Designing Sustainable Urban Systems: Features, Metrics, and Processes; September 2019, Washington,D.C.

Georgetown University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Our nation's cities are already home to the majority of our citizens and generate 80% of our gross domestic product. By 2050 as many as two-thirds of our citizens will call urban spaces their homes. Yet the benefits, potential, and problems of our cities do not begin and end at their borders. We recognize that urban spaces are intimately connected to the suburban and rural places around them. Each of these depends upon the other for something: food, workers, jobs, financing, and much more. Rapid changes in technologies, resource challenges, and social divisions, however, are making understanding and improving our cities and their surroundings more complex than ever. New approaches are needed and they will benefit from deep integration among all stakeholders. This project brings together leaders, citizens, and scientists to explore common ways of studying and learning how our cities operate and how they affect the larger regions around them. For many decades now, we have considered the various systems that comprise our cities and their surroundings as collections of isolated sub-systems. There are ways to deliver water, that are separate from the ways we pick up trash. There are ways to get people to work that are separate from the ways we get food to our tables. While practical, this component view of urban planning and management has created many unintended consequences whose ramifications are only now beginning to be felt, but which will reverberate for decades. These divisions will become problematic as new technologies of measurement and automation come online in the next decade. Understanding how to integrate these disciplines and the data, metrics, and algorithms associated with them will be essential to making our cities livable. This project is a step toward developing a distinct science of sustainably connected urban systems through design-based methods of multidisciplinary communication. Over the 2 days of this conference, thinkers from diverse scientific and academic disciplines engage with city, suburban, and rural representatives to develop the agenda we need to help our cities and citizens thrive in the face of unprecedented challenges. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.