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.
Critical urbanists are empowered by theory, constrained by history, and valued by their ability and will to negotiate opportunities. The powers of theory are defined by Brenner and Roy as that of critical imagination and rejection of definition; contexualized as historically urban and increasingly planetary by Harvey, Brenner, and Schmid; and actualized by Kaika and … Read more
Community is mostly depicted as a unifying tool that brings a sense of belonging, but does it also act as the root of urban conflict by defining who is an outsider? Through the use of AI, the text Cites or Urbanization? by David Harvey was reimagined as a part of a political discourse and represented … Read more
Introduction Embarking on the odyssey of urban studies, this blog post endeavors to unravel the intricate tapestry of urban theory. At its core, urban theory seeks to comprehend the dynamic relationship between cities, nature, and design, viewed through the lens of recent discussions within the realms of urban and environmental studies. The journey is marked … Read more
‘ The blurring and rearticulation of urban territories. Urbanisation processes are being regionalised and reterritorialised. Increasingly, former “central functions,” such as shopping facilities, company headquarters, research institutions, prestigious cultural venues, as well as spectacular architectural forms, dense settlement patterns, and infrastructural arrangements, are being dispersed outwards from historic central city cores, into erstwhile suburbanised spaces, … Read more
Harnessing AI to deconstruct text to visuals Introduction Welcome to our exploration of urban theory, where we decipher the complexity of urban theory through the lens of imagery and aphorisms. We—three students with diverse perspectives—have delved into the intricate narratives and critical readings to let us translate them to critical urban thinking. This blog post … Read more
Music is visualized everyday – but is there any accuracy to its representation? Can sound be accurately represented? If so, what does it look like? How is accuracy measured? While not fully satisfied with the answers found to these questions, Python’s mido package shed light on the how sound and color may be linked through … Read more
The city of Barcelona has a history of change through impulses. No part of the city is more representative of this trend than Montjuïc. Throughout the 20th century, the area has undergone a number of spatial and social transformations which have typically occurred in short spaces of time. In this short study, we argue that … Read more
Mapping America’s Genrescape Promised Land, Chuck Berry’s early representation of modern rock and roll, blurs racialized difference in genre origin, fueling the hybridization of genre categorizes, resulting in America’s current rich music tapestry. MIDI data correlated to synaesthetic representations of color is crystalized and in a dense three-dimensional mesh and place qualities are correlated to … Read more
OPTIMIZING THE EXISTING WALKABILITY INDEX Urban design plays a pivotal role in shaping the livability of a city, and walkability is a crucial aspect that directly impacts its residents’ quality of life. The City of Melbourne has developed a Walkability Index. This project aims at optimizing the existing framework by integrating key parameters related to … Read more
A Study on the Back of the Road, Factors Forming Streets, and Crime Relationships in the 23 Wards of Tokyo, Japan. 2023, Tokyo is the one of megalopolis. Tokyo has built a megalopolis unlike any other in the world. The megalopolis of Tokyo is depicted in Japan’s representative culture, anime, and manga, and the city … Read more
The City of Marvelous Disorder is a study was conducted during the ‘CaaS studio (City as a Service): The future of cities’ services in the AI times’, that aims to built a methodology on mapping the creative sector and high education ecosystem of Barcelona, with a particular focus on social creative industry that works within … Read more
A Story of a Beloved Design This is a story of a one-of-a-kind creation in history, the British Red Telephone Box, which soon after its implementation in 1921 became a symbol of british culture and identity, an inseparable part of the nation’s and, more specifically of London’s urban landscape. Successful designs can be timeless, resonating … Read more
Every single search query, every streamed song or video and every email sent, billions of times over all around the world – it all adds up to an ever-increasing global demand for electricity, and to rising CO2 emissions too. Our increasing reliance on digital tools has an environmental impact that’s becoming increasingly harder to ignore. … Read more
India is one of the fastest developing countries with many metropolitan cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, and Hyderabad. Migration from villages and small towns to metropolitan areas has increased tremendously in India and led to the degradation of urban environmental quality and sustainable development especially in the metropolitan cities. The problems faced by the people living … Read more
The task required to pick up an urban challenge and develop a City Science Problem Framing Proposal in a few days workshop. The topic of localized food systems was chosen PROBLEM FRAMING “In order to feed a population expected to grow to 9 billion people by 2050, the world will have to double its current … Read more
A new ecosystem for a global tourism destination Benidorm, Alicante The city of Benidorm is the most renowned mass tourism destination on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. It has been recently acknowledged as a sustainable urban development to support the mass-tourism industry; however, Benidorm had received strong criticism during many years, mainly because of its striking … Read more
Cities face complex challenges, amplified by the unparalleled urban growth testing traditional municipal and regional boundaries. Cities have evolved into metropolitan regions, complicating the optimization of city services, e.g. transportation, infrastructure, and public service. The evolution of cities and their urban forms are ever-evolving in a direction that induces higher car dependency and longer commuting … Read more
Athens, Greece “Archipelago is a group of islands set in a sea that simultaneously divides and unites them” The case of the Aegean Archipelago in Greece, which consists of 1.145 islands and islets, for reasons associated with historical and geographical circumstances, represents the promise of a different urbanism. Even in the absolute separation of the … Read more
