Professor Anu Ramaswami of the Advisory Committee on Environmental Research and Education discusses their newly published report about the next generation of sustainable urban systems science with Nature Sustainability.
Why a report about research on sustainable urban systems? And why now?
The first generation of interdisciplinary urban projects was crucial to understand what makes cities sustainable. However, such projects typically focused on either a few sectors, for example, water or energy, or a few outcomes, such as health, resilience or low-carbon development. In our report Sustainable Urban Systems: Articulating a Long-term Convergence Research Agenda , a committee of urban scholars and practitioners drawn from various disciplines propose to move from studying single sustainable cities to studying sustainable urban systems. We think now is the right time to promote such a shift given the momentum around the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the recognition that global sustainability will not be achieved without a new science of urban systems where the transboundary local-to-global impact of urban areas is explicitly recognized. We need to assess multiscale sustainability linkages in urban areas, and between urban areas and their rural hinterlands, and we need to assess the collective impact of all urban areas in a nation or world region. Furthermore, cities themselves are now recognizing that innovative solutions often emerge from civil society or the private sector, and require multilevel governance well beyond metropolitan administrative boundaries.
Can you tell us who supported this work and how this idea came to light?
This work was developed under the auspices of the Advisory Committee on Environmental Research and Education (ACERE) whose mandate is to make recommendations to the US National Science Foundation (NSF) regarding its environmental research and education portfolio. ACERE has been interested in urban sustainability projects for some time, recognizing that the potential of environmental research in the context of urban systems is critical to the nation and the world. I was tasked as an ACERE member in 2016 to lead a report on what the next generation of research on sustainable urban systems would look like. In 2017, the sustainable urban system subcommittee was created and deliberated over a number of meetings. I chaired the subcommittee and led the synthesis and writing of the report that was published in January 2018. Dr Tony Janetos chairs ACERE and will help guide how the report is now taken-up by institutions, and the scientific community at large.
What is a sustainable urban system in your view? How do we achieve it?
As indicated in the report, urban systems are geographical areas with a high concentration of human activity and interactions, taking place within interdependent social, technological and natural systems that impact human and planetary well-being across spatial and temporal scales. Urban systems are sustainable when they transform their structures and processes to measurably advance the well-being of people and the planet. To support such transformations, researchers need to adopt interdisciplinary approaches, engage with practitioners to develop co-produced knowledge better suited to inform action on the ground, and go beyond the study of individual cities. In particular, scholars need to recognize the transboundary nature of processes in individual cities, identify urban typologies and study supra-aggregation of cities. This will require a suite of new data, methods and conceptual frameworks. The report proposes a portfolio of different projects reflecting these needs.
Will there be barriers to deliver the kind of research set forth in the report?
Yes, there will be barriers. Doing deep interdisciplinary research where the science is nascent and where the most relevant questions emerge as the research unfolds, and in conjunction with knowledge co-production, is inherently challenging. Developing co-produced knowledge with communities of practitioners will also be challenging, particularly from the angle of transboundary urban systems. Urban systems researchers must not only develop trust with practitioners in one city, but also look at multilevel partnerships, including with actors at neighbourhood, regional and across-cities levels, and these can be intricate based on my own experience. For some of this work, there is need of a longer timeframe than usual. The report in fact proposes a mix of longer-time and large team-based research projects where successful collaborations are already in place, and smaller research projects with fewer researchers aiming at compact deep dives into key knowledge gaps identified in the report.
What is the plan now that the report is published? What sort of impact will it have, both in the short and longer term?
Our first goal is to share the proposed vision for the next generation of sustainable urban systems research with the broader research and practitioner communities both in the United States and worldwide to gain feedback. So, in the short term, we hope the report will trigger an increasing number of conversations in the research communities, among practitioners at various levels including cities and city networks, and among conveners and sponsors at both national and international levels including the US NSF as well as UN Environment, UN-Habitat and the like. All this should lead to new projects and support for them over time.
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Contestabile, M. Future urban research. Nat Sustain 1, 114 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0037-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0037-9
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