City Science Center
Hyper-LOCAL Solutions to GLOBAL Challenges
Transforming urban communities through emerging technology, adaptable design, and innovative public policy to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future
Beyond Zoning
We explore dynamically reconfigurable incentives that encourage the pro-social development of urban areas so as to respond to citizens’ aspirations.
Infrastructure Hubs for Informal Settlements
It is estimated that by 2050, 2.5 billion people will live in communities without centralized water, power, and sanitation. We propose lightweight distributed solutions that bypass the need for centralized infrastructure.
Urban Performance Model
Using Kendall Square as a case study, this simulation shows how collective decisions can dramatically lower carbon emissions while improving the social and economic performance of a community.
Consensus
We explore the use of data analysis, simulation, and visualization tools to understand live/work relationships, mobility patterns, collective values, and human interaction, helping communities reach a shared vision of their future.
Modeling Human Dynamics
Qualitative - human centric, behavior
City Science Network
The City Science Network is a collaborative, international community dedicated to creating more livable, equitable, and resilient communities. Affiliated labs explore local challenges and share tools and knowledge using a collective repository.
The City Science Network includes: Andorra, Hamburg, Cambridge, Shanghai, Toronto, Taipei, Guadalajara, Bíobio, Gipuzkoa and Israel.
Cities are perhaps humanity’s greatest achievement. For thousands of years, they have been the engines of innovation, cultural progress, and economic opportunity. Urban areas are responsible for 90% of global wealth creation, but also the source of 70% of global CO2 emissions. The greatest challenges of our era–from global warming to jobs in an uncertain economic future–are best addressed in cities.
Over the past few decades, however, most high-demand cities have failed to create the essential housing, amenities, and services necessary for the lifeblood of innovation: young professionals, families, and the middle-class workforce. The engines of innovation are stalling, and cities such as San Francisco are facing an existential crisis with unaffordable housing, homelessness, declining mass transit ridership, declining population, depleted tax base, and empty storefronts and offices.
Our mission is to empower communities, guide decision-making, and support the evolution of more livable, entrepreneurial, and sustainable communities.
At the City Science Center, we believe the future of human flourishing depends on reimagining how cities are designed and managed by deploying the innovations of our era—AI-powered governance, behavioral simulation, generative design, robotics, and real-time data analytics—to build new models of urban transformation.
The City Science research journey began with prototyping advanced systems: shared-use mobility, transformable housing, and tangible decision tools. It evolved into easy-to-understand simulation platforms that quantify the impact of urban interventions. Today, our work increasingly focuses on something even more fundamental: building dynamic governance systems with feedback loops and adaptive incentives to enable consensus building and responsive, pro-social development.
Through an international network of City Science Labs, interdisciplinary collaborations, open-source tools, exhibitions, and startups, we aim to help scale urban innovation globally.