Note:Climate change is the overarching environmental issue of our time and I'm a huge proponent of urging national and world leaders to take action. However, I often wonder what it is they're going to do once a treaty is signed to reduce CO2 emissions. It's not like there's a magic switch that will turn off all the centralized power plants and get most cars off the roads. Our current infrastructure is so inefficient and wasteful at its core that it depends on energy stored in fossils a million years ago just to be maintained. Tinkering around the edges with a few solar panels and bike lanes is not going to be enough. If we're serious about reducing carbon emissions we have to re-envision the biggest things we build — cities. In order to do that, we have to understand how cities work, from the inside out. This is what I've been devoting most of my energy to.
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As part of my work with the Ecocitizen World Map project (EWM) I'm currently learning about Urban Metabolism Information Systems (UMIS), a whole systems analysis that measures everything flowing into and out of a city over time and space. The UMIS methodology was developed by Dr. Sebastian Moffatt and proposes a standardized "source to sink" framework to better understand and analyze urban systems as they process through the built environment. For example, here's a close-up of just one segment of the City of Vancouver, BC's water flow, showing how water is used and where it goes after that.
In fact, with the help of intrepid citizen activists and students in our pilot cities of Cairo and Casablanca we are taking it even further: turning the tool from the inside out and from the bottom up, we are testing out Participatory Urban Metabolism Information Systems, a method designed to empower people on the ground to map out their own neighborhoods and become participants in transforming their communities into more resilient, equitable, and ecologically healthy settlements.
Community activists and students at Mundiapolis University in Casablanca getting ready to map out the neighborhood of Roches Noires.
Why is this important? Well, like a human body a city is a living, ever-evolving organism, and in order to have it operate at a healthy level and in sync with its environment you have to know exactly what flows into it, how those things are used, and where they go after the body no longer needs them. Another familiar analogy to think of is a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), the well established method to assess environmental impacts associated with all the stages of a product's life, from cradle to grave. But LCAs only work for products, and cities and neighborhoods aren't products — they are situated in one place, they are complex, ever-changing physical and cultural ecosystems, and they have no lifetime. Cities are eternal.
Cities are also the largest things that humans build, and with the number of cities of 750,000+ inhabitants quadrupling over the last 50 years and 70 percent of the world's population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, the quest to figure out how our urban environments could operate within the earth's carrying capacity ranks as one of the most viable pursuits anyone concerned about climate change, resource depletion, loss of biodiversity, and the human struggles associated with it could undertake. To put it simply, if we don't understand our cities' organisms, we will never be able to have them function in balance with the larger natural organisms within which they reside.
