Center for Sustainable Cities

Introduction - Objectives of the work package
This work package is focused on public space, the built environment that defines it and the scenario-building processes and systems modeling that are to be used to explore the range of future possibilities related to the buildings and spaces of the built environment. In particular it explores the role of public space as the vehicle to creating scenarios that extend the functioning of the Hammam to improve the local quality of life through the pursuit of sustainability oriented means.

Working from the context of the Hammam scenarios involving the restoration of the Hammam at the small scale as well as scenarios involving the neighborhood and the city which at the larger scales are explored. The role of public space in the neighborhood context and the role of scenario building as a research method for projecting alternative futures encompassing what may be considered to be the least desirable to the most desirable and from the most unsustainable to the least unsustainable. The general objective of this work package is to explore and develop the role of scenario building and systems modeling as tools in a larger sustainability design and negotiation process, working from the Hammam within its public space context.

It Takes a Village:

A Scientific Design Process for Generating Sustainable Cities in China

Richard S. Levine, Michael T. Hughes, Casey Ryan Mather

ABSTRACT:
The recently completed European Commission sponsored SUCCESS project studied rural villages in six Chinese provinces from a sustainability perspective. With as yet few inroads from the larger unsustainable Chinese economy, the villages are excellent living exemplars of an almost complete proto-sustainable economy, albeit at no longer acceptable levels of development and opportunity. The form of the villages, their households, and their agricultural allotments create a visual record of their material economy. Systems dynamics models of these village economies were created to experiment with many “what if” scenarios for future development. At first, inherently unsustainable aspects of village life (fossil fuels, agricultural chemicals, etc.) were replaced in the models with comparable sustainability oriented means. Through a civil society, sustainable scenariobuilding process the farmers were able to understand both the consequences of their current activities as well as a range of their future prospects. The researchers were then able to extend this multiple scenario building process to sequentially enlarge these sustainable village models to the scale of towns and eventually cities. Through this Scientific Design Process, it thus becomes possible to project new, modern, sustainable city models rooted in Chinese circumstance and tradition.

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It Takes a Village

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The Sustainable City Game:

Systems Dynamics Modeling Toward a Democratic Urban Design Process

Richard S. Levine, Michael T. Hughes, Ernest J. Yanarella, Casey Ryan Mather

ABSTRACT:
While it has become a buzzword at global conferences, within the scientific and design communities, and among policymakers at a variety of levels, sustainability has largely remained an abstract concept whose abstraction, on the one hand, has served to gather wide-ranging support, but on the other hand, has not been useful in achieving its implementation. The Center for Sustainable Cities in collaboration with Oikodrom, the Vienna Institute for Urban Sustainability, has developed an operational definition of sustainability at the scale of the city-region as a participatory, balance-seeking design process. Our scenario-building design process of sustainable cities is informed by systemic feedback generated by the Sustainability Engine™, a software utility under development at the University of Kentucky that combines systems dynamics modeling software with the functionalities of intelligent CAD, GIS, and facility management programs. This design process, or what call the Sustainable City Game, is a democratic method for the generation, governance, and management of sustainable cities in which stakeholders may place any desire on the table, but in order for a given proposal to move forward in the iterative process it must be embedded in a scenario that on a systemic level is approaching balance. The Sustainable City Game will be explored in the context of two case studies. First will be an examination of a Sustainable Urban Implantation designed for the overbuilding of Vienna’s Westbahnhof railroad yard wherein new urban models were developed that are particularly well suited to the flexible urban design process of the Sustainable City Game. Second, will be an investigation of the European Commission sponsored SUCCESS research project wherein seven proto-sustainable Chinese villages were studied and their metabolisms were projected forward as future sustainable cities through the utilization of an early form of the Sustainability Engine™.

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The Sustainable City Game

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Designing the Future Sustainable City:

Projecting Sustainability from Seven Villages in China

Richard S. Levine, Michael T. Hughes, Casey Ryan Mather

ABSTRACT:
The Center for Sustainable Cites, in collaboration with Oikodrom, the Vienna Institute for Urban Sustainability, has developed an operational definition of sustainability that presents a comprehensive, scientific, democratic, design and governance method that integrates conflicting interests through a scenario-building process. Using this operational definition of sustainability, the European Commission sponsored SUCCESS project studied seven proto-sustainable Chinese villages in order to map their current material, economic and energetic metabolisms and began to engage citizens in a balanceseeking civil society process.

