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.