planted city

Urban Metabolism: ‘Cities, Scaling and Sustainability’ (Video)

From The Santa Fe Institute via YouTube:

Humanity’s greatest social innovation remains the city, says an article in the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic mentioning SFI research that finds surprising statistical regularities among cities, patterns the researchers relate to an underlying “urban metabolism.”

Related:

• ‘A physicist turns the city into an equation’ (New York Times)
• ‘Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations’ (TED Talks)

(Infographic: World Bank)

Japanese proverb

Tools for Change | Sustainable Communities: ‘Planning for Turbulence: Shock, Resilience & Innovation’ (Part 1 of 6)

In this keynote talk to the Canadian Association of Planning Students complex systems expert Thomas Homer-Dixon explains some of the dynamic and interconnected issues facing our communities and offers strategies that will help them (and us) thrive in the face of changing conditions. He also cautions that what worked in the past is no longer working.

Homer-Dixon is the CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, and a professor in the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment, Enterprise, and Development. His books include Carbon Shift (2009), The Upside of Down (2006), which won the 2006 National Business Book Award, and The Ingenuity Gap (2000), winner of the 2001 Governor General’s Non-fiction Award. His recent research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change.

You can check out more of his work here.

Related:

• ‘Future city planners told stakes are high’ (The Record)

Leaders in Sustainability: RIP Dr. Elinor Ostrom, First Female Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics

In this short video for the Stockholm Resilience Centre Dr. Ostrom: 

explains how people can use natural resources in a sustainable way based on the diversity that exists in the world.

Related:

• ‘Elinor Ostrom 1933-2012’ (Slate Magazine)
• ‘Elinor Ostrom obituary’ (Guardian)
• ‘Green from the Grassroots’ by Elinor Ostrom (Project Syndicate)

Building Urban Resilience: ‘Saga City - Our Communities Facing Climate Change’

From Saga City via Vimeo:

Urban planning has great effects on collective choices that contribute to climate change. By defining the shape of a community, urban planning determines part of its energy consumption, and thus, the quantity of greenhouse gases released by dwellers. Nevertheless, it remains largely out of the general debate on this issue. SAGA CITY invites you to learn more about these stakes through to story of the city of Colvert.

More here.

(Photo credit: Vivre en Ville via Saga City)

Thomas Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, talking about a new approach to addressing climate change that involves collaboration and competition. The Center’s Climate CoLab recently announced the winners of a contest generating “a wide range of innovative ideas for how the 21st century economy should evolve in light of the risks of climate change.” You can check out their proposals here.

(Image credit: MIT News)

Writer David Orr explaining the relationship between sustainability and resilience in his article, ‘Sustainability as National Security’.  

(Image source: Green Flow) 

Above is the conclusion of Nancy Southern’s article for Triple Pundit, ‘Why are people so immune to change?’ Southern is the chair of the organizational systems program at San Francisco’s Saybrook University and a regular contributor to ‘Rethinking Complexity’.   

(Photo credit: National Geographic)

A  Presentation from the 2011 Eco-City World Summit: ‘Networked Urban Sustainability: Breaking the Integration Barrier’

Here is a presentation from urban sustainability researcher and planner Alex Aylett at the 2011 Eco-City World Summit. On his blog, he explains that:

This presentation is something I put together for a general audience. It’s jargon free, and aims to get across a few key points that have emerged in my research over the past four years.

It all centers around one question: “How  can we go from small scale changes in  urban processes, to large scale sustainability shifts that take place across a city as a whole.”

Check out more on his blog or over at Sustainable Cities.

A Fascinating Talk: Geoffrey West on ‘Why Cities Grow, Corporations Die, and Life Gets Faster’

From the Long Now Foundation: 

As organisms, cities, and companies scale up, they all gain in efficiency, but then they vary. The bigger an organism, the slower. Yet the bigger a city is, the faster it runs. And cities are structurally immortal, while corporations are structurally doomed. Scaling up always creates new problems; cities can innovate faster than the problems indefinitely, while corporations cannot.

These revolutionary findings come from Geoffrey West’s examination of vast quantities of data on the metabolic/economic behavior of organisms and organizations. A theoretical physicist, West was president of Santa Fe Institute from 2005 to 2009 and founded the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.