Culture, infrastructure technology and ecosystems needed to plan sustainable urban environments.

AGS meeting will address urban futures Jan. 26-29

ZURICH, Switzerland -- Three factors must be considered to effectively plan for Urban Futures, according to the Alliance for Global Sustainability (AGS). These are cultural patterns, new technologies in buildings and infrastructure, and ecosystems and their relationship to urban areas. The AGS's meeting, Urban Futures: the Challenge of Sustainability, to be held January 26-29 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology main building in Zurich, will gather academics and business leaders from 39 nations to discuss and plan a research agenda to ensure that our rapidly developing urban regions can be sustainable.

By 2050, the world's urban population is expected to double to 6 billion people, according to the United Nations, with 93% of that growth coming from developing countries. The Alliance for Global Sustainability, an international multi-disciplinary collaboration of four prominent research universities: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The University of Tokyo, Chalmers University of Technology, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), asks, "Can this dramatic demographic change be harnessed to ensure progress towards sustainability?"

"If cities are properly managed, they can be transformative arenas in which natural resources are used more efficiently and economically, contributing to a high quality of life for everyone," said Prof. Peter Edwards, AGS Coordinator at ETH. "Reinventing these rapidly developing cities offers one of the most effective ways to reduce human impact upon the environment and achieve greater sustainability."

Through a series of seminars (http://www.agschalmers.se/urbanfutures) around the world, the AGS has been studying the challenges in Urban Futures and identifying mandates for effective planning. Meetings were held in Goteborg, Sweden; Zurich; Cape Town, South Africa; and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The last seminar will be held in Bali in February.

The AGS's annual meeting this week brings together researchers from the four AGS partner universities with corporate and government leaders to discuss ways to ensure our world develops in a sustainable way, using the background from these earlier meetings and building on the factors above. The conference allows participants to share the research and knowledge already out there, creates an agenda for what's most important to research, and opens dialogue between the public, private and academic sectors that are all needed to create solutions.

The conference will include a keynote speech by Lars Reutersward, Director of the Global Division of UN-Habitat, on "Sustainable Urban Futures: Challenges and Opportunities for Academia." More than 25 sessions and workshops will look at questions such as: How can the world's energy architecture be made sustainable on the scale needed?; What can be done to dramatically reduce the energy and resources used by the existing building stock?; and How are the AGS universities harnessing urbanization to ensure progress towards sustainability? ETH is hosting the meeting along with the Competence Center Environment and Sustainability.

The complete program is available at www.theags.org.

Sustainability, the ability to continue to have a decent standard of living while not using up the raw materials needed to create that standard, is a concept that must be embraced to ensure all of our survival. But it is a complex issue that difficult to study within the boundaries of traditional academic and research fields. The AGS's structure brings together multiple disciplines and regional knowledge which enables productive interchange.

The Alliance for Global Sustainability http://www.theags.org/, since its inception in 1997, has provided intellectual leadership to help societies improve both environmental quality and the quality of life by integrating large bodies of knowledge, conducting research and rigorous analysis, and identifying robust pathways and policies leading to a sustainable future.