The urban ecosystem and sustainability may be the most important areas of environmental study in this century. Estimates are that by the year 2025, a majority of the world’s population will live, work, and play in large urban areas. That translates to almost 5 billion of approximately 8 billion people living in metropolitan areas like New York City.
This program focuses on the urban ecosystem with all it complex systems. For example, think about studying water, our most important and valuable resource. Without it, we cannot exist. How do you provide clean, drinkable water to millions? What about its uses for industry, transportation, manufacturing, power generation, agriculture, and all living forms in the ecosystem? Can you understand water without understanding politics, management, ecology, economics, chemistry, etc.? If you go to work for a government agency, a large corporation, a small business, environmental group or almost any management position dealing with health, safety and well being, can you be effective without a comprehensive knowledge of environmental impacts?
Then there is the issue of how our actions today set a path upon which future generations will have to travel. Will that path be sustained for the betterment of future generations and what is our ability and responsibility today to plan for its development? We can continue to rely on traditional management tools that include regulation, law, conservation, and volunteerism. We can continue to apply policy, economics, sociology and science to provide answers and solutions. Some of these tools have worked well, but will they be able to give us all the answers to a sustainable environmental future? Is there something missing from our efforts to redirect our actions towards a healthier environment based on equity, fairness, and justice?
The answer is yes and the process is design. It is time to bring greater creativity in our efforts to find solutions to environmental problems. The answer lies in how we integrate design as a field of study and use the power of creativity to find solutions in the intersections between policy, management, economics, and science.
It is here in the center of New York, one of the most complex urban ecosystems on earth, that the New School finds its laboratory for the study of environment and sustainability. Our outstanding faculty in social science, urban policy and management, natural sciences, and ecology are working with colleagues in our school of design, Parsons, to discover creative approaches to teaching and research. Welcome to this collaboration.