Biocomplexity Incubation Activity: Complex Systems: Cities in Their Environments

University Of Connecticut, Storrs CT

Investigators

Abstract

Human-managed systems are arguably the most complex and fragile of complex systems. Usually poor in biodiversity, they display most other characteristics of complex systems, including feedback loops, step functions and other nonlinearities, surprises, and unpredictability. The most complex human-managed system is the modern city of the developed world. Its complexity may well be of benefit to the environment; more complex cities may prove to be even more benign. The rapidly growing cities of the developing world, in contrast, are often insufficiently complex, lacking even basic elements of infrastructure such as water and sewage systems. Their vulnerability as forms of human organization and the vulnerability of their residents to poor quality of life, disease, and death are often extremely high, and are likely to be severely tested by environmental changes at the local, regional, and global levels. This Biocomplexity Incubation Activity award will support work in association with the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) to develop an international, interdisciplinary research project under the auspices of the IHDP-Industrial Transformations core research program. That project will address the issue of whether and how it would be possible to decouple the improvement of human well-being from the negative environmental effects of the production and consumption systems that sustain life in cities. Noting that humankind is now a majority urban species and will be even more so within 50 years, the project will focus on the form of human social organization that will probably have the greatest impact on the environment at local, regional, and global scales throughout the next century. It will design an implementation plan for interdisciplinary research on cities as complex systems, drawing upon insights from other disciplines about forms of biocomplexity. It will give special attention to urbanization in the developing world, where most of the world's megacities are now being built, and particularly to the Asia-Pacific region, because of the rapid rates of urbanization in countries of the region and the large population size of many countries in the region. The project will initially focus on two subsystems through which humans have large effects upon their environments: the subsystem by which humans utilize water, affect the hydrological cycle, and produce pollution of various forms, and the subsystem by which humans achieve mobility of goods and persons, usually consuming substantial amounts of energy in the process and emitting several forms of environmentally active substances. Each subsystem may contain tractable solutions to the problem of combining the improvement of human well being with the reduction of human impacts on the environment. The incubation project will provide for capacity building through workshops, small seed grants, international collaboration, and the production of an implementation plan. It also will facilitate the involvement of interested investigators from the natural and social sciences and engineering will be sought.