Will information technologies save planet USA?
5 p.m. to 8 p.m., at SciencesPo, salle Érignac, 13 rue de l’Université, Paris 7e
With J.D. Margulici, Associate Director of the California Center for Innovative Transportation at the University of California, Berkeley, and Carlo Ratti, teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Director of the SENSEable City Laboratory.
The idea that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can resolve the problems of city dwellers is back on the agenda again, especially in the US. Broadly speaking, ICT would purportedly make it possible to virtualize (“decarbonize”) a segment of human activity. Two angles developed for mobility in particular have revived interest in ICT-based approaches. The first is to combine ICT with other technological solutions to incorporate them into the infrastructures and material substance of the city. The goal is to develop complex, multifaceted services that do more than just tackle mobility. Integrated into the city’s material substance, they would produce closer textured, more interactive and more accurate information on the status of the local built environment. This information would optimize our mobility, including CO2 emission levels. The second angle is to produce and disseminate information to urbanites on their activities and the impact of those activities on the environment. These so-called reflexive technologies give city dwellers feedback on the environmental impact of their own activity and that of nearby users. For example, they would provide information on pollution levels in a particular location or the energy consumption generated by their transport and destination choices. This way of “reflecting” their own and others’ environmental impact back to city dwellers could influence or even alter their behavior.
During this session, we will look in particular at these two angles to explore how ICT can assimilate the challenges of climate change to alter mobility patterns.
Discussant: Christian Licoppe, Professor of ICT sociology and head of the Economics and Social Sciences Department at Télécom ParisTech.
For questions or information, contact: marc.scherer@vilmouv.com
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