The Role of Urban Infrastructures (Prof. Sybil Derrible) - Circular Metabolism Podcast ep.29
Channel: Metabolism of Cities
Date: 2021-06-10

📺 Welcome to the Circular Metabolism podcast 📺. This podcast is hosted by Aristide Athanassiadis from Metabolism of Cities. In this podcast we interview thinkers, researchers, policy makers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities and how to reduce their environmental impact in a socially just and context-specific way.

On today’s episode I wanted to focus on a piece of our cities which I always found a bit boring. It is topic dominated by engineers and which I thought there is nothing new happened since the beginning of the 50s or 70s.  However, I later came to realise that if we want to reduce the environmental impact of existing and especially new cities then they are a key component. If you haven’t figured it out already I’m talking about infrastructures. Indeed, urban infrastructures are dictating the way flows circulate with our cities and have immense political and urbanistic implications. 

To talk about infrastructures, I have Sybil Derrible who has written and edited two books and written countless articles on the topic. Sybil is Associate Professor of Urban Engineering in the Department of Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and the Director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks (CSUN) Lab. His research interests include the planning, design, and modeling of urban infrastructure. More particularly, he looks at both the supply of (e.g., network properties) and demand (e.g., consumption behavior) for infrastructure. From buildings, water/wastewater, electricity, gas, telecom, transport, and even solid waste, all are part of a nexus of co-dependent and ubiquitous elements of infrastructure that is critical to our cities, acting as a significant generator of economic activity and social development. His main goal is to rethink infrastructure planning and design practices and inform new policies to help design smart, sustainable, and resilient cities. 

On this episode we talk about the role of urban infrastructures to address urban (environmental) challenges. We discuss about the variety and differences of infrastructures existing across the world as well as how we should plan and implement infrastructures in the future for existing and new cities. 

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#infrastructure #engineering 
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