This folder contains slides for an 18-lecture course entitled “Introduction to Urban Science” based on the book:

Luís M. A. Bettencourt, Introduction for Urban Science: Evidence and Theory for Cities as Complex Systems (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2021). Also, now in Chinese translation.

The slides and materials are shared with a Creative Commons License.

This is a living archive: Corrections and improvements are continually being made. The contents may contain copyrighted materials, so please obtain any necessary permissions for your own uses.

A few notes:

• A set of 9 Assignments is also attached. These are the basis for student evaluation at the course I teach at the University of Chicago. Each assignment has a quantitative or a quantitative component, because students taking the course come from very diverse backgrounds. Text, code and data are included in each folder as needed. I encourage students to alternate quantitative and qualitative assignments.
• The slides have comments to help instructors and follow the book closely (pink notes refer to sections/chapters in the book), where much more detail is available.
• Slides are made available in PDF, Keynote and Powerpoint. I created them in Keynote and share PDFs with my students. The Powerpoint are file conversions and have not been carefully checked against the originals.
• Additional reading materials (classical papers) are also shared, but please obtain necessary rights for your uses.
• I attach a general description of the course, as used at the University of Chicago 2021-24.
• Some aspects of the course focus on Chicago, but I encourage instructors to adapt use cases and discussions for their cities. The idea is that the essence of urban science is general, but applications are context specific.

Syllabus description: This course is a grand tour of theory, general phenomena, emerging data, methods and policy applications that define a growing scientific, integrated understanding of cities and urbanization.
Its objective is to provide students with an interdisciplinary knowledge-base of urban phenomena and the capacity to conceive more systemic solutions to urban, local and global challenges. Roughly, every chapter of the book will be covered by two lectures. Themes include: worldwide urbanization and the challenge of sustainability, classical models from geography, economics and sociology, cities as complex networks and what they predict, variation and statistics of urban quantities, measuring and understanding diversity and productivity, neighborhoods and human development, cities in history and the origins of settlements, the structure and dynamics of systems of cities big and small (such as the US), the origins of (economic) growth and change, the emergence of institutions and their functional roles in connected, interdependent societies. The main point of the course is for students to better grasp how these themes are interconnected and form a predictable, dynamical complex system that requires systemic interdisciplinary scientific approaches and solutions. We will finish with an outlook of challenges ahead, including social justice, climate change, poverty and growth, and the role of cities in addressing them.