Cities As Systems

What is a System?
A system is a simplified way of looking at how things work. Systems generally include factors (inputs), processes (throughputs) and results (outputs). The systems approach can be applied to many aspects of geography, including cities.

Cities as systems: Open linear systems

Urban areas can be seen as a type of system, with inputs, throughputs and outputs just as in the human system. This is a linear type of system as suggested in the diagram below.

Cities as systems: Open linear systems

The Unsustainable City

Inputs
The inputs may be made up of: - people, whether daily commuters or more permanent migrants and immigrants, - goods such as bricks, bread, furniture and computer microchips - services such as water and electricity.

Outputs
Outputs like: waste water and refuse, outgoing commuters and migrants unseen' exports like air pollution. Where great amounts of products are exported without much recycling, this type of system is called an open system.

Why Are These Systems Unsustainable?

Such a system may be thought of as unsustainable in the long term because of the escalating demands for resources from an ever-widening area, creating a widening ecological footprint.

Urban Ecological Footprints

The Canadian economist William Rees started a debate about the footprint of cities which he defined as the land required to supply them with food and timber products and to absorb their CO2 output'. Herbert Girardet is a consultant to Habitat II, the UN agency concerned with sustainability in cities. He has researched the amount of land required by a city to sustain its metabolism, that is to provide the raw materials on which it feeds and process the waste products that it excretes. This is the urban ecological footprint.

Example: London
London has experienced great changes in its population which in turn has had implications for the land area occupied and needs for inputs and outputs the basis for any system. Sustainability depends on the nature and balance of the system. If the system grows in total numbers, it will require more inputs and inevitably produce more outputs. If the system reduces or increases in numbers of working age group, other issues will ensue.

Example: London
London's total footprint, following Rees's definition, extends to 20 million hectares: around 125 times its surface area of 159,000 hectares. With approximately 12% of the UKs population, 7,000,000 people live in London, occupying a surface area of 158,000 hectares. The area required for food production at 0.2 hectares per person is 8,400,000 hectares. The forest area required by London for wood products is 768,000 hectares. The land area that would be required for carbon sequestration (fuel production) at 1.5 hectares per person is 10,500,000 hectares.

 The total London footprint is 19,700,000 hectares: 125 times London's surface area. London therefore requires the equivalent of Britain's entire productive land. In reality, with its increasingly sophisticated consumer tastes aided by rapid transport technology, this means London is increasing its impact on remoter areas: such as obtaining mangoes from Brazil, teak furniture from Malaysia, copper from Zambia not to mention our appetite for increasingly far flung holiday destinations

Conclusion
Large cities are often considered to be unsustainable systems because they consume large amounts of resources and produce large amounts of waste. Sustainable urban development aims to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the needs of future generations

Reasons for the Problems

Traditional settlements were delineated and structured by transport and production systems based on human or animal power A major effect of fossil fuel-based technology has been that the high density of traditional cities has given way to urban sprawl creating an increasing ecological footprint.

 As cities draw resources from increasing distances, they also accumulate large amounts of inert and toxic materials within themselves that is to say, pollution. Waste gases and water expand the negative impact of cities at a regional and increasingly global scales.

Cities as sustainable systems: Circular metabolism

In nature, a circular metabolism is developed whereby every input is also able to renew and sustain the living environment by recycling the outputs. In the past medieval cities had something approaching this relationship, with the following closely linked nearby: market gardens, orchards, arable and grazing land, local water supply, forest products and so on.

Cities as systems: Circular Metabolism

The Sustainable City

Looking at the Past to look at the Future

Indeed, until the recent and rapid industrially led growth of the late twentieth century, many Chinese cities were largely self-sufficient in food. They were unique among the world in having highly developed low technology systems of using human waste as fertiliser for local farms. It must be stressed that any city has an ecological footprint the question is to what degree?

 Cities in less economically developed countries such as India often have a higher reuse' system than do those in more economically developed countries. In the USA and UK, disposable culture' and built-in obsolescence' permeate society. Modern cities have broken the close links with the local biosphere.

The Key to Sustainability

In order for cities to become more sustainable they must change the linear metabolism to a more circular metabolism, creating a selfregulating sustainable relationship with the biosphere. To do this they will need to become more compact cities.

Compact Cities
Compact cities minimize the amount of distance travelled, use less space, require less infrastructure (pipes, cable, roads, etc.), are easier to a provide public transport network for, and reduce urban sprawl.

Warning!!
However if the compact city covers too large an area it becomes congested, overcrowded, overpriced and polluted. It becomes unsustainable.