How can we ensure that humanity flourishes in the cities of the future?

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Designing and re-engingeering urban environments

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How can we ensure that humanity flourishes in the cities of the future?

The world’s urban population is projected to increase from 3.9 billion to 6.3 billion by 2050, making up 66 percent of the entire global population.1 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 re-engineer 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 stand-alone entities, such as the electricity grid designed by individual sectors under the assumption that bigger is better to leverage 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. Several example initiatives are presented in the following pages.

1http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Highlights/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf

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How can we ensure that humanity flourishes in the cities of the future?

Flexible cities.

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. Innovations required to realize this vision include:

Lower-power, reliable sensing

methods with innovative algorithms that characterize human behaviors of mobility, occupancy and resource consumption, and enable adaptive, real-time interaction and adjustment.

New models that detect the environmental and health impact of novel urban systems (e.g., air-quality and noise assessments).

New paradigms in infrastructure

financing and construction engineering to spur rapid deployment and adoption of modular urban systems.

New methods for system decision

and policy analysis that facilitate the design of public and private policies for equitable urban services for all citizens.

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How can we ensure that humanity flourishes in the cities of the future?

Intelligent and healthy buildings.

In 2005 and 2006, buildings accounted for approximately 39 percent of total U.S. energy consumption, approximately 39 percent of total U.S. CO2 emissions and approximately 72 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption.2 Advances in technologies, materials and policies can significantly decrease those numbers. Opportunities include:

Advancing sensing and control

technologies to turn buildings and infrastructure facilities into intelligent robots that communicate, create shared regional awareness and self-synchronize to use energy, heat and other scarce resources more optimally.

Engineering new building materials for total sustainability, engineering new resource recovery methods to improve indoor air quality and building occupant health, reducing construction and demolition debris (which makes up 40 percent of U.S. landfill volume), and creating resources for new high-value materials.

Exploring the interface of architecture with fields such as neuroscience, organic electronics and computational materials science to investigate how differences in our built environments are reflected in brain function, human behavior and personal well-being. These insights can inform new building design and materials development.

Facilitating policy changes to implement measured performance standards for buildings and incentives for better performance. A significant challenge is to overcome the obstacles posed by fragmented industry and construction processes, unregulated commissioning processes and uncertain returns on energy-efficiency efforts.

2http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Highlights/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf

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How can we ensure that humanity flourishes in the cities of the future?

Transforming the electricity grid.

Current grid design is centralized and hierarchical, making it expensive to deploy, hard to modify and vulnerable to cyber and physical attacks, both human-made and natural. It assumes that generation can be accurately controlled and that demand is predictable and inflexible. Pervasive low-cost sensing, computation and communications can now provide a high-resolution picture and enable fine-grained control and optimization of electrical systems. New materials and technologies enable cost-effective generators and new storage capabilities. Opportunities to take these advances and innovate to meet future electricity demands include:

Fundamental advances and innovations are needed in security, real-time optimization and power electronics, large-scale simulation, optimization and power systems, as well as energy economics, data analysis and public policy.

Transforming the grid edge by designing plug-and-play architectures that coordinate distributed energy generation (solar, natural gas, wastewater processing), loads and storage to achieve economic objectives for each consumer while providing systemwide efficiency.

Redesigning the grid core to support operations responsive to variability in supply through recourse opportunities, improved monitoring and use of new storage and transmission technologies.while providing systemwide efficiency.

Creating load flexibility by using large-scale data analytics to understand consumer behavior, design pricing and other incentive mechanisms, and to target energy efficiency and demand management mechanisms.

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How can we ensure that humanity flourishes in the cities of the future?

Transportation networks.

Transportation systems have traditionally included the infrastructure that facilitates mobility and the vehicles that traverse the network. The future of urban transportation will be very different. Privately owned cars, widely recognized as an unsustainable solution for urban mobility, will probably be replaced with networks of shared and connected autonomous cars. New materials and structural systems will extend the service life, increase the usefulness and reduce the construction impact of roads, bridges, railways, ports and airports. Research on autonomous platforms, controls, connectivity, safety and reliability, human response, and legal and economic aspects is needed. Opportunities for innovation at the interface between vehicles and infrastructure include:

Advancements in engine design, batteries, sustainable fuels, smart grids, urban planning and cyber security are also necessary for transportation to be quicker, smarter and result in less negative environmental and social impact.

Developing pavements that provide on-the-go recharging of electric vehicles.

Using vehicles to provide power and transmit data for infrastructure sensing networks.

Developing adaptive management of infrastructure networks based on travel demand.

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How can we ensure that humanity flourishes in the cities of the future?

Responsive urban water systems and the food-water-energy nexus.

Increasing demands for water require the development and management of integrated water, wastewater and groundwater systems to achieve denitrification of drinking water, direct potable reuse of wastewater and reuse of wastewater for agriculture. Fundamental advancements are required in systems analysis, including integrating data from sensor arrays to simultaneously optimize fluid dynamics, water chemistry and microbiology over large systems.

