Engineering for Sustainable Development (Cities as Environmental
Goods). Ponder the examination question: Discuss
with examples the case for promoting cities as environmental
"goods", not "bads". Now sit back and reflect
on this. Much of the current debate about sustainability in
the water sector is directed either at halting the transfer
to the South to caricature it of the profligate,
water-wasteful, centralized, end-of-pipe Northern paradigm,
or at starting from scratch, by building new eco-villages, even
new eco-cities, especially in countries literally in northern
latitudes. And if it is neither of these, then it is about stakeholders,
the need to be participatory and place-based, and reminders
aplenty of the fact that sustainability amounts to more than
just technical and financial considerations. At times it can
seem to be all a matter of people, politics, and public relations,
and sincerely meant so. Those of us schooled in the technocracy
of the second half of the 20th Century might well wonder what
we have to contribute to sustainability in the urban water sector.
But this is not just a matter of engineering in the water sector,
of course. For there is abroad the view that Engineering as
a whole "missed out" on the great sustainability debate
of the 1990s. So is it now gaining the recognition it richly
deserves? Our program, in collaboration with Imperial College
(London), is enquiring into the nature of the principles of
Engineering, to track how they have evolved over the past 150
years and stood us in good stead some would say debatably
so. Are they still valid in the face of the calls today for
a Science and Engineering of Sustainability? What might be the
context and cultural milieu of Engineering 25, 50, or 75 years
hence? Should we expect, as some have suggested, a Second Industrial
Revolution? Do we have the right social and institutional arrangements,
in the broadest of terms, for the principles and profession
of Engineering to catalyze any such revolution? Given the notion
of adaptive community learning, do we need some scheme we would
label "participatory technological envisioning"? Perhaps,
less grandly, the principles of Engineering are not "broke"
after all. A mere introduction to social science is all the
engineer of the future will require to return to his/her rightful
place at the center of social and economic developments. If
we could carry out the research in answer to our own examination
question, how should we then pass on this experience to the
next generation of engineers? We are currently working towards
the idea of a Summer School, or Master Class, in which (not
least) one goal would be for the "masters" to be outwitted
by the "students".