A conversation with Professor Carlos Moreno about the 15-minute city, one of the urban planning concepts embraced by the United Nations Habitat on their latest World Cities Report 2022.Join Eduardo Guerrero, urban designer based in Tucson, as he talks with urban idealists and designers about their work and stories. Listen in as he engages these relevant thinkers in reflections and conversations about the environment and culture.Paris soundscapes byMémo Dumay, sound artist, musician / Paris https://memodumay.tumblr.com/ 12 Carlos Moreno, 15-minute city / Paris Biography:Carlos Moreno was born in Colombia in 1959 and moved to France at the age of 20. He is a Senior University Professor, an international expert of the Human Smart City, and a Knight of the French Legion of Honor. This scientist and humanist describe his exceptional career as a path guided through and through by passion: a passion not only for innovation, creativity and exploration but also one for sharing, connecting, and building ties with others. A journey on which he has explored a variety of disciplines and fields in a wide range of spheres – teaching, research, business and industry – strong in his conviction that innovation springs from interaction among them.TEACHING, RESEARCH AND SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTATIONCarlos Moreno swiftly joined France’s scientific community in 1979. In 1983 he became a researcher and lecturer at the IUT in Cachan at the Université de Paris Sud, working in the computer science and robotics laboratory (LIMRO). There, he was a leading figure in robotics, a budding discipline at the time which draws on IT, electronics and mathematics and studies the interface between robots and their environment.Mr. Moreno’s work in robotics and artificial intelligence made him absolutely certain of two things: one, that systems must be designed in terms of complexity (as defined by French thinkers such as Henri Laborit and Edgar Morin), meaning that an entity can only be understood in relation to its environment and must be studied in the context of how it relates to and depends upon other factors; and two, that this ‘complexity’ can be applied in the real world to create value through innovative services and uses. Also during this period, Mr Moreno helped create one of France’s first technology transfer offices in the Paris region, at the CERMA in Cachan.In 1990, after taking part in its creation, he began working at the Université d’Evry, where he became a Senior Professor. While working at the computer sciences lab (LaMI – Laboratoire des Méthodes Informatiques), a joint unit run by the CNRS, he founded and directed the “Distributed Reactive and Adaptive Systems” team and developed extensive ties with industry. In the late 1990s, the creation of Genopole, a biotechnology cluster in Evry, gave scientists, research engineers and entrepreneurs at the university an opportunity to work together despite their different backgrounds and specializations — an approach that Carlos Moreno has tirelessly promoted since.Exploring a system from the viewpoint of complexity means understanding it in context and studying its vitality as manifested in the relationship among its component parts, the energy which creates these, and the changes made in order to establish an equilibrium, extract knowledge, introduce change, make a breakthrough, anticipate a death or predict the emergence of new situations. In 1998, a new law on innovation and research in France (the ‘Allegre Law’) enabled researchers to start their own business. Professor Moreno quickly seized this opportunity to rally his best PhD students, capitalise on the critical mass of knowledge they had generated, and find industrial applications for the expertise acquired through intelligent complex systems. His start-up, Sinovia, was created in 1998. Based at the laboratory, Sinovia centred on the intelligent control of complex systems with an emphasis on infrastructure. Aided by government funding, Sinovia signed its first partnerships with industrial firms. Every project developed by Professor Moreno during this period has since proven pertinent (see below) and revealed his visionary spirit.A pioneer in his field, in 2006 he turned his attention to cities – a complex system par excellence – and developed the concept of the ‘sustainable digital city’ as a viable platform from which to provide the services needed to ensure the well-being of a city’s inhabitants. In this context, Professor Moreno’s start-up began working with INEO, a subsidiary of GDF SUEZ, which acquired Sinovia in 2010.Carlos Moreno became Scientific Adviser to the Chief Executive Officer in charge of strategy for GDF SUEZ’s Smart Cities programme. For five years, he led international efforts to develop the city of the future and created the Live in a Living City forum which brings together experts from around the world to look at how urban environments are changing. ...
