Designing Sustainable Urban Systems: Features, Metrics, and Processes; September 2019, Washington,D.C.

我们国家的城市已经是我们大多数公民的家园，创造了我们国内生产总值的80%。到2050年，多达三分之二的我国公民将把城市空间作为自己的家。然而，我们城市的好处、潜力和问题并不是从它们的边界开始和结束的。我们认识到，城市空间与其周围的郊区和农村地区密切相关。这其中的每一个都依赖于彼此的某些东西：食物、工人、就业、融资等等。然而，技术的快速变化、资源挑战和社会分化正在使我们对城市及其环境的理解和改善比以往任何时候都更加复杂。需要新的办法，它们将受益于所有利益攸关方的深度融合。这个项目将领导者、公民和科学家聚集在一起，探索研究和学习我们的城市如何运行以及它们如何影响周围更大区域的共同方式。几十年来，我们一直将组成我们城市及其周围的各种系统视为孤立的子系统的集合。有一些送水的方法，这与我们捡垃圾的方式是分开的。有一些方法可以让人们去工作，而不是我们把食物送到餐桌上的方式。城市规划和管理的这种组成部分观点虽然可行，但已经造成了许多意想不到的后果，这些后果的影响现在才开始感受到，但将在几十年内产生反响。随着新的测量和自动化技术在未来十年上线，这些部门将变得有问题。了解如何整合这些学科以及与之相关的数据、指标和算法，对于让我们的城市变得宜居至关重要。这个项目是通过基于设计的多学科交流方法，朝着发展可持续连接的城市系统的独特科学迈出的一步。在为期两天的会议上，来自不同科学和学术学科的思想家与城市、郊区和农村的代表接触，制定了我们需要的议程，以帮助我们的城市和公民在前所未有的挑战中茁壮成长。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Our nation's cities are already home to the majority of our citizens and generate 80% of our gross domestic product. By 2050 as many as two-thirds of our citizens will call urban spaces their homes. Yet the benefits, potential, and problems of our cities do not begin and end at their borders. We recognize that urban spaces are intimately connected to the suburban and rural places around them. Each of these depends upon the other for something: food, workers, jobs, financing, and much more. Rapid changes in technologies, resource challenges, and social divisions, however, are making understanding and improving our cities and their surroundings more complex than ever. New approaches are needed and they will benefit from deep integration among all stakeholders. This project brings together leaders, citizens, and scientists to explore common ways of studying and learning how our cities operate and how they affect the larger regions around them.For many decades now, we have considered the various systems that comprise our cities and their surroundings as collections of isolated sub-systems. There are ways to deliver water, that are separate from the ways we pick up trash. There are ways to get people to work that are separate from the ways we get food to our tables. While practical, this component view of urban planning and management has created many unintended consequences whose ramifications are only now beginning to be felt, but which will reverberate for decades. These divisions will become problematic as new technologies of measurement and automation come online in the next decade. Understanding how to integrate these disciplines and the data, metrics, and algorithms associated with them will be essential to making our cities livable. This project is a step toward developing a distinct science of sustainably connected urban systems through design-based methods of multidisciplinary communication. Over the 2 days of this conference, thinkers from diverse scientific and academic disciplines engage with city, suburban, and rural representatives to develop the agenda we need to help our cities and citizens thrive in the face of unprecedented challenges.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.