Abstract

In the context of the climate change and energetic and political crises, new tendencies in the long/medium term evolution of urban systems, together with new data and methods, require that existing theoretical assumptions and conceptualizations be challenged as global urban hierarchies are reconfigured and citizens’ aspirations in their urban environments are in strong transformations. The connection between urban systems at different levels of organization becomes more and more relevant for understanding urban systems and their transitions. But the current inter-urban perspective is not sufficient to encompass these dynamics. The evolution of power distributions inside and between cities reshapes the world organization of central/peripheral cities and the complexity of the global urban system. Actors as multinational firms, or high-level innovation centers, participate actively in these reconfigurations that concentrate wealth, control, innovation, and attractiveness in a few cities. At the local level, citizens wish more health and well-being implying better policy coordination between local and national/international scales. In the complexity of this multi-level system, how is regionalization of the world reshaping in a multipolar urban world? How does the multi-level perspective highlight some resilience properties in the urban system? The theories and methodologies derived from complex systems sciences bring new perspectives for urban transitions towards more sustainability and resilience.

Biography

Céline Rozenblat is professor of Urban Geography at the University of Lausanne, vice-president of International Geographical Union (IGU) and chair of the groups of the Geospatial societies of the United Nations Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM). She was member of the International Science Council (ISC) commission on Urban Health and Well Being: A system approach for 6 years and Director of the institute of geography and sustainability of the University of Lausanne for 5 years. She is member of the Society of Complex Systems, and of the UNESCO UniTwin Digital Campus of complex Systems.

She studies the evolution of power distributions inside and between cities that reshapes the world organization of central/peripheral cities and the complexity of the global urban systems. Actors as multinational firms, or high-level innovation centers, participate actively in these reconfigurations that concentrate wealth, control, innovation, and attractiveness in a few cities introducing increasing inequalities inside and between cities. In the complexity of this multi-level system, how is regionalization of the world reshaping in a multipolar urban world? How does the multi-level perspective highlight some resilience properties and the well-being inequalities in cities? The methodologies derived from complex systems sciences bring new forms of intelligibility to worldwide urban dynamics. Using evolutionary economic geography and urban system science, she underlines large sets of city properties and their evolution in a multi-dimensional and long temporal approach. Diachronic and dynamic models and visualizations aim to offer different perspectives for cities’ policies.

These competencies are put to work with the UN-GGIM institutional frameworks to strengthen the collaboration around Geospatial and statistical Information management and AI. Besides, following her involvement in ISC urban health commission and in the International Society of Urban Health, she developed different research programs with the World Health Organization (WHO) and built a MOOC on the systemic approach on urban health (HUS: Healthy urban Systems) with 30 international recognized scientists.

Scientific domains: Urban networks, Systems of cities, multi-level urban approaches, resilience, urban systems science, regional science, evolutionary economic geography, multinational firms, urban health, World, spatial analysis, quantitative and qualitative models, complex networks, complex systems