Human-Centred Urban Futures: Smart, Sustainable, Social?

By 2050, an estimated 68% of the world’s population will live in cities. As urbanization accelerates – intertwined with the pressures of climate change, digitalization, and social transformation – cities face the urgent task of adopting smart technologies and advanced manufacturing systems. In doing so, a human-centred design approach, integrating residents’ invaluable local knowledge, will be essential to ensure these innovations improve their daily lives.

Building on AGYA's and UoS’s established research frameworks that emphasize community-centred concepts for smart cities, this interdisciplinary lab kicks off with short inputs on urban transition models prioritizing residents’ needs. Which urban concepts emerging from local communities enhance the overall resilience and self-reliance of cities? How can advanced manufacturing technologies and human-machine collaboration of Industry 5.0 reshape urban economies? Which information technology innovations are at the forefront of urban development and can enable more responsive, adaptive urban systems?

To translate these discussions into practice, participants are offered a hands-on digital co-modelling session to simulate urban transformation – such as population, transportation, and land use models – in real time. The workshop closes with an interactive session fostering collaboration to co-develop research ideas for human-centred smart and sustainable cities, laying the groundwork for future research collaboration and practical applications.

Interdisciplinary Labs: Sharing ideas and shifting perspectives for knowledge co-creation

Interdisciplinary Labs are interactive workshops where scholars and students as well as contributors from beyond academia explore real-word problems that require integrated perspectives. The goal is to initiate a creative dialogue across disciplinary and geographical borders along thought-provoking research questions and target-driven case-studies. The labs help navigate the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration by their inclusive and hands-on environment that invites the participants to share and shift perspectives and to jointly develop innovative approaches towards complex issues. Encouraging curiosity, active participation, and equal contribution, the labs offer an immersive experience to foster new forms of knowledge co-creation and plant the seed for future research collaboration.

Kindly register to the AGYA Annual Conference 2025 here