Asian urbanization and its environments

Abstract

RIHN's Human Impacts on Urban Subsurface Environments projects has made substantial progress. It is especially effective in seeing the unseen and gaining a better understanding of that unseen environment. The Asian cities on which the project focuses represent one of the most dramatic human social-movements in our time. In the span of a mere century the Asian urban population will expand from 234 million to 3.2 billion. Moreover that urban population lives in a high risk environment, whose vulnerability increases with global warming. As many have observed, the struggle for sustainability will be won or lost in the world's urban areas, and the Asian urban environment will play a highly critical role in this struggle. We suggest that the RHIN project's excellent work on the unseen environment now needs to make links to the many other urban environments to promote the development of sustainable cities. Here we suggest two following steps. One is the development of a standard protocol that governments can use to assess the condition of the urban subsurface environment. The second is modeling exercises that will focus attention on linking the many urban environments to work toward sustain able cities. © 2011 Springer Japan.