We have difficulty accepting that society, economy, technology, and nature are deeply intertwined and co-evolving. This is leading to declining biosphere integrity, disrupting biophysical flows, climate change and the disruption of social foundations, frustrating an economic transformation, just to name a few. Another neglected item is the ongoing convergence between infotech, nanotech, biotech and cognitive sciences that could restructure not just economies and societies but our very bodies and minds.
These aforementioned challenges are enormous in scale and complexity, and we will need to take equally enormous leaps in our imagination to meet them successfully. It cannot be stressed enough that we are at a critical point in time.
Nature essentially has a circular zero-waste metabolism where every output by an organism is also an input which replenishes and sustains the whole living environment. In contrast, the metabolism of many modern cities is essentially linear, with resources flowing through the urban system without much concern about their origin or the destination of wastes. Inputs and outputs are considered as largely unrelated.
Urban metabolism is a powerful metaphor that helps us think about the man-made environment in a completely different way, which feels less judgmental than certain other perspectives. All cities, like all nature’s organisms, have a definable metabolism and can be described as ‘the sum total of the technical and socio-economic process that occur in cities, resulting in growth, production of energy and elimination of waste’. The characterization of these flows and the relationships between anthropogenic urban activities and natural processes and cycles defines the behavior of urban production and consumption. Urban metabolism is therefore a deeply multi-disciplinary research domain focused on providing important insights into the behavior of cities for the purpose of advancing effective proposals for a more humane and ecologically responsible future.
While research has tended to focus predominantly on quantifying various flows in and out of cities, it has become a widely accepted notion that more than an organism, cities are human-dominant, coupled, complex ecosystems.
Complex systems have emerged through natural or manmade evolution. This has produced parallels between natural and technological systems despite their differences. While natural evolution has been evolving for billions of years, man-made technological, social and economic evolution has made a significant impact on the Earth only in the past few thousands of years. Hence, evolutionary rates are much different when comparing the two types of complex systems: man-made versus natural. Natural evolution needs to wait for random favorable mutations in the DNA of an organism to occur over many generations, whereas in technological evolution new ideas can become new products overnight.
As cities’ systems grow and increasingly become interconnected, we are finding ourselves in a realm of the entanglement at the level of our cities. All aspects of a city’s life are complex combinations of events in both the real world (and physical space), the natural and digital world (cyberspace) and many transactions and interactions take place in or between all three domains. Wherever they take place, the outcomes are certainly felt in the real world of a city’s stakeholders.
Cities are best addressed as complex adaptive systems; relational, adaptive, autopoietic, non-linear, dynamic, open, contextually determined, embedded, and emerges through complex causality.
Regulating and governing mechanism plays a critical role in urban complex systems, through making policy, planning, and management decisions that influence both anthropogenic and ecological processes within and beyond the city.
In the decade ahead, waves of exponential technological advancements are stacking atop one another, eclipsing decades of breakthroughs in scale and impact. Emerging from these waves are technologies and trends that are likely to revolutionize entire industries (old and new), redefine tomorrow’s generation of businesses and contemporary challenges, and transform our society and livelihoods from the bottom-up.
For contemporary communities around the world, each situated in a distinct social-ecological context and each with their own histories and visions for the future, anthropogenic change is occurring with increasing rapidity, complexity and uncontrollability. The drivers of these changes occur at different scales and speeds and include environmental, climatic, economic, technological, sociocultural, demographic and governance factors. Our society has and will become even faster highly dynamic, volatile and a-linear: relational, adaptive, dynamic, open, contextually determined and emerges through complex causality.
Therefore, it is more than ever essential to understand what a city is, of what it consists of, and especially to understand ‘how a city works’. Understanding how cities works is all about feedback loops, sensitive dependence on initial conditions and emergent phenomena.
For dynamical models to be realistic, they need to have accurate initial conditions, exact causality between systems variables and defined kinetics. These patterns are the essential elements for understanding and successful interventions for the transformation in our cities. Cities, regions that can function, compete, adapt and evolve towards increased fitness and overall growth.
The objective is to define more precisely the properties towards a greater understanding of the workings of a city (neighborhood, region) as a whole, beyond the understanding of one specific domain, or one specific design concept.
Until recently, as we transformed our society, we have unintentionally changed our environments resulting in drastic changes in natural systems and patterns. It cannot be stressed enough that we are at a critical point in time. The next decade will determine if we are able to sustain a future that is worth remembering; one that represents quality of life. This calls for an intentional transformation of our urban areas. We have created our past, our present, and so can we create our future. The techniques are there and our creative energy and industry offer hope. Then what is holding us back to create something truly transformational?
The process of urban modelling aims to capture the essence of the complexity, abstracting the real system into a manageable structure that is cognitively, mathematically and theoretically explainable. Urban dynamic models built to capture the dynamics and architecture of a system to explain its present behavior and to predict the system’s future behavior. Such models help us to better understand and potentially fix system failures, anticipate internal and external disturbances and ‘run’ predictive analyses.
As a group of people within knowledge institutions, companies etc we have development a decision support model that provides insight in urban complexity, tested and ready to be further developed to a real-time (monitoring-) model able to simulate future urban scenarios by including all different assets of a city. Leveling up real time dynamics and scenario-driven simulation of the multiple interaction, interdependencies, cascade-effects are measured and visualized. Visible through interactive dashboards and 3- 4D simulation enables decision-makers to explore every possible future scenario. Supported by detailed analysis, predictive multiple results of scenarios, results can be ordered, and probability can be assigned as a support for making decisions. The future can be explored by visualizing cascade-effects of causal relationships.
With these realistic insights in possible and desired futures decisions and policy are explored, validated, motivated and managed supported by scientific models and critical data. Once customized and purposefully built, the decision support model provides a useful policy simulator to explore the strength and weakness of alternative policy options. It may reveal system-level risks and inefficiencies which are usually caused by the lack of coordination in policy making and provide a consistent evidence base across disciplines to facilitate policy debates and collaboration among urban professionals.