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Science of Cities Symposium 2022
The Science of Cities Symposium 2022 explored cities as complex adaptive systems through two key panels. The first examined complexity science for building resilient urban environments, while the second focused on regenerative approaches for sustainable development.
Last updated 21 July 2025
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Thematic Panels
Panel 1: Complexity Science for Adaptive and Sustainable Cities
The world we inhabit is increasingly known as a VUCA world – a world confronted by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity – with interconnected challenges such as climate change, changing demographics, ageing population, changing local and global economic structures, among others. The unpredictability of a VUCA world makes planning for an adaptive, liveable and sustainable future challenging, due to the many possible yet uncertain factors and circumstances that could change its evolution.
This growing complexity of improving our daily lives is due to the increasingly interconnected and emergent interactions, relations and flows, at the global, regional, national, town, neighbourhood and individual scales, between the city’s many different urban systems and people. An integrated systems approach that brings together the technical expertise of complexity science and the contextual expertise of cities will thus be needed to scientifically examine the interdependencies of urban systems and scales
This theme focused on the applications of complexity science thinking and/or methods in the urban domain, relating but not limited to, the understanding of integrated urban systems, analytics and data platforms for urban management, complexity and artificial intelligence in urban planning and design, etc.
Panel 2: Science of Regenerative Cities
Cities are continuously evolving and growing in response to the population demands. Sustainability has been a goal for cities to ensure its ability to meet present-day needs without compromising future needs. However, tackling present-day demands and challenges require a paradigm shift in urban planning, design and lifestyles. It is no longer sufficient for cities to minimise environmental losses and repair damaged systems; instead, cities need to shift towards maximising ecological gains such as restoring ecosystems and moving towards building self-sustaining and regenerative cities that improve both human and planetary health.
To facilitate regenerative urbanism, the many years of research on harnessing science, technologies and innovations for sustainable cities can be taken a step further, to develop a holistic understanding of planetary and human health, supported by an ecosystem of multi-stakeholders across urban domains, and enabled through scientific thinking and digital tools.
This theme featured projects that were concerned with the physical, economic and social regeneration of urban spaces and communities, where systematic and scientific analysis was used to understand how to enhance the human-nature symbiosis and/or establish a concerted multi-stakeholder governance model.
Summary Report
The key take-aways from the Science of Cities Symposium are attached.