Ramon Gras Alomà, Aretian Urban Analytics and Design co-founder and Harvard researcher, recently contributed an article to CIDOB, the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs.
In his article, he explains how urban planning structurally impacts the ability for the knowledge economy of a city to flourish and create inclusive, distributed prosperity. City science research led by the Aretian team revealed that cities can sustain stable periods of prosperity over the short, medium, and long term by means of harmonic polycentrism. He describes how the future challenge posed to urban planners will be primarily to identify urban and economic development strategies able to incept inclusive economic growth. He explains that the fractal urban model, as studied by the Aretian team composed of Harvard researchers, supports innovation and boosts the knowledge economy by strategically locating desirable amenities within new innovation districts.
He describes how Aretian evaluated dozens of metropolitan regions and hundreds of municipalities around the world, and compared them with one another to identify city form patterns and their impact on urban performance with respect to their ability to satisfy a series of urban performance quality standards, focusing on the knowledge economy and distributed prosperity.
Throughout the Aretian research, one city type presents better features in order to foster innovation in a sustainable manner; the Fractal City. The fractal city is constructed with a series of hubs (city/neighborhood centers) strategically spread throughout the city providing egalitarian, inclusive access to essential amenities to residents and businesses alike. This article was developed thanks to the efforts of urban scientists working in institutions such as Springer, the MIT Tech Review, Funcas, or Elsevier, as well as the Aretian research like the Atlas of Innovation Districts.
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