IAAC’s Master in City & Technology (1 or 2-year program) is a unique program oriented towards redefining the analysis, planning, and design of twenty-first-century cities and beyond. The program offers expertise in the design of digitally enhanced, ecological and human-centered urban environments by intersecting the disciplines of urbanism and data science. Taking place in Barcelona, the capital of urbanism, the Master in City & Technology is training the professionals that city administrations, governments, industries, and communities need, to transform the urban environment in the era of big data.
During the Master in City & Technology + Thesis Project, students work on an Individual Thesis, focused on the development of one research or pilot project.
In order to bridge the gap between education, research & practice, leaders from the professional fields of design, tech, networking and the third sector join the MaCT team to place concrete challenges on the table, ensuring each individual thesis has direct impact and is meaningful within real-world scenarios.
The students develop cutting-edge tools, designs and approaches to effectively design in the context of planetary scale urbanisation, the climate change crisis and rapid technological development.
We work with:
Computation is not only a platform to develop processes, but also a platform to critically think (and act) on the way on which we design today, how this might respond to meaningful challenges, and how we can empower it to adapt through feedback to the uncertainties we will face in the future.
Ecology is not only a space of criticality, and of consequent mitigation of adaptive action, ecology and ecological thinking become vectors to drive behaviours within the spaces we inhabit, rethinking who we are designing the planet for and how, to shape meaningful and symbiotic living systems, capable not only of adapting to uncertainties, but also enabling collaborative, reparatory and regenerative behaviours through spatial design.
Communities are not only the users of spaces, they are the livelihood of cities, reflecting complexity and intersectionality, as well as understanding aspirations. In recognizing their pivotal role, urban planning must be rooted not only data but also engage with empathy, and ensure active involvement of all those who interact with the urban environment towards the co-creation of equitable, inclusive and just spaces that are also resilient, vibrant, and reflective of the collective identity and that of the future.
The thesis is a platform to shape multidisciplinary leaders empowered to pioneer the transition of the urban environment in the era of big data, towards resilient & circular cities, inclusive & just communities and adaptive & more than human urban environments.
view Syllabus & Faculty
This thesis investigates how the semantic content of urban climate policy can be computationally coupled with high-resolution geospatial data to anticipate the climate consequences those policies set in motion. The work is situated in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, and the central proposition is that policy text far from being inert prescriptive language is itself … Read more
“Power is not something you possess, it is something you exercise”– Michel Foucault With this phrase by Michel Foucault, I would like to invite you, reader, to adopt a lens focused on power relations as you move through this blog post. The first power dynamic I would like to highlight is the asymmetrical relationship between … Read more
Vulnerability-adjusted carbon sequestration for more [actionable land]. Current climate mitigation treats carbon sequestration as a static stock: it counts the biomass a landscape holds and rewards storing more. Yet under fire and drought, the densest biomass is lost first, turning a carbon sink into a source. This thesis develops vulnerability-adjusted carbon sequestration. Working across a … Read more
