Global Seminar | Bringing SimCity to real-life: challenges in land use modeling applications

Overview:

Cities are complex systems, chaotic and amazing to study. Land use modeling techniques have been around for half a century, helping key stakeholders to understand how they evolve, supporting fundamental decision making processes and encouraging public engagement.

In the last fifteen years, technology breakthroughs in several independent fields such as data processing, procedural visualization and advanced algorithmic techniques to model behavior, paired with a revolution on the availability of computing power have unleashed significant evolution in terms of what is possible to do with evidence-based urban planning.

In this talk, I’ll review the challenges that we faced in the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design and then three startups that I co-founded with research colleagues in this field, both in terms of technical and methodological problems and its solutions, and the difficulties of deploying this kind of systems in real cities.

Additionally, I’ll also review what is coming next in this field, talking about CityCompass, a next gen cloud-based platform, that we created at URBANLY, combining a highly cohesive agent-based simulation model to study future growth trends and price evolution in a focus area with an urban information system that integrates scenario planning to connect policy changes with its impact in a visual way.   

Presenter:

Federico Javier Fernández (external pageLIcall_made)- Founder & CEO - URBANLY

Federico Fernandez is the founder and CEO of URBANLY, a startup focusing on the creation of tools to support the acceleration of grounded, better-informed decisions in urban contexts. He leads a team that helps communities to prepare for growth, providing a simulation platform where it is possible to understand the future impact of policy changes, allowing making informed decisions.

Before URBANLY, Federico co-founded two startups in the technology for urban planning field. Synthicity, in 2012, which created novel technology to visualize huge amounts of urban data with procedural technology, acquired in 2015 by Autodesk to refresh many of their products taking advantage of the platform. And UrbanSim Inc in 2016, a startup that grew to 4M annual revenue in a few years, putting together a team of 25 talented professionals.

Federico holds a MSc. in Computer Science from the University of Buenos Aires, and a long experience in academic research, both in theoretical Computer Science and its intersection with Planning. In Computer Science, he specialized in formal software verification methods, under the supervision of Joseph Sifakis, 2007 Turing Award winner.