Cultivating Generative Collective Intelligence

Abstract

The Workshop emphasizes the shared challenges faced by cities and urban communities, including climate change, mobility, housing, resource scarcity, and social support systems. While some challenges vary due to geographic and cultural diversity, many are similar across locations within the City Science Network. The proposal suggests collaborating to identify common challenges and foster future collaboration. The workshop will focus on the housing problem and its associated issues, aiming to engage City Science Network members in group activities to identify shared challenges and generate solutions. The goal is to deliver tangible benefits to communities and strengthen collaboration bonds among network members. By addressing a common issue like housing, the workshop seeks to leverage collective expertise and resources to address challenges that transcend geographical and cultural boundaries, ultimately promoting sustainable urban development and resilience.

Takeaways

Three different findings emerged, noticing the hyper locality of certain issues in cities, the importance of complementing the focus on places with socio-demographic information, and highlighting the importance of creating collaborative networks rooted in shared commonalities. Here are the main takeaways from each finding:

  • The Evaluation of Metrics is Hyperlocal: Metrics vary greatly within cities due to factors like time and location, underscoring the need for a more detailed approach to evaluating them in urban environments.

  • People-Centric Prioritization of Metrics: A paradigm shift in metric prioritization, emphasizing the importance of focusing on people rather than places, could complement the workshop.

  • Network Building Rooted in Commonalities: Our third key finding emphasizes the importance of building networks that are founded on a related set of commonalities.

Your experience

It is not easy to set a date when the 3 of us can meet. Moreover, we spent several meetings trying to work on an idea that we finally changed quite drastically, as we were going deep in some debates with no clear conclusions.

As a proposal for next year, we would like to think about and share the interests of the Lab as the first step. With this information, the MIT CSL can do the teams for the 3 workshops. We can do this based on the shared network research lines previously published internally.