The IE Center for Sustainable Cities Hosts the Actionable Science for Urban Sustainability 2020 Virtual Conference

The Actionable Science for Urban Sustainability 2020 (AScUS 2020) conference is a virtual event aiming at envisioning ways in which scientific insights can be translated into applicable policy and design measures for cities. It will be held remotely from June 3 to June 5 at the Wow Room, IE University’s classroom of the future. The conference will focus on issues surrounding low-carbon cities, sustainable infrastructure, data, education, urban governance, urban metabolism, urban technology, waste, and circular economy. Emphasizing actionable measures, the conference will result in a series of white papers aimed at mobilizing policymakers and the private sector towards greater urban sustainability.

“In order to facilitate constructive discussions, the conference adopts a flipped format, where instead of dedicating sessions to presentations, videos are posted and viewed by participants ahead of time - freeing up the sessions themselves to structured discussions.”

Matan Mayer, professor at IE School of Architecture and Design, and also a member of the organizing committee

For this reason, the event has been described by its organizers as an “unconference”, referring to the innovative presentation approach, aimed at promoting feedback and participation.

The first day of the conference will feature a joint session with a keynote lecture by Jessica Seddon, Director of Integrated Urban Strategy at the World Resource Institute, titled Second Order Smart: Science and City Transformation. The next two days will be dedicated to parallel discussion sessions on topics selected by the participants ahead of time and run by session moderators. Each discussion session will lead to a Path to Action document that will be posted on the conference website at the end of the conference. The final half-day will include a joint session and a closing keynote lecture by Paul Zimmerman, Councilor for Hong Kong’s Southern District and CEO of Designing Hong Kong.

"An international virtual conference creates an academic setting open to those who wish  to participate in the search for sustainable solutions for our cities of the future," explains Martha Thorne, Dean of IE School of Architecture and Design”.

The organizing committee is a group of researchers based in Asia, North America, Europe and Africa, who met as part of the Sustainable Urban Systems (SUS) section of the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE). While it is an independent event, the (un)conference works in close collaboration with Metabolism of Cities. Additional members of the organizing committee are:

• Matan Mayer | IE University
• Shauhrat Chopra | City University of Hong Kong
• Sybil Derrible | University of Illinois at Chicago
• Paul Hoekman | Metabolism of Cities
• Carolin Bellstedt | Metabolism of Cities
• Aristide Athanassiadis | Metabolism of Cities
• Eugene Mohareb | University of Reading
• Kangkang Tong | Princeton University
• Anne Ventura | University Gustave Eiffel

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