University of Kentucky
Center for Sustainable Cities
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Description:
The Center for Sustainable Cities is a multidisciplinary alliance of faculty and other professionals dedicated to advancing the agenda for a sustainable future through research, teaching, consulting, and public service. The center's draws together twenty-two faculty from architecture, English, interior design, German studies, landscape architecture, political science, music, geography, economics, sociology, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, forestry, biology, history, and journalism. In addition, the center works in Europe in collaboration with Oikodrom: Forum Nachhaltige Stadt which is located in Vienna, Austria. Its present director is Richard S. Levine, professor of architecture, and its associate director is Ernest J. Yanarella, professor of political science.
Background:
This multidisciplinary center was formally instituted in 1993 as an administrative center under the joint auspices of the College of Architecture and the College of Arts and Sciences. Since its inception, it has been engaged in research and theoretical work as well as in conducting sustainability projects involving communities and cities in the United States, Italy, Germany, and Austria. Among its most important conceptual and theoretical innovations in carrying out these activities has been the City-as-a-Hill model inspired in large part by the structure, sustainability, and integrity of the Italian medieval hill-town experience.
Vision and Aims:
The Center for Sustainable Cities has emerged from a felt need to integrate parallel concerns driving social movements, policy issues, and academic development geared toward restoring the health and vitality of the Ecosystem and repairing and renewing the modern urban habitat. Its theoretical work--exemplified by its two founding statements, "The Sustainable Cities Manifesto: Pretext, Text and Post-text," and "Does Sustainable Development Lead to Sustainability?"--has been motivated by the question: "What is the minimum activity, the smallest project, that holds the possibility of placing society on a sustainable path?" In grappling with this query, it has concluded that the most appropriate unit of sustainability is the city precisely because it is simultaneously the smallest entity capable of bringing toward balance and equilibrium all those present-day problems besetting the modern world and the largest entity at which true natural and social sustainability can be managed.
Tools:
Much of its theoretical and practical work has been assisted by the use of powerful computer-modeling programs on the RISC 6000 and other platforms--including AES, computer modeling software developed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill and marketed by IBM, and more recently Intergraph's Microstation CAD software. The virtue of these software systems is that they allow research and design to seamlessly integrate computer aided design with geographic information system software and a powerful database. The coordination of these systems allow members of the center to develop a family of three-dimensional city models while it holds the potential for becoming the essential medium through which communities large and small can negotiate their own paths to urban sustainability.
Multidisciplinary Agenda:
In the last four years, proposals and projects involving members of administrative staff and core faculty have included: the Montenero Project, an award-winning proposal to design a sustainable agricultural community as an educational center and tourist attraction near Todi, Italy; the Lexington Corridor Project, a proposal initiated by Mayor Pam Miller to link the University of Kentucky campus with the Lexington downtown using sustainable city principles, and the Vienna project, a proposed city-building program to build a sustainable city implant on a deteriorating area surrounding a former railway station supported by the Vienna city council and being reviewed for additional funding Oikodrom and the European Union. The Center also became involved in generating Oakland Ecopolis, a plan for a green plan, for Oakland, California, at the request of former governor Jerry Brown.
For further information on the center, its activities, and publications, please contact Richard S. Levine, College of Architecture, 111 Pence Hall, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0041 (tele. # 257-1437) or Ernest J. Yanarella, Department of Political Science, P.O.T. 1615, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027 (tele. # 257-2989; e-mail: ejyana@pop.uky.edu).
Comments? Contact: Dr. Ernest J. Yanarella (ejyana@pop.uky.edu)
Copyright (c) 1996-98 Center for Sustainble Cities, University of Kentucky - All rights
reserved.
Graphics and HTML by John Yanarella, 1996-98