The 15th International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM) was hosted by the School of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of South Australia in Adelaide on July 11-14. The theme of CUPUM is using technology for better urban planning and management. Keynote sessions and paper presentations at this conference confronted trends in city science (smart cities, big data, the compact city, the 30 minute city, the potential emergence of self-driving cars) to unpack their meaning, understand potential benefits as well as to think more deeply to consider long term and potentially unintended consequences. For example, the notion of smart cities was explored by Mike Batty as a shorthand for embedding computers in cities, a more idealized notion of smart cities as smart citizens and the contrarian notion that an overall picture of smart cities is that “none of this stuff works”.
UQ’s School of Earth and Environmental Science was represented at the conference as part of a collaboration with the University of New South Wales entitled CityDash: Visualising a Changing City Using Open Data. The paper explores the communication of information and indicators on a city’s performance, consolidation, communication and recording of this information in city dashboards, and the potential role of dashboards in understanding and managing complex urban systems.
This year’s conference was the first CUPUM in Australia in 22 years. The 4th CUPUM conference was held in Melbourne in 1995. The 16th conference is scheduled for July 2019 in Wuhan, China.
Cover photo by Andrew Allan.