Data representing the current metabolism of one of the villages was embedded in a working systems dynamics model. This model can become a gaming tool for extensive experimentation by the villagers, architects, scientists, and government officials to begin design negotiations through a multiple scenariobuilding process, called the Sustainable City Game. During this game, numerous “what if” scenarios are proposed and the systems dynamics models provide feedback as to the state of balance of the villagesystem. Through this gaming method it will then be possible to empower multiple stakeholder groups to evolve much larger modern towns and cities from these villages that are continually working with the processes and within the limits of sustainability.

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Designing the Future Sustainable City

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The Proto-Sustainable Chinese Village as Generator of the Future Chinese City

Richard S. Levine, Michael Hughes, Casey Ryan Mather, Heidi Dumreicher, Lv Hongyi

INTRODUCTION
China is currently undergoing a massive unprecedented urbanization and industrialization program. Within the next five to ten years a minimum of 200 million Chinese farmers will leave their villages to become factory workers in hundreds of new towns and cities. There are strong indicators that from an economic, social, cultural and environmental point of view, China’s cities will be massively unsustainable with dire consequences for both China as well as the rest of the planet. It is vital that a sustainable alternative to this unwise development be pursued.

The European Commission has sponsored a research program in China called “SUCCESS”, whose goal has been to forge a sustainable future for the Chinese village. It has worked with seven villages in six Chinese provinces, initiating Civil Society processes having the potential of increasing the life quality and economic potential of the villages through sustainability oriented means. Teams of villagers have been working with forty researchers from China, Europe and the US on the one hand asking the question “what to maintain and what to change?” and on the other hand, creating alternative scenarios of possible futures for the villages.

The scenario-building process takes its structure from the architectural design process, and at the same time employs both scientific analytical methods and systems modeling feedback tools. The current metabolism of the villages is studied and modeled and unsustainable practices (i.e. the use of fossil fuels, agricultural chemicals, unsound agricultural practices, etc.) are replaced in the model with sustainability oriented equivalents. Future alternatives are developed as systems models of present and future scenarios. “What-if” questions are then posed and the different scenarios are modeled to assess both their balance as well as their performance in the village-asa- system. Scenarios are each balanced within their natural budget or what we call their Sustainable Area Budget, assuring that any scenario that is eventually pursued satisfies the criteria of sustainability.

With the experience of modeling the Chinese village and projecting it into the future on a sustainable basis having been established, the Chinese sustainable village is used as the starting point for larger towns and cities whose growth and development proceeds through this same sustainable scenario building model to develop diverse, vibrant new towns for China’s future. This prospect is presented both as a systems model as well as an architectural/urbanistic model.

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The Proto-Sustainable Chinese Village as Generator of the Future Chinese City

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THESAURUS OF SUSTAINABILITY

Richard S. Levine, Michael T. Hughes, Casey Ryan Mather

PREFACE
Sustainability is an emerging paradigm which must become the dominant worldview if anything approaching the Western standard of living is to persist into the future. Because countless approaches to the question of sustainability emerging in numerous sectors and disciplines in different cultures, countries and climates currently exist, definitions and streams of research and application abound. To date no recognized practice or common language in the sustainability movement has gained hegemony and consequently, no commonly accepted operational definition. It should be no surprise then, that the term sustainability is used (and almost universally misused) to mean a wide variety of often inconsistent and contradictory practices. In attempting to craft a Thesaurus of Sustainability, the current authors cannot claim this resulting document to be exhaustive, comprehensive, or, much less, unbiased.

Two main contributions to the sustainability discussion are offered by the authors. One is that terms such as sustainable architecture, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable economics should be replaced by Sustainability Oriented Architecture, Sustainability Oriented Agriculture, and Sustainability Oriented Economics. With the use of this new term, “Sustainability Oriented,” a distinction is made between tools for sustainability, or practices that could become part of the larger process of sustainability, and a comprehensive civil society sustainable city-region process. Armed with this distinction, it is clear that the term sustainability, in common as well as professional use, almost always refers to sustainability oriented practices not the comprehensive practice of sustainability itself.

