What the city of the future looks like depends on the choices made by the city
of today and the rest of the world's population. It could be hazard resilient,
resource sustainable and rich in natural capital: a garden city.
It really depends how far we're going to push the sustainable development goals and our
target for net zero carbon, where we're living more in harmony with the
environment through things like environment sensitive and water sensitive urban design.
The city of the future I think really depends upon the
decisions that we make today as to what we want those cities to look like.
Cities are hubs of innovation, hubs of economic development; they bring people together
from a really diverse set of groups and offer a really powerful potential to
deliver the sustainable development goals.
Urbanization allows for more sustainable development by achieving huge economies
of scale in the generation and production of essential services and commodities.
If you design a compact city it can actually be really energy
efficient but we haven't really got that balance yet. We're using more resources
than ever before and we're not necessarily seeing new technology and
research findings making its way into mainstream practice.
In bringing people together into smaller confined areas, large numbers of people,
urbanization gives us the chance to deliver things such as access to basic
services: water and energy and food to large numbers of people, potentially in a
way that is much greener, much more resilient, it's much more efficient than
we're doing previously.
In Singapore we've made extensive use of dedicated software and hardware to
capture Geoscience information and data from natural occurring outcrops,
boreholes and samples. We've then brought these data and information together and
synthesized them into a 3D geological model for Singapore.
A key challenge that cities face is their resilience to environmental hazards whether it's
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, but also environmental
change driven by climate change. Understanding those hazards and the
dynamics of those hazards is really critical to inform decision-making to
improve lives in the city.
In Malaysia our work is centered around capacity-building with our partner JMG
to improve their understanding of digital workflows, their technical skills
and IT infrastructure such that they are able to collect store and present
geoscience information to critical stakeholders
We really need new technologies to help in terms of data acquisition and management and
visualizing that data so for example there's better sense of technologies to
be able to monitor the urban environment, better modelling techniques to be able
to interpret that data and then we've got 3D and 4D visualization systems to
help integrate it all and to communicate that understanding in a more meaningful way.
In order for the geology to have any impact
geoscience information needs to be communicated to key decision-makers
Partnerships are integral to our urban projects. We need to think of towns and
cities as an integrated ecosystem with lots of interdependencies and that means
bringing everybody who's involved in planning and development together.
Each one of us has a particular part to play in providing the right solution and we
don't get a good solution if we don't come together.
For geoscientists to come together and work with urban planners, architects, engineers
ecologists, social scientists, psychologists to really understand what makes the city
resilient; what makes the city sustainable and to think about how we
bring our knowledge together to inform decision making is necessary if
we're going to build the cities of tomorrow that protect lives; protect livelihoods,
and help to to achieve sustainable development.
The whole world is now connected physically and culturally. The choices we
make not only affect ourselves our family and our neighbour - they also affect
people on the other side of the world. Unless we work together at a global
scale, nothing we do at a local level will have any lasting impact.
We have to be really mindful though when we're working globally and we have to
understand that each city is individual, not just from its geological perspective
but in terms of its culture, its political framework, what legislation
exists; because one solution that works really well in the UK isn't necessarily
going to be appropriate for an international city, so we really have to
work in partnership and strengthen those collaborations to get the right result.
I think it's really important to to take time to look at what other people have
done, to share our knowledge with with other cities but to learn from those
cities also so that we can enrich our contributions to the global community as
we make cities more resilient and sustainable.