Abstract:
The terms “growth” and “conservation” seem oxymoronic. Conservation implies a state of constancy and stability. In contrast, growth implies a state of evolution and often disruption. When a city grows, new infrastructure needs to be built, often infringing upon cultural heritage sites and requiring more resources from the natural environment. Can the two cohabit with each other? Is cultural conservation possible with urban growth? Can urban growth happen without environmental degradation? In this talk, we will go over a series of examples around the world, where urban growth and cultural conservation were either friends or foes and learn from them. We will also see that the perfect preservation of cultural heritage sites is often challenging, but their neglect can be disastrous. We will finish the talk by going over some possible scenarios for Vietnam in this era of sustainability that forces us to be more creative.
Speaker Biography:
Sybil Derrible is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Computer Science (by courtesy), a Research Associate Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Policy, and the Director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks (CSUN) Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research is at the nexus of urban metabolism, infrastructure planning, data science, and complexity science to redefine how cities are planned, designed, and operated for smart, sustainable, and resilient urban systems. He is the author of the textbook Urban Engineering for Sustainability (MIT Press, 2019) and he an Associate Editor for the ASCE Journal of Infrastructure Systems and for Cleaner Production Letters.