The authors’ second contribution is an operational definition of sustainability – the only operational definition we have been able to identify in all the discourse on the subject to date. The criteria or characteristics of sustainability are present in all well known descriptions and definitions; however, what they lack is an accounting of how to get there from here, or how to design and manage the emerging sustainable city in dynamic and through-going way. Such an operational definition of sustainability will be presented as the culmination of this Thesaurus. On the surface this operational definition would seem to be making a claim upon the spaces of the many other approaches to sustainability that this Thesaurus attempts to cover. Instead, the authors attempt to typify these individual approaches as potentially valuable tools for pursuing sustainability processes, but necessarily within the larger integrative operational definition.

Even in the SUCCESS project, whose very structure was aimed at maximizing integration, manifested a tendency toward disciplinary isolation that hindered the pursuit of a synergistic collaboration toward sustainability. In these early years of the study of sustainability, many researchers have in fact developed their own operational definitions that are strictly contained within their disciplinary boundaries. Thus, sustainable agriculture, sustained yield forestry and (much to the dismay of the current authors) sustainable architecture, have emerged as practices that are not much concerned with interfacing either with other disciplines or with the larger question or practice of sustainability. The positive side of this is that many different disciplines have developed excellent Sustainability Oriented Tools that are useful within their own disciplines and may well become useful in larger interdisciplinary, civil society processes. The negative side of this is that specialists are often much more comfortable employing their Sustainability Oriented Tools within their own disciplines than they are in working with other disciplines, or indeed with the actual citizen stakeholders who should be the focus of any eventual sustainability process.

This dynamic unfolded within the SUCCESS project in sometimes frustrating, but always interesting ways. Three sorts of actors emerged. The physical scientists, in their relentless pursuit of data, calculations and applicable theory, for the creation of coherent models of resource, material, energy and sometimes economic flows, had a deep distrust of the social scientists whose loose, abstract, qualitative, and sometimes touchy-feely methods did not look to them as very scientific. Then there were the social scientists, who were developing all sorts of often innovative methods for teasing out the needs, desires, feelings, and problems of the local villagers in attempts to establish new civil society processes focusing upon the questions of “what to change” in the villages and “what to maintain.” The social scientists were perhaps more open to the work of the physical scientists than vice-versa, but they were deeply suspicious of the latter’s methods, which appeared to omit any real consideration for the local culture, traditions, and aspirations of the villagers. Indeed it sometimes seemed that cultural considerations might well be a hindrance to the application of any scientific recommendations. Still, the role of social and cultural considerations in the pursuit of sustainability has been frequently marginalized in the pursuit of the scientific, technical and economic aspects of sustainability practice. Such oversight “misses the forest for the trees,” as the practice of sustainability, whatever else it may also be, is primarily the pursuit of a way of life in a local place and a local culture within the limits of nature. It needs to be acknowledged that a community of people negotiating how they will choose to live within their fair share of the earth’s resources, assisted by technical means, will be the basis of the future sustainable city-region.

Finally, the third set of actors were the villagers themselves operating through the local, so-called, “critical reference group.” This group was in many ways the liaison between the villagers and their culture, and the research team. The establishment of these groups represented the hope of anchoring civil society processes within the villages. But as this form of local democracy was, in effect, a new and somewhat alien institution to the local culture, it was never clear how representative, how effective, or how empowered these teams of villagers could become.

The Thesaurus that follows, then, is neither comprehensive nor unbiased. Rather, it is, first of all, an attempt to present an overview of the current state of sustainability practice as it exists largely in the West. Secondly, it serves as an immanent critique of those practices, often drawing upon the obscure meanings and unrealized possibilities of clusters of concepts organized around the core term, sustainability. Finally, it strives to offer a comprehensive alternative through which the sustainable city-region may be realized. Along the way, it challenges conventional ways of thinking and opens up a window onto fields of inquiry and pathways of social action that in concert provide the best hope for affecting that paradigm shift so essential if the twenty-first century is to be the Age of Sustainability.

