Building Sustainable and Healthy Cities: A Social-Ecological-Infrastructural Systems Approach
Anu Ramaswami
Charles M. Denny Jr. Chair Professor of Science Technology & Public Policy
Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota
Abstract
Cities would not function without infrastructures that provide water, energy, food, shelter, waste management and mobility services to more than half the world's people living in them today.
How do people, infrastructures and the natural system interact with each other across spatial scale to shape multiple sustainability outcomes for cities – including environmental, economic, risk/resiliency and public health outcomes? How can we better design our urban infrastructure systems to achieve these multiple sustainability outcomes? Who governs the design and diffusion of these more sustainable infrastructure systems in society – and what motivates them to do so (or not)?
These important questions will be explored using a novel social-ecological- infrastructural systems (SEIS) framework for developing sustainable, healthy and climate-resilient cities. The framework will be applied to describe recent efforts to measure and mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with cities, using a portfolio of interventions including: infrastructure design/technology interventions, as well as behavior change and policy interventions.