Extreme Makeover - Urban Edition

By Michael E. Chang

Deputy Director, Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems

May 2010

When the question was asked “Why do you rob banks?” the infamous retort was “Because that is where the money is.” And so it is with sustainability and cities. Globally, more people now live in urban areas than in rural areas. While we passed that majority urban milestone in Georgia about 50 years ago, and in the US almost 100 years ago, this is only a recent occurrence for humanity as a whole. With trends still increasing in both the developed and developing world, urban living looks to be firmly rooted as the new norm, displacing the rural form that was the standard for the previous 200,000 years. But while cities may be the new norm, they are certainly not normal, at least not by nature’s laws. Cities are agglomerations of high concentrations of people, materials, and energy of the order and like of which have no counterpart in the natural world. Cities, as we know them, do not exist in nature because they are not sustainable. If cities – both big and small – are now the desired form of human settlement though, and if they are to serve as a viable home for us forevermore, we must solve this problem.

Up to now, cities have been built and continue to thrive as a result of relentless injections of fossil fuels, mined minerals, and harvested stocks, and the equally relentless export of wastes and pollution. This was fine when urban expanses were small and the world and all of its resources seemed enormously big, but now the resource pie doesn’t seem to be big enough to feed all of our appetites, and the places we used to dump our wastes are now overflowing. If sustainability is defined as living within the means of nature, then cities are not meeting the standard. They consume more resources than nature can replenish and produce more wastes than nature can assimilate. And likely they always will. A sustainable city is like a perfect union – an ideal that one can move closer towards, yet never quite attain. In the United States, we pursue a “more perfect union.” In the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, our internal research efforts and external research exhortations focus on creating more sustainable cities.

The cities we built are good, but they can’t go on as they have. The signals – from economic globalization to global climate change – scream the need for substantial change. But where does one begin? How about at the beginning! If cities are to reduce their carbon emissions by 80% in the next 50 to 100 years, or provide enough water to quench the thirst of 50 to 100% more residents, incremental change is not going to get the job done. The cities of today were conceived by ancient Roman engineers and optimized through history. But we’ve squeezed about as much as we can out of the designs that we have. Our cities must now be re-envisioned, redesigned, re-engineered, and rebuilt, and the place to start is infrastructure.

Infrastructure consists of those major systems that constitute the backbone of a city. Infrastructure includes the transportation system, the energy system, the water supply system, the wastewater system, the buildings and the parks, the technologies we use to communicate, the means we employ for education, and all those pieces that provide safety, security, and comfort. Infrastructure is those really big elements that we often take for granted when they are working, and find disastrous when they fail. To change infrastructure is not easy, but we have opportunities that the Romans didn’t consider. Chief among them is a systems mindset, or rather a “system of systems” mindset. The greatest opportunity to make cities more sustainable in the not too distant future, while also creating jobs and prosperity for all, is to reconsider how all the infrastructure pieces fit and function together as a whole, rather than as individual elements. Such integration is only possible when the different parties that designed, built, or operate these components are brought together, all at once, to consider how they might leverage each others’ resources for their own objectives. And therein lays the purpose of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.

On February 9, the BBISS submitted a major proposal to the National Science Foundation to establish an Engineering Research Center focused on sustainable and resilient urban infrastructure. In this project, a team of nearly 100 researchers from seven different universities proposed to build the cyber-infrastructure one needs to design, test, and optimize whole urban systems. On April 15, the BBISS assisted the Georgia Water Resources Institute with its own major proposal to the NSF on water, sustainability, and climate. Here, a multidisciplinary team from three universities planned to develop the means to understand the whole of Georgia’s water resources in regards to its municipal, industrial, ecological, and economic utilities in the face of a changing southeastern US climate dynamic. In both regards, it was through leadership, communication, decision-making, and human and financial resource development that the BBISS is seeking to drive the research that will provide the sound fundamental basis for the transformations that our state, our nation, and the world need to survive and thrive now and in the future.

Atlanta: Birthplace of Sustainability?

By Michael E. Chang
Deputy Director
Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems
December 2009

Atlanta, Georgia – a proud but generally unassuming city founded in 1837 on the Appalachian Piedmont of the Southeastern United States – has been the backdrop from which the world has been inspired to fundamentally change on two fronts: economic growth and social equity. Interestingly enough, these form two of the three legs of sustainability. So why shouldn’t Atlanta also inspire the third leg: environment? And couldn’t an integrating of these three factors – economy, equity, and environment – serve as the driving force behind the re-envisioning and re-engineering of what is now an unsustainable Atlanta with ripples of reinvention lapping outwards throughout Georgia, the nation, and the planet?

