The modern world, in which human activities are transforming the planet's ecosystem in unprecedented ways, is an urban industrial world. Everywhere the world's population is becoming urbanized, and the majority of the population will live in urban areas by the first part of the next Century.
Cities can be viewed as metabolic processes. They take in people, resources, and energy; transform these into a distinctive quality of life, and emit people, products, and wastes. It is abundantly clear that cities vary in the efficiency of this metabolic process. For example, some cities produce a high-quality of life for their inhabitants with relatively little energy and waste. 0ther cities use immense amounts of energy and emit vast wastes while producing a low quality of life.
Understanding the character of the metabolic process, measuring the process systematically, and identifying the conditions that affect the efficiency of the metabolic process can greatly improve our capacity to plan and build more sustainable cities. Developing both this understanding and the capacity to intervene effectively will require new patterns of interdisciplinary science and international cooperation. Understanding and intervention can also benefit from the new technologies of monitoring, especially electronic remote sensing, which offer great opportunities for effective policy oriented research in this area.
The Asian Urban Information Center of Kobe, Japan, and the University of Michigan's Global Change Project propose to hold an international symposium on the topic of urban metabolism in September 1993.
The symposium will produce papers that contribute to the understanding of the basic metabolic process. More importantly, one objective of the symposium will be to propose a series of protocols for the systematic measurement of the world's cities for inclusion in the START program. Such protocols can help to create a base of scientific data on which effective urban policy development can be built at global, regional, national, and local city levels.
Sponsorship of the symposium by the City of Kobe and the University of Michigan brings together officials of an efficient and innovative city with a team of scholars and scientists promoting the interdisciplinary study of global environmental change. This enhances the potential for producing effective policy oriented research, grounded in practical experience and broad scientific competence.
The symposium will have co-directors from Kobe and the University of Michigan. It will also have technical advisory teams in Japan and the United States. Papers will be solicited from scientists and urban administrators throughout the world. The meeting will be held over four days to discuss papers prepared in advance. Final products from the symposium will include a set of monitoring protocols, a future research agenda, and a book of the papers to be published in both Japanese and English.