News & Events

Professor James O. Leckie from Stanford University, gave a lecture on May 9, 2019 titled “Sustainable Urban Systems: Urbanization in the Era of Climate Change”.

Globally, about 50% of the world population live in urban environments. By 2050 it is estimated nearly 70% of the 9.8 billion global population will live in urban settings. Urban populations are growing in cities of all sizes, which requires scalable solutions for engineered urban systems. One way to meet this challenge is to design coupled networks of adaptable, flexible and modular urban systems (e.g., electricity and information) for scales ranging from neighborhoods to large regions. Modules may be virtual (e.g., a service) or physical (e.g., a building or a resource recovery system) and connected through exchanged data and controls in a manner that will sustain our natural environment along with our values, cultures and social norms.

Although civil engineers are responsible for the physical infrastructure of cities, solving systemic social, economic, and environmental issues in cities are beyond the domain of engineers or any siloed domain. The complex sustainability challenges facing urban systems lend themselves well to the interdisciplinary nature of research and education. Today’s urban areas provide a disparate quality of life and quality of services to their populations, and they inflict a mostly adverse impact on our natural environment. Our challenge is to design and reengineer our urban environments for the future to provide modern services in ways that allow humans and nature to flourish. The engineered systems that support cities today are largely standalone entities, such as the electricity grid designed by individual sectors under the assumption that bigger is better to leaverage economies of scale. Unfortunately, this approach often creates inflexible systems that can be difficult to manage, impose high environmental costs and largely ignore interactions with the people they serve. Yet with advances in information systems, engineered technologies and understanding of human behavior, we can design cities that respond better to the needs of the inhabitants and adapt more readily to changing climatic and environmental pressures and demands.