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THESAURUS OF SUSTAINABILITY

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Generating Sustainable Towns from Chinese Villages:
A Systems Modeling Approach

Richard S. Levine, Michael T. Hughes, Casey Ryan Mather, Ernest J. Yanarella

ABSTRACT
The great majority of China’s developing towns will be extensions of already existing villages. With the prospect of hundreds of millions of Chinese farmers projected to leave their villages to become industrial workers in new and expanded towns within the next few years, new challenges will be faced. As expansion and modernization progresses, this development moves from the traditional village model that operates not far from resource sustainability to increasingly unsustainable patterns of commerce, urban development, and modern life. With such an unprecedented mass migration and transformation, how can Chinese culture survive? What is to become of the existing million plus agricultural villages? How can these massively unsustainable new industrial towns survive? In the European Commission sponsored research program SUCCESS, researchers worked from the scale of the Chinese village to find viable answers to these questions.

To address these issues, the Center for Sustainable Cities, one of the SUCCESS teams, studied the metabolism of several small villages. In these studies, system dynamics models of a village’s metabolism were created and then modified so that inherently unsustainable means were eliminated from the model (fossil fuels, harmful agricultural chemicals, etc.) and replaced by sustainability oriented means. Small Chinese farming villages are unlikely to survive in anything like their present form or scale, not least because they are too small to provide the range of life opportunities to which the young generation of educated Chinese aspires. As a response to this realization as well as to the many other threats to the Chinese village and its rural way of life, it was proposed that one viable path into the future would be to enlarge the villages to become full service towns with sufficient diversity of opportunity to be able to attract and keep many of the best and brightest young people who are now migrating to the larger cities. Starting with the village in its sustainability-oriented model form, the village model would be enlarged both quantitatively and qualitatively through many trial iterations. A research program is described whereby an operational definition of the sustainable city is developed as a means of creating these enlarged models through citizen participation assisted by outside experts using software under development called the Sustainability Engine™ to guide the process and provide feedback as to the consequences of various proposals that are brought to the table. As this process is continued, the village would be incrementally enlarged and made more diverse and more complex through a variety of scenarios until it would emerge as a modern, sustainable town or city. In this way, through a participatory, balance-seeking civil society process involving villagers and scientists in what the Center for Sustainable Cities calls the Sustainable City Game, the villages can become the DNA for generating future sustainable Chinese towns and cities. As an extension of this discussion a new urban model, the Sustainable City-as-a-Hill, is presented that responds to both the qualities of the traditional Chinese village as well as to the modern demands of industrial and post-industrial economies and, in particular, to the need for sustainable urban patterns.

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Generating Sustainable Towns from Chinese Villages

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Sustainable Cities:
A Strategy for a Post-Terrorized World

Richard S. Levine, Michael T. Hughes, Casey Ryan Mather

Introduction
Terror as a political weapon of the poor and the oppressed is an older phenomenon than the terrorism crisis spawned by the tragic events of September 11, 2001, would suggest. Indeed, the word terror is rapidly becoming one of the most overused and least understood concepts in our modern mass-mediated political vocabulary. Not least of all, it is caught up in a body of concepts (violence, coercion, oppression, military force) that are themselves heavily tinged with ideological baggage and weighted down by the class system and the international division of labor. Thus it inhabits the nebulous terrain of essentially contested concepts that defines the speaker’s deepest assumptions about the world and his or her attitudes toward those who count as Us and those who count as Them. This article posits that if all the concepts and interpretations of terrorism were aggregated under a single term—that of unsustainability—a better knowledge of the nature of terrorism as well as its antidote can be understood.

