Last week I went for the first time to Mexico City to take part in a technical conference at the Universidad PanAmerica (UP). The USA newspapers have been full for many months with stories of murder and kidnapping and so I approached the trip with some apprehension. I am delighted to say that my expectations were enormously exceeded. No doubt there are many dangerous areas in Mexico City, but that is true of many cities around the world. As a photographer I was enchanted with the colours and the light in Mexico City and our hosts at the UP were amazingly well organized, gracious, and generous.

The one big problem we faced however was that of getting around in this city of 20 (25?) million people spread over some 2000 km2. The conference used a 20 seater van or a 50 seater bus on different occasions and we seemed to spend 2-4 hours per day crawling through the congested streets. More independent participants used the MetroBus, a very popular (and overcrowded) Bus Rapid Transit system, or walked. But mostly we suffered in the very nice van.

So it would be wonderful to wave a Smart City wand over this and magically solve these problems. Surely this level of congestion must be having some impact on Mexico City’s further economic development and it definitely has an impact on the quality of life of all economic classes. But transportation is only one of many substantial challenges that the city faces. Despite efforts by the city to prevent it, many (millions?) people live in unauthorised developments where they receive no services, including fresh water and sewage. And this in a city that has had repeated epidemics of Avian Flu.

I can barely imagine what it must be like to be a senior administrator in the city government who is confronted with these totally unmanageable and highly inter-connected problems. So what does GSS have to say about problems of this scale and complexity? Or can it only deal with the easy stuff, such as London?

Your thoughts?

Another point i would like to add on the rationale is the fact (2nd paragraph page 5)

is that The type and shape of these connections (when known) are almost invariably intertwingled and varying across several orders of magnitude

I make explicit reference to page 2.

I would like your feedback on the fact that possibly the scope of Global System Science is also to create a new generation of models and algorithms that incorporate latest result in mathematical approaches. Obvious candidates are the combinations of network theory, game theory, agent-based modelling

Reading the version 2.0 I would like to comment on the definition given in first page.

Just after Papadimitriou citation  (3rd paragraph page first)  I believe it will be nice to shift

the focus on the WWW and services rather than Internet (physical layer)

I would add something like

“Even more the whole hierarchy of systems defined on the Internet layer as the WWW and social networks on it,

create a complex and intertwingled web of networks whose mathematical properties are still unknown at the moment.”

Dear all, thanks for the work done on this document I just post a series of contributions.

Some sily as this one, some (I hope) more substantial

firstly I spotted some misprints in the list of people. I list here the correct entries

Guido Caldarelli IMTLUCCA  Lucca Italy and Istituto Sistemi Complessi CNR Italy

Cattuto Ciro (remove Ciro Cattuto) Institute for Scientific Interchange Turin, Italy

Gallegati (not GALLEGATTI) Mauro Univesity Politechnic of Marche, Ancona Italy

Then please remove Mario Rasetti (Already present Rasetti Mario)

Vittorio Loreto (already present Loreto Vittorio)

Somewhere in the text there is also both ITC and ICT, please check

New series on papers on latest issue of Nature Physics

http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v9/n3/index.html

The role of new scientific analysis to tame the complexity of financial systems