
The City Resilient — Some Systems Thinking
The UK Foresight Future of Cities project has published “Coping with Change”, a paper by Bruce Beck and Michael Thompson
Cleantech — Out of Grubby Tech
“Nutrient Recovery” is the first of the BeCleantech Working Group’s Nexus Innovation Impact Analyses.
Growing Blue to Grow Rainbow
Moving from the water sector towards addressing the Water-Food-Energy-Climate Nexus
Antifragility, Resilience, Sustainability & the City
A Review of the book ‘Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Sustainability and smartness: A tale of two slogans
Opinion article published in the journal Sustainability of Water Quality & Ecology
Sustainability Concepts Paper
Cities as Forces for Good in the Environment: Sustainability in the Water Sector
Growing Profits, from Growing Blue to Grow Rainbow
We attach some hard, monetary estimates to technological innovations in the water sectorWelcome to the CFG Network
Is it possible to re-engineer the infrastructure of cities such that — in the popular metaphor of the urban ecological footprint (EF) — cities might “walk on air”? How might the infrastructure of a city be re-engineered so that that infrastructure can be used deliberately to restore natural capital and enhance ecosystem services?
These are the challenges that motivate our work on “Cities as Forces for Good in the Environment”, or CFG. They are grand indeed. They were first expressed in an essay on “Cities” by Paul Crutzen (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry), Bruce Beck (Engineer), and Michael Thompson (Anthropologist). The essay was prepared as a discussion piece for the US National Academy of Engineering’s (2006/7) Blue Ribbon Panel on “Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century”.
Our “big” questions will remain in front of us, out of reach, not fully answerable. Yet they are more likely than not to lead us to other interesting questions that we can answer — but which would never have been asked had those grand challenges not been posed in the first place.