Critical New Bio-Socio-Technological Challenges in Urban Sustainability

Cities are pivotal and growing instruments of human advancement, but also concentrated sites of poverty and dysfunctionalities. The explosive growth of cities since the beginning of the last century is leading to concerns about their sustainability, their impact on the sustainability of our global resources, and on the environment. Will today's cities be sustainable in the long run? What are the long-term global implications of urbanization? Are megacities inevitable? desirable? Will the world be capable of accomplishing the huge paradigm shifts necessary to achieve urban sustainability globally? Answers to questions such as these will depend on our still incomplete understanding of the rapidly evolving urban cycle of interactions and on the response to a set of emerging critical demographic, socioeconomic, and biological challenges-beyond the fundamental and more familiar ones of water, energy, and infrastructures, with which there are, however, inextricable interconnections. How we address the emerging new challenges will determine the future trajectory of human settlements and, ultimately, of our species. This will require comprehensive paradigms of urban dynamics and a new vision of engineering.