MA in Sustainability Studies Program

Technology is both an obstacle in the path to a sustainable future and the bearer of the promise for a new world. For instance, the report by the UN Secretary-General's Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN, 2013), An Action Agenda for Sustainable Development, points to technology as one of the roots of current forms of unsustainable development, but at the same time holds technology up as having the strong potential to show us the way forward.

We care about systemic change because truly complex socio-ecological systems are often intractable to the imposition of intentional change. This intractability derives in large part from certain intrinsic properties of complex systems, namely their nested and scale hierarchic structure and the fact that they are comprised, essentially, of processes and functions rather than objects and entities (vasishth 2008). As such, they are harder to “move,” given that they are not things to be pulled or pushed,
shoved or even levered into places we thinkmore appropriate and better suited. Instead, asprocesses and functions, they need to be guided,and channelled, and deflected and cajoled.

Cities, as the quintessential socio-technological artifacts of human civilization, are seen to set us apart from nature. But an ecosystem view from nested scale-hierarchical process-function ecology shows us that cities are best seen as the emergent and nodal end points of interactive flows of matter, energy and information. From within such a view, a clear need emerges to ecologize our cities by better integrating them back with nature. Arguing from such an ecosystem approach to depicting reality, this paper proposes that tracing the processes and functions which constitute the morphology of the city leads us to articulate an urban ecology that incorporates heat island mitigations, urban forestry, and ecological landscape management (taken both as the introduction of native vegetation and the insertion of increased proportions of pervious paving), all considered within the framework of an integrative ecosystem approach to land use planning. More importantly, such an approach to urban ecology is useful because, as a mode of intervention, it rests on—indeed, requires—an acknowledgement in ecological planning of the often amorphous and usually only indirectly sensible atmospheric, biogeochemical and hydrological processes and functions.

Chicago School. In the following extracts, they draw strongly on lessons of plant ecology (including notions of invasion, succession, etc.) to account for the growth of urban communities. In this chapter, Vasishth and Sloane reconsider human ecology, and discover merit in a scale-sensitive 'ecosystem approach' to understanding and planning the city. From a stout defense of the Chicago School's legacy, they argue that fundamental categories (such as organism, population, and community) retain their significance. In addition, the ecosystem approach retains the emphasis on place, and this brings back the environment into consideration.

Complex systems, unlike simple systems, embody multiple realities that cannot be reduced to some comparable set of singularities. Then, decision making protocols under complexity must be crafted to take account of such inherent incommensurability. Plan-making is usefully seen as scenario-building, with multiple stakeholders representing functionally relevant perspectives, with depictions utilizing multiple scales attentive to boundaries across levels of organization. Under complexity, planning becomes the art of constructing information-rich and meaningful depictions of the system of concern, and the development of expertise is best told as the growing of discernment based on the application of attention over time. A sound decision is one that is generated by the application of mindfulness to rich descriptions made from within an ecosystem approach to telling complexity. This paper is best seen as a scoping document, setting the context from within which a participatory, stakeholder...

Chicago School. In the following extracts, they draw strongly on lessons of plant ecology (including notions of invasion, succession, etc.) to account for the growth of urban communities. In this chapter, Vasishth and Sloane reconsider human ecology, and discover merit in a scale-sensitive 'ecosystem approach' to understanding and planning the city. From a stout defense of the Chicago School's legacy, they argue that fundamental categories (such as organism, population, and community) retain their significance. In addition, the ecosystem approach retains the emphasis on place, and this brings back the environment into consideration.

However, the real seeds of progress were sown on the sidelines. A number of events at the People's Summit held the promise of effective citizens' action towards sustainability and equity, building on the past and carrying on into the future. One of these was the initiation of a host of Peoples' Sustainability Treaties, dealing with a range of issues and actions, starting from the very local, going all the way up to the global. The low expectations for the outcomes from formal process suggested that an alternative centre of energy needed to be created. Uchita de Zoysa, a sustainability activist with a history of engagement pre-dating the original Earth Summit in 1992, conceived the idea to develop a set of Peoples' Sustainability Treaties, with the hope to coalesce the thinking of civil society organisations (CSOs) in the direction of a strong social movement towards an alternative and desirable future. The basic idea was to establish a network of Treaties, with each ...