The summer course on SMART CITIES is open to undergraduates, research students (master’s degree or PhD), researchers and data scientists. Urban planners, policy makers, officials in managerial or technological roles, entrepreneurs, product managers and developers may also enroll in this program. No previous coursework in Smart Cities is required, although prior knowledge in urban studies is recommended as well as interest in digital life and spaces.

The course objective is to improve innovation management in smart cities.

You will learn how to better analyze, understand, and develop products, business- and data-models that are smart, sustainable, and ethical. You will gain a wide perspective on the academic knowledge and practices developed and endorsed by scientific organizations and enrich your international network.

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Please let us know if you are familiar with certain tools and technologies, (e.g., QGIS, Postgres; VR technologies; CAD; python, etc.) or have special interests or skills, from data science and product development to nutrition or community engagement.

A new course: “Transitioning to Smart City Growth” is part of the new M.A. program in Smart Cities and Urban Informatics, HUJ Faculty of Social Sciences

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The course will include: Case studies, data and business models, innovation management and data tools, and field trips in the city of Jerusalem – between tradition and innovation

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The landscape of cities, smart cities and societies invites us to reflect, understand and plan possible collective futures. Through a series of field trips and meetings, this unique course will put the pieces together: assemble the domains and silos of municipalities and systems; figure out the role of new technologies and service applications; and develop a vision of innovation in cities.

Lectures will provide the background and introduce concepts and principles in the first meetings; and along the course, class discussions and assignments will redefine the new urban building-blocks and integrate the varying viewpoints on Smart Cities and Urban Informatics in research and in practice.

Putting the puzzle together, the overall goal of the ideal smart city is to better define problems and then to design solutions. Innovation is a creative yet methodological process. The case of Jerusalem, and topics relating to Jerusalem, are most relevant when trying to recognize diverse perspectives, histories and geographies. Knowledge sharing is key to innovation, especially in the complicated urban context.

In their personal course project, students will choose the framework of influences and responsibilities they wish to consider. To carry out a meaningful project, students are invited to apply methods and tools learned in other courses in the program, to practice new skills and gain real-world experience.

The unprecedented growth of population in cities over the last decades, now combined with the aftermath of a global pandemic, makes the smartification of cities an urgent topic.

We will explore the integration of urban data from different sources, and try to better frame and understand the current human condition in relation to the cities in which we live, considering economic, ecological, and societal aspects that impact and are affected by the accelerated pace of digitization. How will the interactions we experience in urban environments affect future behavioral patterns? The appropriation of the smart city by the citizens is a major component of urban-tech utilization, while urban life transforms into digital life.

Students will examine how digital life can evolve in ways that tackle social and environmental issues. Open data initiatives are already creating opportunities for data scientists, spanning nearly every discipline, to enrich knowledge in urban contexts.

We will focus on (a) integrating data sources to analyze spatial behaviors; (b) studying approaches to ethical use of data, data politics, data sovereignty, digital identities and social scoring; and (c) defining the civics of data creation and ownership, a fusing of urban technology and urban planning.