Announcements

  • AI for Cities: Generative AI, Digital Twin Simulators for Advanced Urban Efficiency, Quality of Life, and Resiliency

    2025-04-07

    Across the globe, cities are grappling with the dual challenge of sustaining growth while ensuring an improved quality of life for their citizens. Technological innovations—particularly in the realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI)—are revolutionizing how urban environments are planned, managed, and experienced. The integration of advanced technologies such as Generative AI, Digital Twin Simulators, and Agentic AI is transforming urban environments, enhancing urban efficiency, quality of life, and resilience. These technologies offer innovative solutions to address the challenges posed by rapid urbanization, resource depletion, and environmental sustainability. From Generative AI models that design optimal information management solutions and citizen engagement to Digital Twin Simulators that replicate real-world conditions in virtual space to help managers make the best-informed decision, and on to Agentic AI systems capable of semi-autonomous decision-making helping our civil servants with complex tasks and always using all available knowledge, these advancements open up new frontiers in urban innovation.

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  • Culture, Society and the Digital Economy

    2025-03-31

    We live in an age where digital technology not only transforms industries but also reshapes how we see, narrate and inhabit the world. Culture, society and the economy have undergone a process of digitalisation that affects everything from everyday communicative practices to the collective representation of identities, knowledge and traditions. Digital life is not confined to a technical or instrumental layer; it permeates the symbolic, emotional, political and economic realms, generating new forms of relationships, consumption and meaning-making.

     

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  • Creative economies and spontaneous city design

    2025-01-06

    Cities are living organisms shaped not only by urban plans and infrastructure projects, but also by the spontaneous, creative interventions of their inhabitants. These interventions—ranging from street art to cultural pop-ups, from citizen-led renovations to informal markets—breathe life into the urban fabric and serve as catalysts for new ideas and create city identity. At the same time, the entrepreneurial and economic value that often emerges from these creative expressions can have profound implications for how cities evolve, who gets to participate, and what values are developed or lost in the process.

    Creative economies and spontaneous city design are integral to the development of urban areas that balance cultural expression with economic growth. This involves navigating the tension between allowing creative actors the freedom to express culture and the benefits to generate new artistic city assets within urban environments that contribute to economic development. This involves understanding how cities can leverage their cultural and creative resources to enhance economic performance, identity, and social welfare while navigating the complexities of state/country participation, public spaces/resources proper use and urban planning.

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  • Rhetoric and Poetics of the Image

    2024-12-04

    In 1964, Roland Barthes wrote The Rhetoric of the Image, defending the general principles of rhetoric regardless of medium, expressive substances, or types of discourse in which it is used. As Horace anticipated in his expression "ut pictura poesis", rhetoric manifests itself in verbal, visual, auditory, audiovisual, and digital discourses, both in its argumentative function (Perelman, 1969) and persuasive function (Aristotle's triple strategy: logos, ethos, pathos, 4th century BC). Burke's New Rhetoric (1950) posits that the use of discourses is linked to their agents to form attitudes and induce actions in receivers, thus introducing the concepts of identification and dialogue. In this sense, rhetoric must also be considered from a Pragmatic perspective, understood as the relationships between sender agents and the text (verbal, visual, auditory, audiovisual, and digital) within a given context.

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