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terrain.org

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Deep Sustainability:
Architecture’s Contribution to a New Paradigm

Richard S. Levine

ABSTRACT
The question of forging a sustainable way of living on this planet is the most significant challenge facing us in the new millennium. The term “sustainability” has been well defined in the abstract, but its operational meaning is still elusive. This is an especially important problem for architects who increasingly embrace the concept of sustainability, but are less than clear about how it relates to the design of buildings and cities. Over the past thirty years there has been a long series of terms that have been used to describe (what should more properly be called) sustainability oriented architecture. Some of them have been: passive solar architecture, energy conscious design, post-fossil architecture, green architecture, ecological architecture and the latest (and arguably the least appropriate) sustainable architecture. Sustainability is a domain that is larger than architecture. Sustainability is understood as an ongoing process through which communities continually renegotiate their common destiny within the limits of nature, their traditions, their understanding of cause and effect and their own creativity. What then does sustainability have to do with architecture? It is the subject of this paper to present an overview of the major analytical methods currently being used in the area of sustainability and their advantages and shortcomings, and contrast these methods with an operational model aimed at actually achieving sustainability rather than describing what we might find if a sustainable city actually existed. In contrast to the analytical approaches that are rooted in scientific tools, this alternative model is rooted in the traditional strengths of architectural design. In so doing the paper also presents an operational definition of “Deep Sustainability” and how the pursuit of Deep Sustainability is dependent upon a design approach.

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A Complete Local Agenda 21 Process:
The Appropriate Relationship of People, Design and Science

Richard S. Levine, Ernest J. Yanarella

Introduction
The provisions of the Rio Earth Summit treaty of 1992 obligated the towns and cities of the signatory countries to prepare and carry out an action plan under its “Local Agenda 21” provisions. Because these provisions were somewhat general and abstract, the European Commission instituted a program culminating in a conference in Aalborg, Denmark in May 1994 called “The European Conference of Cities and Towns Towards Sustainability.” Its animating purpose was to develop a charter that would detail a European approach to the realization of Local Agenda 21. The resulting Aalborg Charter, which has now been ratified by hundreds of cities throughout Europe, has become the principal European vehicle for implementing Local Agenda 21.

Rather than becoming a document that focused on a listing of “best practices” or promoting an “indicator” approach, the Charter emerged after much negotiation and debate as a process document that set forth in strong and clear terms the nature of Sustainable Development as a process. The present authors were principal architects of the Charter and have continued developing both the theoretical framework presented by the Charter as well as extending the process to real world projects. Through successive theoretical iterations and practical design interventions, the authors have devised an operational definition for sustainability processes which is both a condensation and a completion of the operating principles as put forth by the Aalborg Charter:

“Sustainable Development is a Local, Informed, Participatory, Balance-Seeking Process, operating within a Sustainable Area Budget, exporting no negative imbalances beyond its territory or into the future, thus opening a fullness of opportunity and possibility (moglichkeitsraum).”(1)

A unique quality of this definition is the way it places the human and social dimensions of sustainability at the center of the sustainability process without diminishing the critical supportive role played by bona fide science and responsive technological innovation. This paper will explicate that definition, as applied in a project in Vienna and describe how together they describe the minimum level of activity at which sustainable development can be appropriately pursued.

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The Sustainable City of the 21st Century:
Westbahnhof, Vienna - Theory and Practice

Richard S. Levine, Heidi Dumreicher, Taghi Radmard, Ernest J. Yanarella

INTRODUCTION: THE 21ST CENTURY
The 21st Century will be either the century of sustainability or the century of collapse. It will be either the century where the continuation of the unsustainable economic practices of today precipitate irreversible catastrophes, or the century where small local successes in implementing sustainable practices and processes proliferate to transform the entire global economy to a new, balance-seeking relationship with our natural ecosystem. It will be the century where either the analytical, reductionistic methods of science and industry which are the sources of both our progress and our increasingly unsustainable way of life will continue as the central economic paradigm, or the century where a new integrative economic paradigm emerges which promises to put humankind and its processes in a balance-seeking relationship with the natural environment, whose health is the precondition for all human activity.

