In a more and more urban world, where 66% of the population may live in the city by 2050 (ONU), cities have become nests of quantity of challenges to face. Topics like mobility, water, energy and waste management, housing, and others, have to be considered as a system to ensure a sain and sutainable development of urban centers.
AIM project (Metropolis Innovation Workshop) aim to involve students from diverse educational backgrounds to work together on how to face urban challenges of tomorrow. Working in partnership with highly qualified professional and academic experts, the groups of students will be deploying their ingenuity in the service of metropolis innovation attempting to provide solutions for a better futur living together in the cities.
Organised as a real professional expertise unit, students get a rewarding experience of group work management, having to meet expectations of real
client requests. A way to get in touch with responsabilities and precise goals and dead-lines.
This educational model is already set being part of the course at the University of Technology of Compiègne (UTC) for 15 years. The purpose of AIM project is to bring it to an international scale. With students from at least two countries, and potentially several similar studies.
Based on a state of the art of the existing solutions on the topics, AIM work will be headed towards innovation and creative solutions which may enlighten new ways to better manage the cities.
Two phases to assess the model
The AIM project has started in august 2015, and is planned to last 1 year. It involves teams in Paris (France) and in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). The topic to focus on for this first edition will be the mobility and accessibility of the campus in metropolis. The campus from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) is already involved, and we are still defining the better option for a Paris based analysis.
During the first 6 month, a reduced team of professors, students and experts are defining the frame of the project, doing a pre-diagnostic of the situation, and preparing the lauching of the operational phase with all the logistics it involves.
From february to july, approximately 40 students, 6 professors, and several experts will start working on the topic. The results of the AIM project will be presented in Paris and in Rio de Janeiro in july 2016.