One aim of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems is to do just that: inspire. Beginning with this essay and continuing in this space in the months ahead, we will host a forum for “BIG IDEAS.” We’re looking for concepts and challenges that seek to change this unsustainable present that we are in, into a sustainable future in which economic prosperity is achieved justly, and within the ability of nature to provide resources and assimilate wastes. From time to time, guest “editorialists” – of prominence and anonymity, of young and old, of black and white, of rich and poor, and of expert and lay – will be invited to share their big ideas through this forum. Can we find the next great idea to follow the “New South” of Henry Grady, or the “Dream” of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Time will tell. The only certainty we have is that the odds are higher when we actively look for it. In this first essay, the challenge is laid down to find it here, in Atlanta, Georgia, and to complete the sustainability triad.

Atlanta, and indeed most of the South, was very poor after the Civil War. With the end of Reconstruction and the federal aid that came with it, the city was forced to figure out a plan to right itself. Though absent in financial capital, land was abundant, labor was cheap, resources were plenty, taxes were low, and government was tolerant. Such alternative wealth was packaged under a “New South” brand, so brilliantly articulated by Atlanta’s Henry Grady, and sold to investors far and wide. With the subsequent century long infusion of capital, the South, and no city more so than Atlanta, rose from obscurity to prosperity. Others caught on and it isn’t too far of a stretch to say that by the latter part of the 20th and the first part of the 21st Centuries, places like Mexico, and later China and India were soon “out-New Southing” the New South. What Atlanta invented, perfected, and then shared with the world was an economic roadmap for transforming poor and developing areas into wealthy engines of success. This was Atlanta’s first major global contribution.

Its second contribution arose from the mid 20th Century struggle for human equality. As the “Cradle of Civil Rights,” Atlanta played an important role in redefining the creed that all men are created equal. In a city too busy to hate, leadership and a path forward was found here that shifted American and, by virtue of the example democracy it provides to the world, global perceptions about human dignity, human rights, and human equality. Here at home it transformed schools and neighborhoods, businesses and industries, and written laws and unwritten values. Abroad it transformed perceptions of what constitutes legitimate government and legitimate freedom. Dr. King’s Dream was born of Atlanta and exported to the world. While injustice sadly still exists, it is more readily recognized and vanquished because of lessons learned here.

Speaking as an Atlantan then, if the experiences of our 19th Century history begat an economic paradigm that would provide for the development and growth of cities, states, and nations, and if our 20th Century experiences led to a new social compass that guided the domestic and foreign agendas of democracies everywhere, certainly it must be reasonable to expect that here now in the 21st Century the tests we face will lead to something just as remarkable. But what are those challenges today that are testing our mettle? The air is dirty. Water is scarce and contaminated. We’re altering our climate. The land is less productive. Native flora and fauna are disappearing and invasive exotics are proliferating. Food safety is being questioned. Energy is expensive. Traffic is congested. Affordable housing is scant. And parks are lagging. Intuitively, it seems a common thread could be woven through these disparate problems (e.g. growth?), but a communal solution seems far from intuitive. There is this third piece of Atlanta that is missing. As the city became more economically prosperous over the last century and a half, and as it became more socially just over the last five decades, it did not necessarily become also more environmentally benign. Even the progress we seemingly did make may have been illusory. When we traded visible smoke for invisible carbon dioxide, the problems were not fixed, but merely transferred or put off. When we built more highway capacity to fix existing traffic problems, we also created inducements for more traffic and even tougher problems to follow. And every water solution proposed for Atlanta only seems to incite our downstream neighbors.

This third leg of the sustainability stool has as yet, eluded us here in Atlanta and because of it, we now face crises on many fronts. But from these crises are also opportunities. The New South paradigm arose from an economic crisis of mammoth proportions. Civil Rights leaped forward when a few brave souls created a crisis on the bus and at the lunch counter. If Atlanta was the crucible from which these two movements sprang forth, why shouldn’t Atlanta also be the place where a third movement will also originate – a third movement that will complete the sustainability triad and anoint Atlanta as the birthplace of sustainability? We in the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems look forward to your response.