is the answer to the major problems facing civilization today. The trouble is that the term is used and misused in so many different contexts and in so many contradictory ways that the word sustainability is on the verge of becoming meaningless. This proposal rescues “sustainability” by giving it a complete, coherent operational definition, supported by a process, a quantitative metric, a new urban form, and a systemic feedback tool, The Sustainability Engine™, to be developed under the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award. In so doing, it opens the way to the creation of the paradigm shift that will take humanity into a new era.

Its rationale is this: if a city could be created that clearly showed how to live off its fair share of the Earth’s resources on a regenerative basis, and if it was seen to be both a good and economical way to live, then such an exemplar would become the catalyst to trigger the transformation of all the cities on the planet. Such a town would define and would be defined by our operational definition of sustainability, which summarizes our team’s major contribution to the Charter of European Cities and Towns Towards Sustainability:

“Sustainability is a Local, Informed, Participatory Process, operating within its Sustainable Area Budget, and in so doing exports no harmful imbalances beyond its territory or into the future, thus opening spaces of opportunity and possibility.”

In introducing his concept of design science, Buckminster Fuller created the framework for the synthesis of two separate cultures: the analytical/scientific/industrial and the synthetic/creative/cultural. In his World Game, Fuller provided the basis for synergizing the collective intelligence and creativity of stakeholders and experts in a competitive atmosphere to do good--providing a safe place for conflict where that very conflict could become the source of creativity. This proposal builds upon that pioneering work. The forces of globalization now in effect play the equivalent of the “World Game,” but with a vengeance. In their current version these forces play for “weaponry” and not for “livingry,”--for profits and exploitation and not for people and sustainability as Fuller would have had it. This proposal completes the Fuller agenda by providing a local vision – the Sustainable City-as-a-Hill, through which Bucky’s global vision may be realized. There are four aspects to this vision: the theory, the process and its feedback tool, and the urban form.

The theory works from the concept of the Sustainable Area Budget–a design-based version of the ecological footprint concept. Each individual is entitled to a fair share of the Earth’s bounty on a regenerative basis. A town or city thus has a land-based resource budget equal to the aggregated budget of its citizens. With such a land and resource budget the town can then play the Sustainable City Game, which is the local equivalent of Fuller’s World Game. Our team has developed preliminary versions of the Sustainable City Game on research projects in Vienna, Austria, Chinese villages, Islamic Mediterranean cities, South Korea, and Kentucky.

To achieve a balanced urban metabolism within a town’s Sustainable Area Budget requires a good deal of design, informative feedback, and calculation. To date we have done most of this work “by hand,” but in the future this will be done using the Sustainability Engine™, an advanced, object-oriented system modeling tool, that will build from a number of software packages already available in the architecture and planning worlds including CAD, BIM, and Facilities Management; as well as from System Dynamics Modeling. Support from the Fuller Challenge Award will be used to translate the Sustainability Engine™ from its current conceptual development into beta-version software ready to be used by and marketed to the countless cities anxious to institute a sustainability process if only one were available. The Sustainability Engine™ will be able to project stakeholder-proposed scenarios as both physical designs and energy and material flow models. Within the Engine will be module libraries of building blocks that contain universally applicable scientific data as well as data obtained from local conditions and “local knowledge.” These attributes may include resource efficiency, embodied energy, distance from source, cost, availability within the region, labor requirements, land use implications, recyclability, energy and material flow connections to other regenerative systems, and the various inputs and outputs involved in the functioning of the module within the city-system. These modules will function as plug-in--i.e., “free body” objects that provide inputs and outputs when attached to larger sustainable city scenario models. The Engine will serve as the principal design, feedback, and management tool in the negotiation of sustainable cities and will be an essential technical means and public policy tool for facilitating a democratic participatory stakeholder design and governance process.

With the assistance of the Sustainability Engine™, citizen stakeholders of a given city-region will be able to negotiate among themselves how they will afford to live within the limits of their land budget through their own creativity and ingenuity. The Sustainable City Game begins by encouraging players to place any legitimate needs and ideas on the table. Then, varied teams of stakeholders – together with designers, social scientists, natural scientists, and other professionals–attempt to assemble a number of different design scenarios that represent these competing interests. These design scenarios would all be negotiated within the Sustainable Area Budget of the city. Systemic scenario feedback from the Sustainability Engine™ supports a significant operational principal of the sustainability endeavor: any proposition may be put on the table, but in order to be carried forward in subsequent iterations of the Game, the overall city-system scenario in which the proposition is embedded must be near to or approaching equilibrium. Very quickly it will be seen through this systemic feedback that no matter how beneficial a given proposition may appear (or however politically powerful its proponent), it must still attach itself to a more extensive network of mutually supportive propositions to form a larger, well-balanced, synergistic scenario in order to remain viable as the Game progresses. Unlike a typical urban design process in which one best case proposal is either accepted or rejected, the Sustainable City Game sets up a matrix of decision-making information embedded in a number of alternative flexible urban design scenarios.

These flexible urban scenarios become manifest in a new form developed by our team that is particularly well suited to achieving sustainable balances: the City-as-a-Hill. This award-winning urban concept originally inspired by the dense human-scaled urban fabric of medieval Italian hilltowns, provides for a walkable pedestrian scale, which requires few vehicles, and fosters the creation of public spaces such as markets and squares. Whereas its medieval counterpart was a city built on a hill, the new urban model becomes a city built as a hill, with the inner “hill” containing the many large scale industrial, institutional, and commercial buildings, parking, mass transportation and other necessary infrastructure needed for the operation of a modern city but which usually create dead zones and sprawl in the urban fabric. The construction of the hill is made possible by a flexible structural system, the Coupled Pan Space Frame, a post-tensioned concrete structure inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s work and developed by one of the architects on our team. This space frame spans large distances and at the same time allows for systems infrastructure to be interwoven within the depth of the structure. The space frame system also easily accommodates future expansion and modification within the city, allowing the surface to evolve and increase in responsiveness and complexity.

Our team of architects, political scientists, and computer scientists is uniquely suited to carrying out this proposal, with members who have developed the above theory over twenty years and others who specialize in programming and the interoperability of energy/sustainability programs. We have a comprehensive strategy for developing sustainable city-regions but currently lack the funding that will enable us to develop the Sustainability Engine™ into working software, the missing link in our robust theory, process, and urban design. Currently our team is operating with modest grants from three sources towards the conceptual development of the Sustainability Engine™. Support from the Buckminster Fuller Challenge will go to translating the conceptual development of the Sustainability Engine™ into beta version software. The resulting software from this proposal will be marketed to software companies (i.e. Autodesk) and municipalities as well as other granting sources (i.e. NSF) to further both its operability and its implementation in sustainable city planning around the world.