On Earth Day twelve finalists were chosen representing 7 different countries for the California Chapter of the Royal Institute of British Architects’ International Design Competition: Building A Sustainable World: Life in the Balance. The goal of the competition is to directly and immediately address the impending and current environmental problems upon us by creating design models for sustainable communities. Among the finalists chosen by an international panel of esteemed architects was the Center for Sustainable Cities Design Studio, a Lexington-based design firm that specializes in green residential architecture and sustainable urban design. Their entry, “Sustainable Reclamation: An Urban Model for Coal Country” is a proposal for an abandoned strip mining site near the town of Whitesburg, Kentucky. The CSC Design Studio is directed by Richard S. Levine, an architect and professor of architecture at the University of Kentucky College of Design. The project itself is an extension of an undergraduate thesis project at the UK School of Architecture designed by Michael T. Hughes, who served as project manager for the proposal. Casey Ryan Mather, also a graduate of the School, was project coordinator and Taqi Radmard provided the architectural renderings. Bill Fleming, Doug Hartig and Pongsak Chaisuparasmikul provided additional design and research. The proposal will be presented at a symposium in Los Angeles on June 8-11, where the final winners will be announced.

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Richard attended a series of meetings and workshops in Cairo recently for the newly begun HAMMAM project. Once again Oikodrom has organized a fantastic group of people to study seven specific Hammams in five different Mediterranean countries and one European country (Turkey) and develop sustainable user concepts for the different sites. As the HAMMAM website reads, "The HAMMAM project develops strategies and designs new concepts of adapting the old Hammam features to a contemporary Islamic life, at the same time assessing possibilities for a joint usage of the Hammam by the local dwellers and tourists interested not only in architecture, but also in getting to know other life styles." Richard went to talk about the virtues of Strong Sustainability and multiple scenario building with the aid of systems dynamics modeling. His travels took him to the bustling city of Cairo with a population of over 16 million people, to an isolated oasis, to ancient Egyptian ruins, and to the white sand desert. Before making his was back to the USA, Richard stopped off in London. All-in-all, a diverse excursion, to say the least.

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The European Union sponsored SUCCESS (Sustainable Users Concepts for China Engaging Scientific Scenarios) project came to a conclusion with several presentations in Beijing and Shanghai. The SUCCESS project was rooted in the principles developed by the Center for Sustainable Cities and was put together as a collaboration between Oikodrom: The Vienna Institute for Urban Sustainability and the Center for Sustainable Cities. It was the largest research grant to be awarded by the European Commission’s, DG-Research, in China. It took as its subjects seven traditional “proto-sustainable” villages in five different Chinese provinces and first assessed their current way of life, how their lifestyle was nearly sustainable in a systemic sense (but not in terms of modern expectations), what to maintain and what to change in cultural, economic, and ecological terms and how to bring these villages into the new century and to make them fully sustainable as an alternative to the grossly unsustainable policies of the central government in their program to transform the country from a rural agrarian country to a modern, industrial, urban country. While team of researchers were using a number of the methods of the Sustainability Game in this China project, the CSC focused on understanding the villages metabolisms through system dynamics modeling: we specifically focused on a small village called Dujia. The research on this project was presented as a stepping stone to a much more comprehensive computer program called the Sustainability Engine which would have imbedded into it systems dynamics models that would aid in the generation of several three-dimensional scenarios for the stakeholders to manipulate.

Eventually, Casey made it out of the meetings and got to explore China's capital city, Beijing. Also, there were several days to explore the modern city of Shanghai.

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"The International Symposium CORP premiered at the Congress Center Messe Wien in February 2006 covering the major topic: 'Sustainable solutions for the information society.'" reads the first blurb on the CORP website. The Center for Sustainable Cities was able to send a paper, "The Sustainable City Game: Systems Dynamics Modeling Toward a Democratic Urban Design Process," to the conference, but unfortunately, no one from our office was available to attend due to previous engagements: however in our absence Heir Stefan Arlanch and Dr. Heidi Dumreicher gave a presentation prepared by the CSC.

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Michael T. Hughes, a research associate and architectural apprentice here at the Center for Sustainable Cities, attended the XXII UIA World Congress in Istanbul, Turkey. He presented the paper “The Proto-Sustainable Chinese Village as Generator of the Future Chinese City” which discusses the importance of Chinese villages in the context of the massive urbanization China’s countryside is currently undergoing. Due to the over 400 million migrant farm workers that are predicted to move the cities for “a better life,” new urban projects are springing up all over China, mostly gabbling up countryside with no regards to the local cultures or architectures. Michael’s call was to present the findings of the European Union funded SUCCESS project, which studied the potentials in the small villages, in that they could offer a node of sustainability at which future urbanization could begin.