SIM ECO CITY – A new research proposal

October 4th, 2010 · · Research Projects

SIM [1] ECO-CITY -  PROJECT OUTLINE

An open innovation project to simulate and analyse new distributed systems architectures for zero-carbon, resilient communities and cities, in response to the challenges of climate change and ‘peak oil’.
Draft Sept 2010. ⓒ Chris Ryan. University of Melbourne. Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab.

Preamble

Cities and the carbon challenge

The legacy of a century and a half of fossil-fuel based development is that (globally) we face a serious threat to future prosperity from climate change and the immanent depletion of cheap oil. On the balance of expert opinion we have only a short period – a matter of decades – to make the significant changes to our economies if we are to achieve sustainable prosperity. This will demand fundamental structural and systemic change. From many spheres of thinking this historical moment is being cast as a time for visionary action, for creativity, innovation and transformation – for re-invention rather than re-construction. Much of that visionary attention is focused on the transformation of cities and the development of new infrastructure, new services, new business solutions and the enhancement of urban and community liveability.

Cities accommodate over 80% of the global population and play a significant role in the economic success of nations. Yet cities everywhere face multiple problems and challenges relating to: urban congestion; availability of suitable land; ageing and inefficient infrastructure; diminishing natural resources; climate change; obligations to reduce the carbon footprint, oil and energy usage; and the need to protect people and infrastructure against human-induced and natural disasters. In this context, dealing with the twin challenges of fossil fuel – oil depletion and climate change – without massive disruption requires

  • ‘building-out’ dysfunctional carbon-dependencies
  • designing and ‘building-in’ new systems of social and physical infrastructure for the provision of food, energy, water, transport and shelter
  • creating living systems that raise understanding of ‘natural capital’, and support behaviours and lifestyles with low material consumption.
  • simultaneously delivering mitigation, oil decent and adaptation (to climate shifts).

Cities and towns play a constitutive role in the formation of social and cultural identity, providing a fertile source of community and political initiatives for transition to a zero-carbon world. Cities in many countries are taking action to ‘decarbonise’; new eco-city and regional sustainable development projects are growing rapidly; hundreds of towns and communities are organising around ‘bottom-up’ processes loosely coordinated around the concept of ‘transition’[2]. What is most interesting about these initiatives  is that they express broadly similar visions for change, emphasising: greater decentralisation of systems of provision of critical resources; stronger local economies; increasing diversity of resource supply; configuration of information systems to provide dynamic feedback on environmental conditions and to support community engagement in experimentation, innovation and governance.

Over the last four years the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL) at the University of Melbourne, working with local and international collaborators, has developed a series of visions for change for Melbourne in 2032. These visions explore the outcomes of a paradigm shift in the city’s support structures to a distributed (decentralised and networked) model, echoing most of the characteristics identifiable in the city/town (bottom-up and top-down) initiatives. This distributed model is not an invention but an extrapolation of current technical systems (in renewable energy and information) and socio-technical developments in water, food, local economic development, and so on.  Working with the McCaughey Centre at the university VEIL has also produced research and policy papers on distributed systems (energy, water, food) with a particular focus on such systems as the basis for community and economic resilience in the face of uncertain climate impacts.

A new systems architecture for sustainable resilient cities.

In this proposal we use the term ‘a new systems architecture’ (NSA) to describe the underlying structure of a zero-carbon, resilient, city, based on VEIL’s work and city/town/region case studies.

The shape of that NSA can be broadly described as involving:

  • Decarbonised energy supply
  • A culture of end use efficiency and low consumption (materials, energy water..)
  • Systems of provision of energy, water and food that are more regionally diverse and localised, following a distributed infrastructure model
  • Economies more localised and diverse with an accelerated growth of new information-based services;
  • Strong culture and use of open-innovation platforms for collaboration
  • Transport, built structures and urban form based on principles of short access distances and a modal shift to electric and human powered systems.

The accumulated attention to NSA’s that resemble the above features is now so evident (and the pressure for social action so urgent) that it warrants a significant program to evaluate its potential contribution to the creation of a truly resilient, zero-carbon, liveable city.

