Engineers on the City

Do yourself a favor: Go check out the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum, either online or in hard copy. Spectrum is the trade magazine for the international engineers' society—it's really quite good—and this issue features an extensive package on megacities.

This is the engineer's take on many of the issues we all grapple with on Interchange. So it's not about making public meetings go more smoothly or trying to understand how to use GIS for placemaking. It's about building stuff and making sure it'll keep working.

There's too much in the issue to pick out one or two things to link to. Great stuff on electrical infrastructure, earthquake preparedness, surveillance, terrific (and terrifically useful) statistics...hoo, boy. I haven't even made it half way through, and I'm psyched.

I'll leave off, then, with this wonderful chart showing the ecological footprint—all the inputs and outputs—of greater London. And check out the way the writer, Samuel K. Moore, tees it up:

Greater London, like all metropolitan areas, is a living thing. Each year it eats—7 million metric tons of food. It drinks—94 million liters of bottled water alone. It breathes—giving off 41 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. It excretes—generating 26 million metric tons of garbage. It builds itself up with 28million metric tons of cement, glass, and other construction materials. And it falls apart, generating 15 million metric tons of debris from demolished buildings.

IEEE Spectrum megacities package