We are faced with the choice of either continuing our descent into the realm of unsustainability while continuing to deny that it is the consumerist/materialist path itself that is the problem, or we can shift to the new emerging paradigm, a paradigm based on the same principles and processes as those that underlie architecture and design. At present we are not aware that there is a real choice to our current path. It is therefore the primary challenge facing our generation to develop the alternative to decline, not just on a theoretical basis, but as a real place: The Sustainable City. It is an idea whose time has come. It will take very little to precipitate that paradigm shift. It took only one steam engine, one light bulb, one Xerox machine. It will take only one city operating within the limits of its resources and its environment: one Sustainable City, to prove to all the others not only that sustainability is possible, but that it is the only possible way in which the cities and their economies may be designed and managed. Fortunately, an operational theory of the sustainable city is in place and has been embedded in the European Charter of Cities and Towns Towards Sustainability. Equally important is the fact that many towns and cities are moving to implement the Charter in actual programs and urban projects. This paper describes Vienna's Westbahnhof project, which may become the first project in Europe to fully implement the principles of the Charter and in so doing, become Europe's first modern sustainable city.

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The Sustainable Area Budget:
Beyond Sustainability Indicators

Richard S. Levine, Ernest J. Yanarella, Heidi Dumreicher, Tiffany Broyles

Abstract Powerful quantitative methods in the area of sustainable development have recently been developed which, when applied appropriately, can become very useful tools in the effort to establish the foundations of sustainability for the built environment. Among these analytical methods are the so-called sustainability indicator regimes and the various environmental footprint assessment tools (SPI, MIPS, etc.). This paper suggests that while these tools have played a valuable role in mobilizing wider public understanding of the nature of unsustainable processes operating in the world, by themselves these instruments have decided limitations if the goal is to achieve sustainable city-regions. As an alternative, this paper presents a supplementary tool in the early stages of its development –the Sustainable Area Budget (SAB) --as a particularly useful method in the sustainability design process.

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The Appropriate Scale for "Low Energy":
Theory and Practice at the Westbahnhof

Prof. Richard S. Levine, Prof. Ernest J. Yanarella, Arch. Taghi Radmard, Dr. Heidi Dumreicher

ABSTRACT
This paper discusses the question of the absence of long-term goals and standards in the Passive and Low Energy Architecture movement. It also presents the larger context – the Sustainable City - in which a clear goal and operational definition will establish a valid basis for performance goals. Sustainability as a larger context will sometimes even present counterintuitive indications of how building scale goals may manifest.

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Generating Models of Urban Sustainability:
Vienna’s Westbahnhof Sustainable Hilltown

Heidi Dumreicher, Richard S. Levine, Ernest J. Yanarella and Taghi Radmard

Introduction
The focus of this chapter is Vienna's Westbahnhof project, an ambitious undertaking now in the third phase of its conceptualization and design at the Centre for Sustainable Cities at the University of Kentucky, in association with Oikodrom in Vienna. Because the underlying framework of this project departs in significant respects from conventional approaches to sustainability, the chapter begins with an extended outline of its theoretical underpinnings and design elements, as well as the historical model and precursor to its 'city-as-a-hill' design.

Then, through text and illustrations. it explores the fundamental effort to integrate urban architectural design with strong sustainability principles into a program for implementing a Sustainable City Implantation (SCT) upon and over the present Westbahnhof site. The purpose is to demonstrate not only that sustainability in a place is imperative, but that it is possible and realizable. When completed, the implantation may become the first project in Europe to fully implement the principles of the Aalborg Charter and, in so doing, become Europe's first modern sustainable city.

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Cities and Regions in the Global Sustainability Debate:
Co-Evolution Toward Sustainable Development

Richard S. Levine, Ernest J. Yanarella, and Heidi Dumreicher

Introduction
As carriers of alternative visions of the twenty-first century, two polar trends appear to be giving shape to the emerging social and cultural landscape of the new millennium: global society versus the commonwealth of sustainable societies. On the one hand, powerful forces of globalization are obliterating territorial barriers, economic and political divisions, and cultural differences. Global economic restructuring decimates local political economies, causing the destruction of old industries and the uprooting of the existing labor force. The New Information Order dissolves local news sources and popular culture, bringing forth more homogeneous coverage of national and global news with a Northern Hemisphere bias and Westernized mass culture. Fast capital and worldwide markets undercut pockets of local capital and locally-embedded and regionally-rooted business and commerce.

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