Marta Gonzalez
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley
Jun 26, 2025
12:00 pm
Jun 26, 2025
12:00 pm
In-person
Devon House
107
4 Thomas More St
London E1W 1YW, UK
London E1W 1YW, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
107
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
2nd floor
Devon House
Room
107
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
London E1W 1LP, UK
Talk recording
As cities grow more interconnected, interdependent, and vulnerable to environmental and systemic disruptions, understanding their dynamics through the lens of complex systems becomes essential for achieving sustainability. This talk presents a unified framework that leverages macroscopic patterns, human mobility data, and network-based models to address pressing urban challenges. We begin by examining the dynamics of urban traffic collapse, identifying critical transitions that signal systemic failure in mobility networks. Building on this, we explore how vehicle emissions scale with mobility metrics, showing that reducing vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) through urban densification can significantly curb emissions, even amidst rising congestion. Next, we introduce novel metrics for real-time tracking of urban spatial structure via human mobility data, revealing how cities adapt — or fail to adapt — during shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, we extend our systems approach beyond the urban core, applying spatial network models to wildfire management. By identifying high-risk fire spread pathways, we demonstrate how data-driven strategies can enhance proactive responses in climate-vulnerable regions. Collectively, these studies reveal how treating cities as dynamic, interlinked systems allows us to diagnose vulnerabilities, predict critical transitions, and guide interventions for more resilient and sustainable urban futures.
About the speaker
Marta Gonzalez is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, and also a Physics Research faculty in the Energy Technology Area (ETA) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Gonzalez’s research focuses on urban sciences, with a focus on the intersections of people with the built and the natural environment and their social networks. Her ultimate goal is to design urban solutions and enable caring development in the use of new technologies. Gonzalez has developed new tools that impact transportation research and discovered novel approaches to model human mobility and the adoption of energy technologies. She is a recipient of the prestigious Joseph M Sussman Prize for Frontiers in Built Environment best article award in 2021, the UN Foundation award in support of her research studying the consumption patterns of women in the developing world in 2016, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation award to study access to financial services in the developing world in 2016. In 2023, she was named fellow of the Network Science Society for her seminal contributions to our understanding of human mobility and transportation networks, and for applying network modeling to solve societal problems in urban systems, and in 2024 she received the Lagrange-CRT Foundation Prize for her scientific research in the field of complexity sciences, its applications and dissemination.
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