Proposal:

Aim: to produce urgently needed data on potential new systems architectures for cities:

Many of the city projects around the world have developed as a response to local demands and opportunities and have been content to be localised experiments. There are few cases where the impact of scaling up such localised experiments has been analysed in detail. Many city cases deal with limited components of the systems architecture (typically either energy, water or food). It is critical that promising developments are modelled to look at system interactions (e.g new water systems can have significant impact on energy; food interacts with both energy and water and transport, and so on). The more complex multi-system approach of VEIL, whilst being influential in affecting the direction of future development, has produced, essentially, a series of plausible conjectures (or small-scale projects in development) for public scrutiny and critique. With one exception (food scenarios for Melbourne), impacts have not been modelled and analysed. Critical questions do need to be addressed:

  • At what scale are distributed solutions most effective and efficient (e.g  rain tanks/grey water/sewerage systems – household level, neighbourhood or precinct scale?);
  • What configuration of systems provide greatest reslience, greatest overall decarbonisation?
  • Can such systems reduce overall material consumption?
  • Are they viable in terms of resource use, behaviour, culture, affordability?

This new distributed system architecture urgently needs to be assessed for resilience, liveability and resource impacts.

Method: creating a multi-disciplinary design and simulation program: Researching, visioning, modelling, analysing and ‘prototyping’.

The program should be a globally significant centre for:

  • the exploration of projected architectures for the essential living systems of future cities and urban communities (focusing on more distributed systems for food, energy, water, transport, built infrastructure and urban form) utilising the successful VEIL methodology and process, involving designers, researchers and design students.
  • the exploration and analysis of current experimentation around the world (case-studies)
  • testing the projections, and the case studies, through modelling and analysis, for their social, technical and economic capacity to deliver affordable, enduring, resilient, zero-carbon, outcomes in the light of projected climate change and ‘peak oil’ scenarios.
  • engaging with communities, business and government to ‘prototype’ promising solutions – as real-life experimentation.

The specific modelling (and ‘prototyping’) will be based on existing and projected conditions of metropolitan Melbourne.  However, the generic nature of the proposed approach, supported by specific precinct-scale research and interventions – ‘prototyping’ the most fertile outcomes – gives confidence that the research will be scalable and adaptable for other regions. The prototyping work is expected to involve further collaborative work with the City of Hume (for both the CAD and the Broadmeadows 2032 plan), with the City of Melbourne and the University of Melbourne Campus.

Scope: In the first instance: a three year program. A strong multidisciplinary program; partnering with design schools and practices, research organisations, governments, communities and the private sector (nationally and internationally) to envisage and assess rapid, fundamental change.

Scale and budget: Full-time staffing of 9. Core research: team of 5 people (knowledge of systems – food, energy, water, transport, built environment; design; modelling) plus 5 Masters students. Management and support: Research; Strategic and Financial; Communications and engagement; IT. Consultants and partners: Materials flow and footprint analysis; analysis  of community well-being; business, jobs and economic modelling. IT support.

Program components

The program is to commence in the first half of 2011, with an initial scoping phase building up to the full project team by 2012.

Overall, the program would be based around 6 Modules that would work in an iterative sequence:

(1) A platform for engagement

Designing, operating and refining a web-based platform to provide:

  • Information flows between the core research team and other partners
  • Internet based platform for collaboration by core group – to contribute to building the visions and simulation
  • Documentation of case studies
  • Collaborative wiki with shared with relevant research groups
  • ‘Open innovation’ platform for public input – linked to social and innovation networks (innocentive, etc)

(2) A research and visioning team

A multidisciplinary team researching components of NSA’s

  • Technical, social, systems and design researchers (with expertise across food, water, energy, transport, housing)
  • Investigating existing models from case studies and input from (1) and feedback from (3)
  • Developing briefs for NSA’s to be simulated (input to 3)

(3) Simulation and visualisation.

