Cities are getting bigger and smarter. Can we still live in them? ERC researchers are on a quest to make our digitized mega-cities more livable.

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It was a warning of troubles ahead. In 2008, a 14-year-old Polish schoolboy hacked into the tram system in Łodz, Poland. For a lark, he reprogrammed a TV remote control to take command of the city’s track points. He proved to be a lousy driver: four trams derailed, more than a dozen people were injured. And yet, there he was playing with the city’s transit system like it was a model train set.

Since then, other urban hackings have made headlines around the world – highlighting how vulnerable our computerised infrastructure really is. Cities are getting bigger and bigger: by 2050, 82 per cent of Europe’s projected population of 581 million will be urban, according to the United Nations. And as cities grow, we keep adding technology: we’re sensing, filming, measuring, analysing, controlling our urban environments constantly. With everything connected to everything else, the city is a place not just of daily wonder but of possible crisis. Added to the routine problems of bad traffic, noise pollution, fouled air, lurking crime, the modern “smart” city starts to look pretty dumb – if not downright unliveable.

Can we fix that?

Can our best minds – in urban planning, civil engineering, computer technology, sociology and other fields – find solutions? “We just can’t afford to say no”, says Debra Laefer, associate professor in the School of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering at University College Dublin. “We’re going to get two billion more people on the planet between now and 2050. And we know two-thirds of them are going to want to live in cities.”

Ludovic Leclercq, Research Director at The French Institute of Science and Technology in Transport, Planning and Networks agrees. “My idea is to provide tools for people to think of new ways of managing cities,” he says.

Leclerq and Laefer are among scores of scientishttps://www.sciencesquared.eu/wanted-human-cityts now applying their in-depth subject expertise to urban research projects funded by the European Research Council, one of Europe’s biggest frontier-research funders. Laefer has developed a new technique for aerial mapping of heritage buildings to help in avoiding damage when tunnelling below them for underground transport systems. Leclerq is laying the foundations for next-generation road traffic management systems that anticipate congestion, rather than reacting to it.

Other ERC-funded researchers are studying how nature builds ecosystems in a diminishing number of green spaces, new ways of modelling cities, and how, in addition to being a source of annoyance, traffic noise actually damages our health. This is blue-sky stuff; it won’t get the refuse collected in your neighbourhood tomorrow. But like all frontier research, it will eventually transform our lives – in this case, what it’s like to live in a big city.

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Source: Wanter: the Human City. European Research Council.

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