iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

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

youtube.com

+Lab lightning talks - YouTube

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Reposted by +Lab @ University of Bristol

Dani Arribas-Bel @darribas.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

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...

me.darribas.org

Alien Data in Urban Science

My one slide at the +Lab launch in Bristol.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

He's equally wary of neat answers from causal inference: "we're asking too much of our tools to answer these questions". pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

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”.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

It means some city infrastructure can't bend when the world changes. The result is lock-in: aging infrastructure, siloed departments, short-term fixes. See Nancy's full talk at youtu.be/oFQDXGEsMuo?... pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

"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 Nancy Grimm argues cities are built on an outdated "control" premise - treating social, ecological, and technological systems as separate and knowable - rather than the entangled, complex systems they actually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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Michael argues we have to accept that many things lie beyond the limit of a system, and we need new tools to deal with closure in space and time. See Michael's full talk at youtu.be/L0u4uaot4DQ?... pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

“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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Cab drivers and other gig workers stay poorly paid, with little path to formalization or better productivity – a pattern he warns could produce a winner-takes-all divide. See Anand's full talk at youtu.be/vP2E65u4BJE pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

See Luis's full talk at youtu.be/QXY9pIjJNEE pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

He contends that an answer can be obtained in two ways – bottom up individual cost-benefit calculus (why live in this city right now?) versus top down emergent, citywide properties (what is the city for?). And the two don't always agree…

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

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.

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Reposted by +Lab @ University of Bristol

Timon McPhearson @timonm.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Some really fun discussions with some brilliant urban science minds. check out the others too!

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Citizen science captures that experience but is uneven, resource-intensive, and hard to scale globally. Plus there is no broadly agreed definition of "liveable" in the first place. pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Environmental data on cities is often inconsistent, inaccessible or privately held – leaving basic questions like what's "natural" in a city largely unanswered. pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

"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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

But is this always the case? And before weighing the costs and benefits of urban sprawl, or the measures used to contain it, we first need to agree on how to define and measure it. pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

"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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Underneath it all sits a harder question: "What is urban". People often aren't even working from the same definition. pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

But the biggest infrastructure decisions - a new metro line in New York for example - don't just respond to a city's dynamics, they "change the very system we seek to predict". pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Big data complicates things further: as he puts it, "they dispense with theory but demand theory". Building a genuine theory behind these distributions, he says, is a top research priority. See Chris's full talk at youtu.be/wT8PWcXQ1CY pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

We still don't know how a city's 3D form shapes the materials it needs, or the minimum required for decent living standards. See Hadi's full lightning talk at youtu.be/bTyib8VcP1E pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

He traces a pattern across remote sensing, machine learning, quantum computing, and even soft robotics: technologies born outside urban studies keep reshaping what cities are, how they work, and what questions we should be asking about them.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

"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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

See Anni's full lightning talk at youtu.be/qHJ2pnXOKTk pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

For this lightning talk, Anni Beukes draws on fieldwork with Slum Dwellers International to ask: under what conditions do urban service systems in informal settlements support collective adaptation, versus intensifying precarious, household-level self-provisioning?

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

What happens to infrastructure in fast-developing African cities under climate stress?

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

The real challenge is making sense of data expressed the way computers "think," using methods we're not yet trained for or comfortable with. See Dani's full lightning talk at youtu.be/EsXNs-dMmRI pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Testing theories, managing systems, and planning interventions all require data – but going forward, far more of it will be in the form of images, text, and other unstructured sources rather than traditional tables.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Most of the data cities need will be “alien" - so says @darribas.bsky.social, posing an unresolved problem in urban science.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

So how do we move governance from incremental change to real transformation, and match decision-making to systems and scales that cut across municipal boundaries? See Timon's full lightning talk at youtu.be/0zdgMeQVXLI?... pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

@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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

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?

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

"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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

So where does AI take us? Driverless cars? Wealth redistribution? Cities will have to react - but slowly given the sunk cost locked into buildings and infrastructure. See Emmanouil's full lightning talk at youtu.be/0GGdmlviLno?... pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

He calls it something of an existential crisis for the field — and makes the case for thinking harder about how we actually get solutions implemented, not just modelled. pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #UrbanScience #Cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

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.

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Prof. Susan Parnell on how urban science actually compounds: ask the normative questions first, don't retreat into pure computation, then get operational — collectively. See Susan's full lightning talk at youtu.be/3sQNcz8XmdM pluslab.bristol.ac.uk/launch-sympo... #urbanscience #cities

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

“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.”

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+Lab @ University of Bristol @pluslab.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

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

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