From ‘briefs’ provided by (2) and other research inputs, develop general systems maps and visions of NSA’s at appropriate scales that attributes can be modelled and analysed

  • Part of a core team expertise.
  • Input from collaborators
  • Use of VEIL design (and engineering) school process for final-year and masters students to ‘amplify’ the research, concept development, simulation and visualisation (an important contribution to (5)
  • Representation of NSA options for modelling and analysis.

(4) Modelling and Analysis

Providing quantitative and qualitative data on the simulations (encompassing measures of materials and resource flows, community well-being, social and economic outcomes).

Use of various modelling and analysis processes – e.g.:

  • CSIRO stocks and flows
  • Footprint, LCA ,City metabolism (CSIRO and others)
  • Social and community well being
  • Economic modelling

(5) Living Prototyping and Experimentation

Collaboration, consultation and support for local precincts (through local councils, service providers, developers, government agencies) to build prototype systems to be monitored by the SIM ECO-CITY lab.


(6) Communication and feedback for system optimisation

A critical function for the open innovations framework

  • Wide communication of results (simulations, visualisations, analysis) for public feedback
  • Linking data from 4 back into (2) and (3)

Scoping research phase (6-9 months 2011):

Building up critical components of the visioning and modelling.

Research sub-projects (incomplete):

(1) Critical review of ‘economies of scale’. The research is to re-examine the economic arguments for economies of scale – to review and analyse the factors that appear to be shifting the economics of production systems towards small scale distributed production systems. Broadly this will include consideration of changes to past economic thought from issues such as: internalising of previously externalised (environmental and social) costs; development of new technical/production capcities/systems that are efficient at smaller scale when the production-distribution-consumption chain is shortened; the ability to provide centralised monitoring and maintenance for a number of small decentralised production units using broadband and sensors.

Researcher: Post-Doc (non-linear resource economics); Funding: Melbourne University (MSSI and VEIL)

(2) Directions in distributed water, energy and information solutions (technologies, management, systems interactions, drivers, investment)

Review of global research and experimentation.

Researcher: Post-Doc engineering/industrial design ); Funding: Melbourne University. Partners: Yarra Valley Water; others (to be identified)

(3) Review of developments in frameworks for assessing urban resilience.

Analysis of frameworks used or under-development for characterising and evaluating the resilience of the built environment (and systems of resource provision). Frameworks will be compared and assessed for their value in providing heuristic (rapid, rule-of-thumb) methods for identifying critical nodes of intervention:

  • areas of weakness and vulnerability (low resilience) where urban systems are at greatest risk from physical and socio-economic disturbances, and
  • sites where changes in current functions can dramatically improve the sustainability of resource provision.

This work will draw from global research in the areas of integrated assessment, resilience and transition management; in particular from the resilience alliance (particularly the Urban Resilience network), the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the CSIRO’s sustainable ecosystems flagship.

Researcher: research officer  / Masters research.  Funding: VEIL

(4) Building a database of case studies, research, outcomes, across the field of localised energy, water, food, transport systems.

Populating the core of the (A) engagement Platform above. Identifying global case studies, research, modelling. Establishing links with organisations, researchers, experimenters, entrepreneurs. Identifying and collating data on the outcomes of case studies. Establishing a uniform framework for the collection and storage of data, to meet the objective of the (A) platform for the project.

Researcher: Research staff or PhD. Funding to be identified.

(5) Feedback systems (a): effects on individual consumption patterns from engagement in production (water, energy, food)

Research to explore the impacts of role changes from ‘passive consumer’ to (part) producer where individuals take on production of:

  • energy through installation of PV, wind power;
  • water (rainwater tanks, grey water systems);
  • food (community gardens, home gardens).

Research Officer. Funding: VEIL, Centre for Design RMIT; Corporate (to be defined). Partner: Alternative Technology Association, Victoria (in kind, data and support).

(6) Feedback systems (b): review of technologies for feedback and their effectiveness.

Smart meters; individual household energy meters; on-line systems; new billing systems; digital and analogue systems.

Globally there are a range of systems being used or developed or tested to provide effective feedback on consumption. There is a widespread assumption that consumption patterns partly develop around inadequate data on actual instantaneous and cumulative consumption and that the provision of readily accessible data will result in a modification of those patterns. Critical issues explored in research and experimentation in this area are: What is effective data (are units of consumption enough or is price more effective?; what constitutes ‘readily accessible’ data, accurate date streams or indicative, digital or analogue, etc?.

Researcher; potential Masters research. Funding: not yet sourced.

Potential project  partners:

University of Melbourne – VEIL; McCaughey Centre; Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute: Melbourne Energy Institute: Victorian Climate Change Adaptation Research Centre; MUTOPIA; Faculties of Architecture, Building and Planning; Engineering; Land and Environment; Business and Commerce.

Other Australian Research – CSIRO (Sustainable Eco-systems); Institute for Sustainable Futures (UTS); Centre for design RMIT

Government – Melbourne City Council; Hume City Council; ICLEI; Sustainability Victoria; DIIRD; DPCD; DSE

International – TU Delft, Netherlands; Stockholm Resilience Institute; University of Lund, Sweden; Forum for the Future, UK; University College London UK; Politechnico di Milano, Italy; Yale University (Industrial Ecology) USA

Private Sector: Yarra Valley Water; ICT; Transport; Energy; Water; Construction.

Detailed Background Argument

Either we look at radical changes to the way we live, and intervene in our urban fabric with overlaying strata of new green infrastructure or we tinker with what we have.  Heathcote, E. FT architecture critic – in ‘The future of Cities’,  Financial Times UK Sept 8 2010

SIM-ECO-CITY

The Challenge: Sustainable and Resilient Cities

Cities accommodate over 80% of the global population and play a significant role in the economic success of nations. Yet cities face significant problems that threaten to reverse the livability factors that have attracted people to move to urban communities. According to even the weaker impact scenarios for climate change and ‘peak’ oil, cities face a period of extraordinary transformation if they are to be sustainable; extraordinary because of the necessary rate of change (essentially just a few decades) and the extent of re-alignment of the vital systems of city life (economies, business, infrastructure, production, distribution, consumption, culture and community).

This transformation will be driven two aspects of the process of withdrawal from hundreds of years of fossil fuel dependency:

1.     Mitigation /  Decarbonisation. The (rapid) shift to an economy that is (beyond) zero-carbon: Powering up (switching to) carbon free energy supply; powering down energy consumption[1] (reducing waste); expanding carbon sequestration.

2.     Adaptation / Resilience. Living with higher temperatures, sea-level rise, altered rainfall patterns (and water availability), and being able to bounce back from extreme weather events (without loss of critical function).

These responses are linked – they have to unfold in a compatible, coherent way.

A New Systems Architecture for Sustainable Cities

There is a dominant articulation of the above challenge as ‘technological’ – positing it as essentially a technology-innovation revolution. It is becoming abundantly clear that this is a dangerously simplistic assumption. Cities have developed as a complex alignment of social, cultural, physical and technological systems. Although new zero-carbon energy supply technologies – and information technologies –  must be a foundation of any future sustainable-resilient city, how they are deployed will depend on selecting, and configuring technical systems so they align with the other life-systems of the city. Whatever systems architecture emerges will, of course, also be shaped by the twin drivers outlined above: reducing atmospheric greenhouse gases at the same time as developing resilience to large and unstable shifts in weather patterns.

The new systems architecture of the city will not only be aligned around energy supply; there are also fundamental challenges in the provision of water and food. Energy systems, water systems and food systems are interconnected and location dependent; the effects of climate change and oil shortage/prices could be catastrophic in some contexts but impacts will not be uniform. It will depend on local conditions and the nature – the ‘brittleness’- of exiting systems of provision.

A 2010 UNEP report[2], assessing the impacts of production and consumption for global action, identifies agriculture, fisheries and energy supply as the critical production priorities, but finds that patterns of consumption are driving the environmental impacts of production in the areas of food, housing, mobility and use of electrical appliances. A new systems architecture will have to re-shape the consumption and production patterns of the city, addressing, as interlocking issues, supply and demand characteristics, as well as the infrastructure of delivery in the provision of energy, water and food, transport, housing and workplaces.

