The Sustainable Urbanization: Place Matters Summit convened fifty researchers from around the globe in March 2014 to discuss emerging urban research agendas in Philadelphia.
Roundtable discussions centered around five themes: Economic Agglomeration, Resilience and Metropolitan Systems, Inequality, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Urban Analytics. Panels were convened on Asian urbanization, think tank and foundation initiatives, and crafting an urban commons.
Important cross-disciplinary research agendas emerged from the summit, and are discussed in the final report. Three major concerns summarize the agenda:
- We need to know more about the dynamics of growth and shared prosperity in cities and how to address them in order to eradicate poverty and inequality.
- We need to know more about how to create peaceful participatory dialogue and governance in the urban world in order to resolve conflict and avoid civil unrest, and
- We need to know more about how to select and implement the form and design of urban places best suited to reduce GHG emissions in order to adapt or mitigate the ravages of climate change.
PDF’s of the summit program and the final report are available here: