communalities, experiments for solving them, cultural productions. The workshop will examine in a first session how such processes of sharing knowledge can be regulated. A second session will be devoted to the creative commons practices, whose principles could inspire new co-operations. Cities would therefore create networks of collaborative work, including their collective intelligence, as examined in the third session.
The workshop is intended to bring together urban actors, social innovators, cultural entrepreneurs, policy makers and scientists within three sessions:
Duration/Venue
Duration: November 17 (Thu) 9:30-17:30
Venue: Paris, Cité Internationale Universitaire, 19 Boulevard Jourdan,
75014 Paris
Organisation
European Conference on Complex Systems 2005
http://complexsystems.lri.fr/
Access
Exceptionally in the Conference, the attendance to this one day workshop is free, for ensuring the broadest possible participation from the persons interested in the governance of cities and regions.
Programme and schedule
9:30- 11:00 : Sustainable Urban Development
Coordinator: Jean-Pierre Gaudin, Professor, political science,
IEP Aix-en-Provence, Director of the CNRS Programme on Urban Sustainable Development
The Urban Sustainable Development needs sophisticated regulation
processes. There are important interactions but also conflicts between its
main environmental, economic and social objectives. Is it possible to regulate
the contradictions and how? For example, monitoring of the Urban Sustainable
Development could be considered in terms of systems of information, quality
of proceedings and levels of collective learning, including e-collaborative
working.
We also wish to discuss the real impact of participatory forums in Urban Sustainable
development policies. And, to this extent, analyse the difficult relationships
often observed between participatory democracy and the elected bodies.
Keynote speeches:
Bernard Barraqué, Directeur de recherche CNRS : Integrated and participative water management
Jacques Theys, Centre de prospective Ministère de l’Equipement, France : Questioning expertise
Jean Louis Fabiani, Directeur d’études EHESS : Contemporary art and public policies: conflicting assessments and regulations
Discussion
11:00-11:30
Keynote speech : Andrea Bairati, Councellor of the Region di Piemonte for Research : Development & Innovation
Lunch: 12:00-13:00
13: 00 – 13:30.
Keynote speech : Marc Lipinski, Deputy President, Region Ile-de-France
13:30-15:00 Creative commons
project and communalities governance
Coordinator: Danièle Bourcier, CNRS-CERSA, University
of Paris II, Scientific Director of Creative Commons France
Creative commons is a non profit that offers alternative to either exclusivity or other appropriation of knowledge. It helps authors to share and build upon creative work. It develops a real protection of cultural sharing and legal diversity through internet actors self-regulation. This model of sharing is also a model of governance and democracy. Where does this model come from? What is the historical basis? How can that model apply to other common goods such as public information, whatever information, legal, administrative, educational or cultural produced or disseminated by local services? How could cities use this model for their own objectives in the cyberworld? What are the common metaphors between cities and the internet: for example, why would the Internet be a village?
Keynote speeches
Michel Briand, Mayor deputy, Brest City, A-Brest editor in chief, Local Authorities : making public what is public
Marjin Arnoldus, project coordinator for Knowledgeland, Amsterdam: Cities and the journeys of creative work
Paula De Dieu, Leader of International Commons Project, London: Open Public Achives
Discussion
15:30-17:30 Cities and regions
within world networks
Coordinator: Denise Pumain, Professor, geography, Institut Universitaire de
France
Cities and regions are increasingly involved in the networks that multinational firms are creating through their strategic location choices. The increasing volatility of the financial capital and the capacities of the communication technologies are challenging the positions of cities and regions, which become more constrained to develop their competitive advantages. In this new game, different rules could be experimented through exchanging knowledge and cooperating for a more widely distributed economic development. Could networks of collective intelligence help in this process by sharing new tools and inventing cooperative strategies among cities and regions?
Keynote speeches
John Frazer, Professor, International Research Co-ordinator, Digital Practice Ecosystem,
Gehry Technologies, Inc : Talking Cities and the Groningen Experiment;
Laurent Perrin, IAURIF, France: Digital visioning for the future of cities
Guy Engelen, VITO (Flemish Institute for Technological Research, Centre for Integrated Environmental Studies), Belgium: Integrated and spatially explicit decision support tools for urban and regional development
Valérie Chatelet: Strategies for integration of complexity in urban design
Discussion
