OPEN ACCESS
More than 50% of us now live in cities while world population growth and urbanization continues unabated. There is an urgent need for policies that can address both the challenges and opportunities for sustainable development in urban settings.
Within the past two decades, the idea of cities as fractal structures resulting from social and economic pro- cesses led to a transition in thinking of cities as machines to cities as organisms. Independently, the concept of ‘sustainable cities’ had emerged earlier, with many successful implementations already underway.
I propose to define a sustainable city as one able to feed and power itself as much as possible using land and energy efficiently with the least environmental pollution and impact on climate change, minimizing wastes and recycling and reconverting wastes into resources.
Coherent fractal space-time structures are the key to a circular thermodynamics of organisms and sustain- able systems that achieves the state of minimum entropy production and dissipation that Ilya Prigogine had proposed as a conjecture. In this article, I explain how the principles of circular thermodynamics can be applied to sustainable cities.
allometric scaling, cycles, energy capture and storage, fractal spacetime, minimum entropy production
[1] West, G., The surprising math of cities and corporations. TEDGlobal 2011, available at https:// www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations, July 2011.
[2] Bettencourt, L. & West, G., A unified theory of urban living. Nature, 447, pp. 912–913, 2010. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/467912a
[3] West, G., Life from cells to cities: are they sustainable? Boston University Lecture, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etfRE5-YlXs, 8 May 2013.
[4] Wikipedia, Sustainable city, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_city, 4 July 2014.
[5] Register, R., Ecocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future, North Atlantic Books: Berkeley, 1987.
[6] Downton, P.F., Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_F_Downton, 31 May 2014.
[7] Downton, P.F., Ecopolis: Architecture and Cities for a Changing Climate, Springer: Berlin, and CSIRO, Australia, 2009. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10980-009-9366-4
[8] Indicators for Sustainability, How Cities Are Monitoring and Evaluating Their Success, Sustainable Cities International: Vancouver, November 2012.
[9] 10 Hunger Facts for 2014, World Food Programme, available at https://www.wfp.org/ stories/10-hunger-facts-2014, 30 December 2013.
[10] Batty, M. & Longley, P., Fractal Cities: A Geometry of Form and Function, Academic Press: London, 1994.
[11] Batty, M., Building a Science of Cities, available at http://www.complexcity.info/, 30 October 2011. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2011.11.008
[12] Salingaros, N.A., Connecting the fractal city. Keynote speech. 5th Biennial of towns and town planner in Europe (Barcelona, April 2003). Published in Planum The European Journal of Planning On-line (March 2004). Reprinted as Chapter 6 of Principles of Urban Structure, Techne Press: Amsterdam, Holland, 2005.
[13] Thames path. National Trails, http://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/thames-path (accessed 4 February 2015).
[14] Smart Growth, Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_growth, 10 July 2014.
[15] West, G.B. & Brown, J.H., The origin of allometric scaling laws in biology from genomes to ecosystems: towards a quantitative unifying theory of biological structure and organization. J
Exp Biol, 208, pp. 1575–1592, 2005. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1242/jeb.01589
[16] West, G.B., Brown, J.H. & Enquist, B.J., A general model for the origin of allometric scaling laws in biology. Science, 276, pp. 122–126, 1997. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.276.5309.122
[17] Enquist, B.J., West, B.G., Charnov, E.L. & Brown, J.H., Allometric scaling of production and life-history variation in vascular plants. Nature, 401, pp. 907–911, 1999. doi: http://dx.doi. org/10.1038/44819
[18] Gilloly, J.F., Brown, J.H., West, G.B., Savage, V.M. & Charnov, E.L., Effects of size and temperature on metabolic rate. Science, 293, pp. 2248–2251, 2001. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/ science.1061967
[19] Brown, J.H., Toward a metabolic theory of ecology. Ecology, 85, pp. 1771–1789, 2004. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/03-9000
[20] Ho, M.W., “Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability” for cities? Science in Society, 64, pp. 32–36, 2014.
[21] Oliveria, E.A., Andrade, Jr., J.S. & Makse, H.A., Large Cities are Less Green, available at arXiv:1401.7720v2 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.7720, 18 June 2014. doi: http://dx.doi. org/10.1038/srep04235
[22] Ho, M.W., Larger cities in USA less green than small ones. Science in Society, 64, pp. 26–27, 2014.
[23] Ho, M.W., The Rainbow and the Worm, the Physics of Organisms, 3rd edn., World Scientific, 2008. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/6928
[24] Ho, M.W., Living Rainbow H2O, World Scientific and Imperial College Press, 2012. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/9789814390903
[25] Ho, M.W. & Ulanowicz, R.E., Sustainable systems as organisms? BioSystems, 82, pp. 39–51, 2005. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2005.05.009
[26] Ho, M.W., Circular economy of organisms and sustainable systems. Systems, 1, pp. 30–49, 2013. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/systems1030030
[27] Harskamp, J. & Dijstelberge, P., Piazza del Campo (Siena) or rather: not the Piazza del Campo..Streets & Books – An Intertwined Cultural History, available at http://abeautifulbook.
wordpress.com/2013/11/17/, 17 November 2013.
[28] Ho, M.W., Golden cycles of organic spacetimes. Science in Society, 62, pp. 32–35, 2014. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.09.060
[29] Metabolic Pathways. Sigma Aldrich, http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/content/dam/sigma-aldrich/ docs/Sigma/General_Information/metabolic_pathways_poster.pdf (accessed 27 October 2014).
[30] Ho, M.W., Burcher, S., Lim, L.C. et al. Food Futures Now (*Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free), ISIS/TWN: London and Penang, available at http://www.i-sis.org.uk/foodFutures. php, 2008.
[31] Vitiello, G., On the isomorphism between dissipative systems, fractal self-similarity and electrodynamics. Toward an integrated vision of nature. Systems, 2, pp. 203–216, 2014. doi: http:// dx.doi.org/10.3390/systems2020203
[32] Prigogine, I., Time, Structure and Fluctuations. Nobel Lecture, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1977/prigogine-lecture.pdf, 8 December 1977.
[33] Ellen MacArthur Foundation, http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/ (accessed 26 October 2014).
[34] Ho, M.W., Circular economy of the dyke-pond system. Science in Society, 32, pp. 38–41, 2006.
[35] Ho, M.W., Sustainable agriculture, green energies & the circular economy. Science in Society, 46, pp. 8–13, 2010.
[36] Ho, M.W., Paradigm shift urgently needed in agriculture, UN agencies call for an end to industrial agriculture and food system. Science in Society, 60, pp. 4–19, 2013.
[37] FAO, Agriculture Towards the Year 2010, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Rome, Italy, 1995.
[38] Ho, M.W., Sustainable agriculture and off-grid renewable energy (Chapter 1, Commentary XIII). Wake up before it is Too Late, Make Agriculture Truly Sustainable Now for Food Security in a Changing Climate, Trade and Environment Review 2013, UNCTAD: Geneva, pp. 19–21, 2013.
[39] Ho, M.W., Sustainable agriculture essential for green circular economy. ISIS Lecture in Ten+One Conference, Bradford University, http://www.i-sis.org.uk/sustainableAgriculture EssentialGreenCircularEconomy.php (29 November–1 December 2010).