High-performance, multiscale computing has the potential to enable previewing of the performance of large, complex systems to provide new design insights and enable scale-up for water systems. Recognizing that food-sector activities are frequently located near urban areas where unique synergies are possible between the food, water and energy sectors, opportunities for innovation include:

Integrating planning and operation of food production and urban water systems to decrease our overall water, energy and nutrient footprint.

Developing mobile remote sensor and telemetry controls to maintain effective control and standards compliance in distributed treatment systems.

Extending advances in environmental

biotechnology that were originally designed for urban water systems, so they can also produce food more efficiently.

Minimizing food waste to improve economic and environmental impacts, including decreased water and energy demands. In 2009, 32 percent of food produced in the world was lost or wasted partly because of inefficient distribution systems, packaging issues and consumer behavior.3

3http://www.wri.org/sites/default/files/reducing_food_loss_and_waste.pdf

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How can we ensure that humanity flourishes in the cities of the future?

Urban resilience.

Urbanization is happening in regions with significant hazards ranging from rising sea levels and earthquakes to terrorist threats. Cities are relying more on complex infrastructure and supply chain systems, indicating the need to better understand what makes a city resilient to disruptions. While most attention to resilience has come from social science case studies, engineering principles can facilitate the design of optimal urban systems. The Rockefeller Foundation’s recent “City Resilience Framework”4 suggests several indicators of resilience related to the built environment, and also several focused on community diversity, robust employment, societal stability, a strong financial system and integrated planning.

The success of urban areas, and their ability to recover from shocks, depends on both physical infrastructure and societal quality of life. Advancements needed to improve urban resilience include:

Achieving these advancements will require a multidisciplinary network of researchers focusing on technologies, organizations, policies and tools that will meaningfully improve urban quality of life, and therefore urban resilience.

Quantifying and improving quality of life within an urban community.

Measuring the extent to which smart, decentralized and flexible infrastructure systems increase resilience.

Developing metrics and tools to facilitate consideration of resilience when designing next-generation infrastructure systems.

Modeling and designing societal-infrastructure interactions in disrupted cities in order to enhance resilience.

4http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/report/city-resilience-framework

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How can we ensure that humanity flourishes in the cities of the future?

Urban systems and public health.

The goal of public health is to improve lives by preventing and treating disease. Urban systems and planning directly impact public health and can be designed to promote active, healthy lifestyles through transportation planning; limit or mitigate urban pollution by retrofitting and replacing aged heating systems; and improve sanitation and hygiene through novel waste and wastewater treatment technologies. The challenges for decision makers in urban systems design and public health programs include limited resources, competing objectives and limited information about uncertain events.

To support good decisions for systems design and public health, cities need information on how urban system design decisions influence health consequences and likely costs. Advancements are needed in:

Developing mathematical and

computational models to evaluate the potential impact of urban system designs on alternative public health programs that capture relevant uncertainties, complexities and interactions, and to better guide the spending of public funds.

Developing low-polluting energy, water and waste-treatment system designs for dense urban regions.

Understanding and developing

modeling methods for the impact of novel urban systems on psychological well-being.

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How can we ensure that humanity flourishes in the cities of the future?

To lead the way in ensuring that billions of people can flourish in the cities of the future, we recommend that Stanford Engineering:

Every department in the School of Engineering can contribute to the challenge of creating high-quality-of-life 21st century cities while minimizing their ecological footprint. In addition, collaborations are needed across all Stanford schools, as well as a number of centers and institutes, to tackle these challenges.

While the engineering is necessary, its adoption and impact will occur only when research and education are conducted in the context of how humans will interact with these urban systems, as well as the institutional, governance and regulatory landscape of an urban region. We believe that the Accelerator for Collaborative Engineering Teams and a parallel focus on the research theme “How do we create synergistic interface between engineering and humanity” can enable this endeavor to ensure that humanity will flourish in the cities of the future.

Launch a Center for Sustainable

Urban Systems to facilitate cross-school research collaborations on topics around urban sustainability as described above.

Provide unique cross-disciplinary

(including cross-school) graduate education opportunities for future urban professionals to learn how to integrate urban systems across multiple fields.

Strengthen systems analysis expertise across the school with a focus on multisystem integration in areas related to urban systems (such as transportation, energy, water and buildings).

Strengthen computational expertise

across the school and university in domains related to sustainable urbanization and in particular the interactions of human behavior and response with infrastructure systems.

Strengthen expertise in the interface of architecture and urban planning with engineering.

Establish “living labs” using the campus and a nearby city (Palo Alto and/or San Francisco) to collect data, deploy systems and experiment with concepts developed on campus, creating a rich data and problem environment, open for innovation and then extend and scale the proven concepts to sites around the world.

Create a demand for our work by developing partnerships with institutions and government agencies. They can educate us about their challenges and we can educate them about the value of engineering in addressing those challenges.