All posts by J. David Tàbara

GSS – Orientation Paper

Dear colleagues,

On behalf of the editorial board, please find attached the latest version of the Orientation Paper – Background Material (06-06-2013). If there are any brief additional reactions and comments, I’ll be most happy to introduce them in the last version to be closed later this month after the conference.

Thank you so much for your contributions and enthusiasm so far!

Looking forward to meeting you in Brussels!

David

Version v2 of the GSS Orientation Paper

Dear colleagues,

There has been a lot of activity recently regarding the production of the Orientation Paper on Global Systems Science. First of all we would like to thank very much those who have contributed to our GSS discussions so far, either with pieces of text, the EC consultation process and of course via the GSS blog!

So we think it’s now high time to show what we have been doing so far. Please find attached the long version v2 of the GSS Orientation Paper (2013-05-23) [PDF, 2.8 MB]. There are still some gaps and changes that will be carried in the coming days. Out of this long document we will produce a summary which will be presented and discussed in our GSS Brussels conference in June 10-12.

You can post you general comments on the text on the GSS blog, or if you have some specific comments regarding edits, typos or other issues that you do not consider of general interest to joandavid.tabara@globalclimateforum.org

Thanks a lot for your contribution to this process!

J. David Tàbara, on behalf of editors Carlo Jaeger, Patrik Jansson, Sander van der Leeuw, and Michael Resch

Workshop on Urbanization, Sustainability and Prosperty – Workshop report online

The workshop was organized against a backdrop of rapidly growing renewed interest in the theme of urbanization, which was characterized by Simon in the 1980’s as “the major challenge for [organization] sciences in the 20th century”. To be clear, that does not in any way reduce the importance of the huge amount of work that has already been done on this theme, both in Europe and in North America, in part by participants in this workshop (Batty, Pumain, etc.).

But this work is now reaching a different stage, in part due to the application of complex systems theory to this domain as a result of the work first initiated in the ISCOM project (funded by the ICT directorate of the EU, and led by Lane, van der Leeuw, Pumain and West as PI’s), which seems to be pointing to the possibility that the community may actually be reaching a mature stage in which a theory of urbanization is achievable.

Clearly, this renewed activity is also driven by the fact that the percentage of the world’s population that is living in cities continues to rapidly increase, and that many cities are now so large that a whole new set of challenges arises.

Workshop report [PDF, 1.1 MB]