© 2002 WIT Press, Ashurst Lodge, Southampton, SO40 7AA, UK. All rights reserved. Web: www.witpress.com Email [email protected] Paper from: The Sustainable City II, CA Brebbia, JF Martin-Duque & LC Wadhwa (Editors). ISBN 1-85312-917-8 Eco-tech cities: Smart metabolism for a green urbanism D. Bogunovich School ofArchitecture Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand Abstract The paper addresses the issue of environmental sustainability of cities and propos- es that Urban Design must simultaneously heed Ecology and deploy Technology. To achieve this, Urban Metabolism must become the central paradigm of both assessing urban unsustainabili~ of the present cities and of seeking a model of the sustainable city of the future. The paradigm enables us to conceive of cities as dynamic negentropic systems whose sustainability can be enhanced by better organizing their flows of environmental information. Ecologically inspired schools of urbanism have been with us for a long time but have tended to ignore techno- logical solutions. Our reality is that human habitat is ever more artificial and that technology is all around us. Urbanists should embrace new technologies, A mix of clean environmental technologies (F,T) with information (IT) and communication technologies (CT) is a key part of the solution, Information-rich, knowledge-inten- sive solutions are critical in enhancing the eco-efllciency of the city. An ecologi- cally sound urbanism of the firture will be both ‘green’ and ‘smart’. Presently, the twin trends of ‘ecologisation of urban technology’ and ‘technologisation of urban ecology’ are contradictory and marginal. If correct political and consumer choices are made in the near future, the trends will converge and become mainstream. The anticipated intellectual, cultural, and economic shifts suggests the emergence a new design paradigm for all professions invoIved in the production of the physical urban environment - planners, engineers, imchitects,landscape architects. This paradigm - ‘eco-tech design’ – wiHset us free from the binary of the Natural vs the Artificial. 1 Introduction: aim and assumptions The aim of this paper is to contribute to the contemporary discussion of ‘urban (un)sustainability’ by suggesting that one of the critical obstacles to making our © 2002 WIT Press, Ashurst Lodge, Southampton, SO40 7AA, UK. All rights reserved. Web: www.witpress.com Email [email protected] Paper from: The Sustainable City II, CA Brebbia, JF Martin-Duque & LC Wadhwa (Editors). ISBN 1-85312-917-8 cities more environmentally sustainable lies on our minds, We are generally used to seeing the concepts of Nature and Culture – for our purpose here translating as Ecology and Technology – as two opposites. This intellectual habit of the great majority of the designers and planners of urban systems hinders faster deployment of new technologies in solving urban environmental problems. The theory of sus- tainable urban development is dominated by thinkers and practitioners who auto- matically connect desirable ecological principles with relatively simple, ‘natural’, and localised solutions, The bigger picture - seeing the city as a whole, a whole that lends itself to better organisation in order to resist waste and over-consump- tion - is missing, The proliferation of technologies of information processing and transfer at the end of the 20th century is seen as a separate event, something that has to do with a more efficient economy and a better informed and connected soci- ety but little to do with improving the management of the urban resources, We shall also argue that the paradigm shift that is necessa~ to take place before we can address the issue of urban sustainability in a systemic manner must start with looking at cities as quasi-organisms and with adopting the concept of ‘metab- olism’ from the biological sciences. The concept of metabolism is perfectly appli- cable to the biophysical functioning of the city. Furthermore, it creates a notional link with the Systems Theory, which both in its traditional and the more modern versions carries great relevance for the problem of ‘urban (un)sustainability ’, Towards the end of the paper we shall propose that the growing demand for bringing the fimctioning of our cities more in tune with the laws of ecology by ‘bringing nature back into the city’ is in contradiction with the continued artifl- cialisation and technologisation of our living environment and our daily life expe- riences. The two contradicting trends present us with a typical paradox, which tends to polarise our mind. We face the dilemma whether we should opt for more ‘ecology’ in the city and work towards some vision of ‘eco-city’ in harmony with nature (eco-topia), or we should opt for more ‘technology’ in the city and work towards some economically super-efficient ‘high-tech-city’ which promises a life of super-convenience and social harmony (techno-topia). The possibility of a solu- tion that includes both the ‘eco-’ and the ‘teclmo-’ aspect (techno-eco-topia) escapes us. This discussion is based on a number assumptions that need to be declared. The first assumption of this paper is that the world is facing an ecological crisis and that this is a consequence of human activity on the planet. The global envi- ronment is under threat because of the relentless pressure from a growing, ever more affluent, and ever more mobile population, It will be ultimately up to our political process to determine whether the threat is real or imaginary and whether something needs to be done about this. This matter will not be debated in this paper. The second assumption is that we already live in an urbanism-dominated world, As the number of city dwellers on the planet continues to grow, cities are becom- ing the key engines of the global economy, the chief creators of cultural models, and the ruling centres of political power. At the same time cities are also emerging as the sites of extravagant environmental consurnptions and the principal sources © 2002 WIT Press, Ashurst Lodge, Southampton, SO40 7AA, UK. All rights reserved. Web: www.witpress.com Email [email protected] Paper from: The Sustainable City II, CA Brebbia, JF Martin-Duque & LC Wadhwa (Editors). ISBN 1-85312-917-8 of pollution. Together, the cities of the world now pose the greatest threat of all the times to the global environment. Consequently, cities hold the key to winning or loosing the environmental battle [1]. This makes the goal of achieving some degree of urban ecological sustainability one of the key issues of global political, economic, scientific, and technological agenda. The third assumption is that ‘urban sustainability’ is an ideal, rather than an achievable goal, Cities cannot be literally sustainable in biophysical terms [2]. It is in their nature to be ‘parasites’ of the biosphere. However, the goal of making them progressively ‘more sustainable’ than they are now is both feasible and imperative, The cities’ rate of consumption of the natural resources can be reduced and brought in line with the biosphere’s ability to recover and regenerate, It is a huge job, but not impossible, 2 Urban metabolism: The central paradigm The debate about the cities will be effective and may lead to practicable long term solutions only if correct language is used to diagnose the problem. A number of key terms - such as ‘urban metabolism’, ‘urban ecological footprint’, ‘regional carrying capacity’, etc – need to be borrowed from basic ecology and adapted to the urban environment, These terms must become a standard vocabulary in all political, theoretical, and scientific debates, They also must enter the language of the professions that create, manage and operate the urban environment. The concept of ‘urban metabolism’ (UM) is of central importance. As an expres- sion, UM is relevant, precise, and economical. It handsomely encapsulates the enormous complexity and the huge scale of the unsustainable processes of con- sumption and transformation of materials, energy, and life media that is going on in every city of the world. The words were first used by Abel Wolman in a seminal article published in Scientl~c American in 1965, which focused on problems of water supply and air pollution in US cities [3]. Later, the concept was widely promoted by Herbert Girardet [4]. The word ‘metabolism’ is borrowed from biology and biochemistry, Life scien- tists talk about ‘organisms having metabolism’, referring to the process of exchange of energy and matter that lies at the base of the very phenomenon of life. The process of exchange emphasises the fact that living organisms are – in the lan- guage of General Systems Theory – open systems. Organisms are distinct entities but they are not fixed, or static, in their composition. On the contrary, their com- position is constantly in a process of change, however within certain limits. They exist in a condition of ‘homeostasis’ – a dynamic equilibrium. In the sense of ecology of natural systems, cities are not productive, On the con- trary – they consume much more than they produce, In terms of the ecological classification of all organism into producers, consumers, and decomposes, cities primarily quali~ as consumers, Typically, their production of organic matter (’food and energy’) is negligible when compared to the consumption by the human © 2002 WIT Press, Ashurst Lodge, Southampton, SO40 7AA, UK. All rights reserved. Web: www.witpress.com Email [email protected] Paper from: The Sustainable City II, CA Brebbia, JF Martin-Duque & LC Wadhwa (Editors). ISBN 1-85312-917-8 78 III( .sm/,,/tr((/d,>(‘iwII population of the city. This is why ecologically-minded theorists have referred to the city as a ‘parasite’, not just a ‘consumer’ [5]. Combined, the notions of ‘urban metabolism’ and ‘city as a parasite’ are very usefld if we want to grasp the magnitude of the impact ofurbanisation on the glob- al ecosystem. Throughout the 20th century the prevailing perception was that big cities were a threat to the immediate regional environment.