Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The realization of sustainable everyday living will require social learning, co-
operation between urban designers and communities, social experimentation, and
the modelling of new project ideas and actions. It will also require urban planning
systems to facilitate the emergence of open and lively cities with significant centres
of local cultural diversity, a new and dynamic fluidity to everyday life, and the
development of new types of services and empowered places that exhibit a form of
ambient intelligence, harnessing the possibilities afforded by emerging media
technology. As Manzini and Jegou write:
Given the complex, hybrid nature of these local-global, real-virtual services, they
could in fact become catalyzers for other, wider phenomena. Particularly in the
perspective of a multi-local city, they could be engines for a strategy of 'bottom-
up' change where, by operating on a neighbourhood scale while being highly
connected on a global scale, they could activate new dynamics in the economic
and social fields, leading to the generation of new forms of community and
identity. In short, if appropriately planned, they could contribute to the birth
of a new sense of place and consequently to a new idea of the city.
The sustainable city will be created by a change in outlook, a critical and
reflexive mindset, and a million and one small changes to the living of our
everyday lives.
(Manzini and Jegou, 2003: 223)
Manzini offers various pictures, or scenarios, for future and present sustainable
living. Some involve a degree of technological problem solving, but the technical fix
is only part of the process and you don't have to be a writer, designer or architect
to envision a sustainable future. There have been many local regional and global
initiatives involving various groups of stakeholders who have undertaken various
forms of visioning, scenario-building, forecasting and backcasting. However, as Barr
et al
. (2011) point out, although promoting and embedding a more sustainable
lifestyle within the home is clearly quite feasible, there is a real tension, particularly
in relation to carbon emissions and consumption, between other lifestyle choices
such as overseas tourism and air travel.
Scenario analysis
Economic forecasters, weather forecasters and scientific forecasters use very similar
methods of building models based on the collection, description and analysis of vast
quantities of often quantitative data, leading to a presentation of future behaviour
as a product of carefully calculated mathematical probabilities. But, as the authors
of the Stockholm Environment Institute's report
The Great Transition
(Raskin
et al
., 2002: 13) state, 'predictive modelling is inadequate for illuminating the long-
range future of our stunningly complex planetary system'. Global futures evade
prediction because of three factors:
1
Ignorance
: Incomplete information on the current state of the system and the
forces governing its dynamics leads to a statistical dispersion over possible future
states.
