Rasa Smite participates in the online discussion organized by Karlsruhe Institute for Technology on December 22. The theme of discussion is ‘Data-Driven Urban Infrastructure’, exploring the European future and climate change. The discussion features questions below:

Which data is key for the integration of nature in the city?

Which data would help urban planners to feed their designs with data-driven decisions?

Which data do plants generate? And forests?

Which challenges will designers face in the near future dealing with datasets from nature? How to generate sets of public data to be used by European cities?

Who should have access to the data? To what specific data?

How to generate useful datasets for other cities, also in other European countries?

How to encourage the EU to promote the exchange of data and technologies between cities?

How to avoid the private monopoly of key data for nature in the city?

The discussion participants are lecturers Rasa Smite and Christine Wacta. Rasa Smite is an artist working at the intersection of art, science, and technology. She is the director of Art and Science center RIXC in Riga, the lecturer at MIT program in art, culture, and technology ACT, and the professor in the New Media Art program at Liepaja University. http://smitesmits.com/ 

Christine Wacta is a lecturer at Savannah College of Art and Design, Department of Architecture Focus on Electronic Design, Urban Planning, History Preservation. She is a president at GeoEduGAMING.Inc and an online geospatial expert. Her Ph.D. thesis follows the theme ‘towards the "neuro-prosthetic city’ of the future: an informed city model as a platform for exchange and crossreferencing of applications integrating data in real-time and on topographical reference support allowing a holistic urban approach which fully integrates the questions of socio-cultural and environmental in an intelligent urban design.