Critical New Bio-Socio-Technological Challenges in Urban Sustainability

Cities are pivotal and growing instruments of human advancement, but also concentrated sites of poverty and dysfunctionalities. The explosive growth of cities since the beginning of the last century is leading to concerns about their sustainability, their impact on the sustainability of our global resources, and on the environment. Will today's cities be sustainable in the long run? What are the long-term global implications of urbanization? Are megacities inevitable? desirable? Will the world be capable of accomplishing the huge paradigm shifts necessary to achieve urban sustainability globally? Answers to questions such as these will depend on our still incomplete understanding of the rapidly evolving urban cycle of interactions and on the response to a set of emerging critical demographic, socioeconomic, and biological challenges—beyond the fundamental and more familiar ones of water, energy, and infrastructures, with which there are, however, inextricable interconnections. How we address the emerging new challenges will determine the future trajectory of human settlements and, ultimately, of our species. This will require comprehensive paradigms of urban dynamics and a new vision of engineering. Acknowledgment I would like to gratefully acknowledge President Jerry M. Hultin, Rose Emma, Dr. Barbara Kates-Garnick, and Dr. Don Lebell of Polytechnic Institute of NYU, and Prof. Mihajlo Mesarovic of Case Western Reserve University. This paper is based on an invited presentation at the joint international conference on Technologically Modified Environment—Environmentally Modified Technology of the German Academy of Sciences (The Leopoldina) and the U.S. National Academies at the University of Karlsruhe on October 15, 2009. A condensed version of some aspects of this paper has been published in the December 2010 issue of Sustainability: The Journal of Record. Notes This paper was almost ready for publication at the time of the author's death. Final edits and preparation for publication were completed by Virginia Bugliarello. Machines: broadly defined as artifacts—as are all the products of technology. The acronym biosoma simply means the entity formed by an indissoluble interaction of biology, society and machines (Bugliarello, Citation2000).