Civil City: A 21st Century Paradigm: Fid-Bau Portal

Civil City: A 21st Century Paradigm

Rogers, Jeffrey / Morelli, John

The Civil City paradigm calls for a broader understanding of the multidisciplinary nature of sustainability decisions relative to the interrelationships between the throughputs of the natural and built environments. These sustainability decisions involve competing and complex interrelationships at the local, regional, and national policy levels. These sustainability decisions often include tradeoffs among conflicting natural resource management policies, land-use planning decisions, industrial ecology activities, and urban infrastructure expansions. To increase this understanding the Civil City paradigm advocates for a systems-based philosophy that: (1) facilitates multidisciplinary public, private, and academic partnerships to fully-integrate the design, engineering, construction, operations, maintenance, and disposal of the natural and built environments relative to collaborative local and regional sustainability objectives; (2) develops comprehensive economic, social, and environmental policies to efficiently and cost-effectively allocate limited financial and natural resources at the local and regional levels; (3) provides innovative decision-making approaches to objectively assess and evaluate competing and conflicting multi-objectives pertaining to the sustainable utilization of limited local and regional natural resources relative to different economic, social, and environmental policy options; and (4) implements and monitors cost-effective managerial strategies to ensure the sustainable utilization of limited local and regional natural resources among the goods and services of constructed urban systems. This paper calls to action the people from the various professional disciplines to voluntarily come forth in collective response to participate in making our cities and regions more people-friendly, livable, sensible, and sustainable.