Workshop on Anthropological Urban Anatomy

The 6th edition of the Digital Cities workshop series, organized by Marcus Foth will discuss urban informatics systems that provide real-time tools for examining the real-time city, to picture the invisible and to zoom into a fine-grained resolution of urban environments that reveal the depth and contextual nuances of urban metabolism processes at work. Particularly, participants will engage in discussing the research approaches that can differentiate (and break apart) a universally applicable model of ‘The City’ by being sensitive to individual circumstances, local characteristics and socio-cultural contexts, leading to the development of a toolbox of what could be termed anthropological urban anatomy. This toolbox would aim at better understanding the ‘city’ as an organism needs to help understand “how do the cells of the city cluster to form tissue and organs, and how do various systems communicate and interact with each other? And, recognising that we ourselves are cells living in cities as active agents, how do we evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes we observe in order to plan, design and develop more livable cities?“