The Little Book of City Principles And Practices

Transforming the engineering of cities means recognising that the engineering of cities has traditionally used top-down approaches alongside personal and vicarious experiences; understanding the needs of society via collective governance has been lower on the list of priorities. This approach starts from the legacy from previous generations and either seeks to integrate new solutions or destroys the local fabric and imposes solutions. Examples of both include canals, railways, roads, gas pipes, electricity cables, optical fibre cables and wireless networks. In the past, growth and development was the favoured economic model in cities, which paid little attention to the growing shortage of resources or the local, regional, national and international environmental damage being caused by engineering solutions. There is now a growing awareness that this should change. However, the ways in which we need to deliver change beyond small-step, small-stage, incremental solutions are not immediately obvious. There is a fear in the current global markets that any country undergoing radical change will lose out financially; that is, their global competitiveness will suffer unless all countries change in the same manner and to the same degree. We are concerned that this is a recipe for inaction, so one of the research challenges of this project was to understand how radical change could be implemented in such a way that is socially and economically acceptable to all. Radical change implies changing the engineering of cities from its core principles. T his kind of transformation means questioning the whole rationale for ‘engineering’ and what it means in the 21st and 22nd centuries. That incremental shift from the legacy of previous generations isn’t going to work if we’re concerned with meeting our present and future needs, so we needed to generate a completely new way of thinking about what we mean by ‘engineering’.

source :

https://blog.soton.ac.uk/serg/files/2017/12/littlebookofprinciplesandpractice.pdf