New systems architecture must provide for transformed social and cultural values and aspirations, supported by (and supporting) the changed physical and technological (urban) form. As in any successful architectural design, all those dimensions must be resolved together.

A Transformative Design Task

Scenario thinking

One way of categorising the challenge before us is that we have to move (rapidly) from the re-construction of the world to its re-invention. The trajectories of past development will not get us to a viable future. This may sound just like another way of articulating the idea of innovation – and ‘eco-innovation’ is frequently the way that the transformative process of de-carbonising the economy is described. However, as the domain of innovation in this situation is complex socio-technical-physical change (across all areas of the economy), current knowledge and practice from industrial or technological innovation is likely to be inadequate.

It is the essence of human creativity that we can imagine a different future, a different society, even to envisaging what might emerge out of period of enormous stress on a society that currently exists. This creative power is often harnessed through the use of scenarios to address anticipated future challenges.  For relatively simple trajectories of change, scenario approaches provide a valuable process of engagement (to harness knowledge and to understand the effects of existing interests, opportunities and barriers) and a method of mapping a territory of action, with various options that can then be modelled and evaluated.

Approaches to modelling complex systems change

When the territory for action involves a large number of interlocking socio-technical-physical systems, the ‘options’ to be ‘modelled’ can quickly grow beyond the resources available to address them.  It is hardly surprising, therefore, that something as complex as the transformation of currently unsustainable human living-systems is frequently addressed by starting from the re-alignment of specific sub-systems (say to deliver zero-carbon energy or to ensure water supply). Then the intersections or interactions with other systems of interest are scrutinised.  There is growing concern that this approach is unrealistic, because systems interactions are complex and often non-linear.

There are attempts to use computer-based modelling to deal with a number of subsystems at the same time, allowing for iterative correction of trajectories identified as unproductive (or maladaptive).

Building – rather than modelling

In a growing number of cities, towns and regions around the word a process of conscious re-development for ‘transition’ to a zero fossil-fuel future is underway. In many cases this arises through the action of local inhabitants guided by an open platform of support and guidance under the ‘transition towns’ imprimatur.

In some European contexts there is a more deliberative policy support for innovation and transition (based on an approach known as ‘strategic niche management’). This approach essentially adopts an ‘evolutionary model’ and establishes policies and programs that stimulate and support diverse local (niche) experimentation, building alternative socio-techncial-physical systems at a (relatively) small scale, suited to specific urban conditions.  The policy settings for these experiments establish goals for de-carbonisation (and potentially for resilience – if that can be defined).  Communication platforms provide for exchange of knowledge.  These new ‘urban life structures’ could then evolve, adapt, prosper or fail. If enough prosper (so the theory goes), then we could see the evolution of new sustainable-reslient conditions at the City level and beyond.

A design-visioning approach.

The above approaches require considerable resources and policy/political support. At Melbourne University the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab received a modest 3.5-year grant ($1.6) to explore another approach that has counterpoints in other countries. It can be described as ‘design-visioning future transitions’.  It uses elements of the above approaches but focuses on building future visions of new systems architecture and testing them for plausibility and for local relevance. The future visions are based on what-if speculations of underlying systems transformation (paradigm shifts to a new systems architecture). The future visions are derived from a scenario of a systems architecture, for the provision of critical resources and infrastructure, that is distributed:

  • Localised: Systems of provision are designed and positioned as close as feasible to points of resource supply and demand – reflecting the scale and context of local needs, conditions and resources
  • Networked: Systems are designed to have strong linkages to provide capacity of exchange. Such networks are necessary to overcome resource inequalities (excess or deficiency) an must exist at a range of scales
  • Modular: Provision of essential resources rely on the collective capacity of multiple systems that can operate autonomously but also in an interconnected mode. Capacity can be directly related to demand – increased demand can be met (as and when it is needed) by the addition of new modules.
  • Diverse and redundant: Systems are created to maximise the use of diverse sources of supply and redundancy is treated as positive – as aiding resilience
  • Open and transparent: responsibility and management for the operation of systems is more democratic, involving local stakeholders, encouraging local innovation. System operation and infrastructure is designed to be as transparent as possible.

