Ramon Gras Alomà was recently interviewed by Dani Cordero, an urban economy-focused journalist working at El País, the largest Spanish-Speaking newspaper in the world, on the topic of the work that Aretian develops for a novel Science of City and the City Science Book that will be published in the fall. This City Science book summarizes urban analytics and design research and practices insights, learnings, and revelations. It includes the analysis of about a hundred cities worldwide in order to further understand how urbanism can continue evolving through data science, complexity science, network theory, machine learning, agent-based modeling, and system dynamics modeling. This book also develops on advanced learnings acquired during Aretian-led research developed in the realms of city science, urban design, economic development, the 15-minute city, the relationship between architectural design and the knowledge economy, and urban mobility, among other topics.
During the interview, Ramon Gras Alomà discusses the urban methodologies from previous decades in Barcelona and in Madrid. He pinpoints the obsolescence of the models and describes them as substandard compared to the most advanced and dynamic urban environments. He comes back to one of the first original works of Aretian developed with Jeremy Burke, which was to analyze 238 cities in order to accurately predict which city was most suited to welcome the newly-announced second Amazon campus.
Read the interview here.
Ramon Gras Alomà also depicts the evolution of the most urban environments in the years to come. He mentions the fact that soon all the most important urban areas will be located outside of the US and Europe, with the instance of the Chinese urban middle class, which grew by several hundred of million people in a few decades. Ramon Gras’ answer to have the West continue to compete relies heavily on the development of knowledge economies and innovation pipelines. Finally, he describes the importance of the novel concept of the 15-minute city, a concept highly reliant on city topology (especially the fractal type). Today, only 4.5% of the urban areas meet the standards of the 15-minute city, including in developed countries.
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