Resilience and transitions of global complex urban systems

Céline Rozenblat is professor of Urban Geography at the Institute of Geography and Sustainability of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland (Director of the Institute since 2018), vice-president of the International Geographical Union (IGU) and member of the Complex Systems Society. She studies systems of cities at European and world scales, multinational firm networks, inter-urban dynamics, comparative urban data, mapping and visualization of networks in geography, and spatial analysis. For several years she has worked on the relations between the evolution of multi-level urban processes and dynamics in city-system networks. To study these topics comparatively, she has built many databases on European and worldwide cities and the networks they form underlying cities’ properties and evolution in a multi-dimensional and long temporal approach. Diachronic and dynamic studies supply materials to develop spatial and dynamic models and visualizations. Member of the commission of Urban Health & Well-being of the International Science Council, she recently developed studies on the planetary urban health and is coordinating an international MOOC on Urban Health Systems.

In the context of the climate change and energetic and political crises, new tendencies in the long/medium term evolution of urban systems, together with new data and methods, require that existing theoretical assumptions and conceptualizations be challenged as global urban hierarchies are reconfigured. The connection between urban systems at different levels of organization becomes more and more relevant for understanding urban systems and their transitions. But the current inter-urban perspective is not sufficient to encompass these dynamics. The evolution of power distributions inside and between cities reshapes the world organization of central/peripheral cities and the complexity of the global urban system. Actors as multinational firms, or high-level innovation centers, participate actively in these reconfigurations that concentrate wealth, control, innovation, and attractiveness in a few cities. In the complexity of this multi-level system, how is regionalization of the world reshaping in a multipolar urban world? How does the multi-level perspective highlight some resilience properties? The methodologies derived from complex systems sciences bring new forms of intelligibility to worldwide urban transitions.



The colloquium is presential with parallel zoom stream: https://zoom.us/j/98286706234?pwd=bm1JUFVYcTJkaVl1VU55L0FiWDRIUT09



Contact details:

Tobias Galla

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