In a distributed systems framework, scenarios for NSA’s show some critical characteristics:

  • A decarbonised energy supply – renewable energy and renewable carbon sequestration
  • A culture of end-use efficiency and diversity of supply systems (energy, water, food) supported by a growth in new services to manage system operation and efficient production and consumption
  • A strong culture of experimentation, innovation and widespread use of open-innovation platforms for collaboration – a more open culture of sharing knowledge and innovation
  • Economies that are more localised and diverse with an high relative growth of (new) information based services;
  • Systems of provision of energy, water and food that are more regionally diverse and localised, based on growth of distributed infrastructure (decentralised and networked)
  • Transport and urban form based on planning principles aiming for short access distances and modal shift to electric and human powered systems (fast and slow)

The VEIL approach involves a creative design process to envisage new configurations for the infrastructure and living systems of an urban community, with twenty-five year horizon. The NSA’s are explored at multiple scales, from the narratives of daily life for individuals and neighbourhoods, to precinct and larger scale restructuring of patterns of production, distribution and consumption.  Newly envisaged configurations – new patterns of production and consumption, new urban forms, new businesses, new life-styles – are ‘tested’ through an open, iterative process of presentation, critical feedback and re-design.

Information and communication technology (ICT) – the enabling platform.

Although the scenario-vision work of VEIL (and collaborators) emphasises the need to think across the socio-technical-physical space for innovation and change, it does seem to be a feature of most of the work to date that ICT – the creative structuring of information flows – forms an essential technological base for all the solutions envisaged. Feedback systems, distributed monitoring and reporting, internet-based collaborative platforms, local resource management systems; these and many other ICT potentialities make the VEIL distributed system NSA solutions viable and effective.

Limitations of the VEIL work

Research input to the VEIL process was a first limited by funds and staff but it has been amplified through the process of visioning in three ways:

  • opening up intensive scenario workshops to a wider community of researchers, government policy officers, entrepreneurs, design professionals;
  • enlisting many hundreds of students to explore the scenarios in their design project work;
  • ensuring the resultant scenario-visions are widely communicated and open to feedback and correction.

‘Siting’ the process has also added a significant level of local knowledge and support to the generation and evaluation of the scenario-visions.

Whilst the cumulative output of the project (research papers, briefing papers, visual concepts, prototypes, exhibitions, has been well received and cited, and in many critical instances very influential in terms of future investment, the underlying assumptions of the NSA remain essentially conjectures. This is particularly true for the various new businesses and services that are envisaged. It has not been possible, expect in one case (food) and that only to a limited extent, to model and widely analyse the impacts.

The VEIL program has generated a significant demand for more (quantitative and qualitative analysis of the ‘viability’ of the envisaged conditions. It is clear that, as the recognition of the need for radical changes in the way we live in urban environments increases, the Important questions need to be addressed. Are these systems (or models of them) more resilient? Do they contribute to decarbonisation? Do they reduce overall consumption? Are they viable in terms of behaviour, culture, cost?

With CSIRO ecosystem sciences in Canberra, the physical resource flows implied by different scenarios of future systems are being modelled in relation to the sustainability and security of food supply.

The SIM ECO-CITY project has grown out of the collaboration with CSIRO.

[1] These terms are borrowed from the Zero Carbon Britain 2030 project

[2] UNEP (2010) Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production: Priority Products and Materials, A Report of the Working Group on the Environmental Impacts of Products and Materials to the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management. Hertwich, E., van der Voet, E., Suh, S., Tukker, A., Huijbregts M., Kazmierczyk, P., Lenzen, M., McNeely, J., Moriguchi, Y.

[1] Sustainable Innovation Modelling:

[2] over 500 of such initiatives are listed in the transition network: see: http://www.transitionnetwork.org