Miami – June 9, 2022 – University of Miami School of Architecture (U-SoA) and Conconcreto, a full-service company with over 60 years of international expertise in all sectors of the construction and development industry, address how the pandemic intensified smart city infrastructure and practices during the 2022 Smart Cities Conference.

The conference programming is meant to aid in the design and development of more sustainable, livable, and resilient cities, by delving into the latest in urban planning, architecture, and engineering in alignment with computational resources and analytical methods, according to conference organizers.

“With each new edition of the conference, we like to bring relevant trending topics to the table,” said Rodolph el-Khoury, dean of the School of Architecture. “This translates into new interlocutors and business partners. This year, the highlights are in automation, robotics, and extended reality (XR), given their precipitated growth during the pandemic years,” he added.

Welcoming leaders in these thriving fields to UM is exciting. Skylar Tibbits, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-director and founder of the Self-Assembly Lab housed at MIT’s International Design Center, delivered the keynote address. Tibbits presentation focused on self-assembly and programmable material technologies for novel manufacturing, products, and construction processes.

Conconcreto, which has established a base in South Florida and forged an alliance with U-SoA to fund a research unit at the School, sponsored the second day of the conference, spotlighting the school’s construction management program and focusing on recent developments in Building Information Modeling (BIM). Experts from the US and Colombia led the session including participants from Autodesk, the leading BIM company. Autodesk tools can support a more efficient design and promote smart cities urban planning by connecting a city’s entire infrastructure using advanced information and communication technology (ICT) to solve traffic, environmental, and housing problems. With these tools, traffic simulations and digital twin cities can be possible, which allows to trace a city as a living organism.

The conference also served as a forum for leaders in academia, industry, and government to examine evolving theories and practices in the Smart City field.