IAS Summit: Colouring Cities & Urban Futures Collective

Part of a week of activities for the IAS Research Summit - Rethinking Urban Inequalities

The morning will open with short showcases of two open-data initiatives — Colouring Cities (our local Loughborough chapter) and Urban Futures Collective (a global and international public-sector initiative) — presenting alternative models for building shared, participatory urban modelling infrastructure. This will lead into an expert panel, "Whose Data, Whose Future? Civic Mapping and the Ethics of AI in Climate Breakdown. The panel probes will probe the epistemological differences between these approaches — what counts as acceptable knowledge, who has authority to produce it, how it is validated — and what happens when both are entangled with AI. The session will close with a critical reflection on building open-source research ecosystems, working toward a summit's manifesto the next day.

Featuring IAS Visiting Fellows:

Rico Henri Herzog, HafenCity University Hamburg
Dr Anastassia Vybornova, IT University of Copenhagen
Associate Professor Jessica Espey, University of Southampton
Associate Professor Esra Suel, University of Zurich
Namrata Narendra, Independent Researcher and Artist

Arrivals from 9.45am for a 10am start. For those joining in-person, lunch will be available after this session from 1.30pm