New York Harper Lecture: The Kind of Problem a City Is

Cities are powerful drivers of human development and economic growth. As such, they create open-ended complexities that may be examined from a variety of perspectives. In this talk, Luis M. Bettencourt, director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago, will develop the case for the interdisciplinary study of cities as a nexus for many classical fields in the sciences and the humanities, emphasizing new opportunities for the University to lead transformative research and practice that address global challenges of sustainability and livability in cities.

To register or find out more information, please click here.

Featured Faculty

Luis M. Bettencourt is the Pritzker Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago. He is also a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago and an external professor of complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute. Trained as a theoretical physicist, Bettencourt received his Licenciatura from Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon, Portugal) in 1992 and his PhD from Imperial College (University of London, UK) in 1996 for research in statistical and high energy physics models of the early universe. He has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Heidelberg, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and MIT. He works extensively on complex systems theory and on cities and urbanization, emphasizing the creation of a new interdisciplinary synthesis to describe cities in quantitative and predictive ways, informed by various disciplines and the growing availability of empirical data worldwide. He has edited several books and is the author of more than 100 scientific papers. His research has been featured in leading publications, such as the New York Times, Nature, Wired, New Scientist, and Smithsonian Magazine.

To learn more about the entire Harper Lecture Series, please visit the UChicago Alumni Association's page.

Questions? Contact alumniassociation@uchicago.edu or 773.702.2150.