The Consortium for the Study of Rapidly Urbanizing Regions

by William Dabars

At some moment in time during the next several years a watershed in the history of human civilization will pass largely unnoticed. Its impact, however, will be lasting. According to research cited by the Population Institute, at some time during the next three or four years, the majority of humanity will for the first time have become urban dwellers. This demographic shift from predominantly agrarian to urban human settlement patterns -- a process termed urbanization -- marks a new era with ramifications that have yet to be fully understood.

The significance of the transition, however, will be marked by a group of ASU scholars and scientists who have recognized that their research on urban regions has achieved critical mass, and that lessons learned in metropolitan Phoenix have application around the world. In a major new effort to bring together academics, policy makers, practitioners and the general public, ASU announced in May the formation of the Consortium for the Study of Rapidly Urbanizing Regions (CSRUR).

Directed by Charles Redman, Virginia M. Ullman Professor of Natural History and the Environment in the Department of Anthropology, director of the Center for Environmental Studies, and an archaeologist with a specialization in the urbanization of the ancient Near East, the consortium will serve as an umbrella organization for ASU's ground-breaking research related to rapidly growing urban areas in the United States and around the world. Although the consortium is "fresh out of the mint,"as Redman puts it, groundbreaking research in issues relevant to rapid urbanization has long been under way at ASU in various colleges, schools and departments, and in at least a half-dozen interdisciplinary research units.

"We are living in the first urban century,"observes environmental planning authority Frederick Steiner, former director of the School of Planning and Landscape Architecture at ASU and now dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas, Austin. "For the first time in history, more than half of the world's people live in urban regions. By mid-century, two-thirds of us will live in cities. And there are a lot more of us."

There are indeed a lot more of us. In figures cited by the Population Institute, it was not until 1830 that the population of the world reached one billion. Within a century that figure had doubled. But by 1960 there were already three billion; and by 1975, four billion; and by 1986, five billion; and by 1999 over six billion. "In the lifetime of anyone who is over forty, world population has doubled,"writes Joel Cohen, a leading theoretical biologist and professor of populations at Columbia University. "Never before the second half of the twentieth century had any person lived through a doubling of world population. In absolute numbers, putting the first billion people on Earth took from the beginning of time to about 1830. Adding the latest billion took twelve years."

And we are indeed living in cities in great numbers. Although worldwide no more than one in fifty people lived in cities in 1800, today three-quarters of the population of prosperous, industrialized nations are city dwellers. And whereas developing nations had been primarily rural, demographer Harold Burdett notes that the pace of migration from rural areas to urban regions in the developing world has accelerated dramatically. Whereas in 1950, only 17.8 percent of the population of the developing world lived in cities, at the close of the millennium that figure had more than doubled, exceeding 40 percent, and by 2030 projections indicate that nearly 60 percent will live in cities. "Motivated by the hope for jobs and a better life,"he writes, "the influx of humanity threatens to overwhelm the existing infrastructure and degrade the environment."

Urbanization of the arid regions of the Southwest is a comparatively recent phenomenon, coming largely after World War II. And nowhere in the Southwest is this urbanization more evident than metropolitan Phoenix. According to U.S. Census Bureau figures, between 1990 and 2000 Maricopa County grew by more in absolute numbers than any county in the nation, increasing by 44.8 percent from 2,122,101 to 3,072,149 people. Not only is it the fastest growing county in the nation, it has become the fourth largest in the nation in terms of total population. And during this same time frame the city of Phoenix exceeded one million people to become the sixth largest city in the nation. Its spatial expanse now surpasses that of the city of Los Angeles, according to Steiner, who cites City of Phoenix Planning Department data indicating that the region is growing by about 63,000 residents per year, and requires 23,000 new housing units to meet the demand.

Historical projections suggest that Phoenix may grow from its present three million to as many as six million during the next two or three decades. And although the inevitable focus of such startling demographics is social, its impact is also environmental. "We are at a critical juncture in the evolution of our relationship to the environment,"ASU President Michael M. Crow observes. "The sustainability of our region, our nation and even our planet remain in doubt. What will the Phoenix metropolitan area look like in fifty years? In 500 years? We must confront the fact that we do not fully understand the implications of human impact on the environment and are not adequately prepared to determine policies regarding the intersection of human and natural systems."

"ASU must do all it can to develop technologies and promote policies that will allow the natural beauty of Arizona to endure, even as millions of people move into the area in the years ahead,"he continues. "The Consortium for the Study of Rapidly Urbanizing Regions represents an institutional commitment to take the lead in addressing sustainability and integrating research in the natural sciences with urban design and planning. The consortium epitomizes interdisciplinary collaboration at its best and will bring precision and clarity to the critical issues of sustainable growth and serve as a prototype for scholars, analysts and planners around the world."

"Phoenix is the ideal platform for this initiative in that it is among the most rapidly urbanizing regions in North America,"notes ASU Vice President for Research and Economic Affairs Jonathan Fink. "The larger significance of the consortium is that it will greatly enhance information exchange and program development. By forming a global consortium, we at ASU and in Greater Phoenix will be able to learn from the experiences of other rapidly growing regions around the world, and the tools and approaches developed here will be exportable to a much more extensive audience. From ASU's perspective, becoming recognized as one of the key places using science and engineering to try to solve global urbanization issues will help us recruit additional faculty experts and graduate students who share these interests, and it should also offer new funding opportunities. Finally, from the standpoint of our own region, launching this consortium should lead to new, practical solutions to problems that are of immediate interest to nearly all of the citizens of metro Phoenix: traffic congestion, air and water pollution, unrestricted sprawl and compromised public health."

Metropolitan Phoenix has become a "poster child for rapid urbanization,"notes Rob Melnick, director of the Morrison Institute for Public Policy and associate vice president for Economic Affairs. But despite undeniable benefits associated with urbanization -- social and economic resources are concentrated in cities -- there is a "growing sense that its trajectory is not healthy, that growth at this pace will produce intractable problems of transportation, environmental degradation and social isolation."And as it sprawls, metropolitan Phoenix will spill well beyond the "understood geo-political boundary"of Maricopa County. "Fifty years from now, the Valley will neither be contained in a valley, nor in Maricopa County,"Melnick continues. Instead, metropolitan Phoenix "will reach well beyond the mountains that ring the area and well into both Yavapai and Pinal Counties."The consortium, he believes, will bring a broader vision at a time when there will be no political entity that governs the entire region.

Research universities like ASU are unique in their capacity to bring a broader vision to societal problems, serving convening functions, bringing together disparate groups and integrating and synthesizing data. A significant body of information and research about metropolitan Phoenix already exists, notes consortium director Redman, but it is held by different agencies and organizations. Analytical tools and models developed by separate agencies often find limited application outside their immediate sphere of influence. Projections of urban growth developed by the Maricopa County Association of Governments, for example, and assessments of available groundwater compiled by the Arizona Department of Water Resources become more meaningful when integrated and synthesized -- output from one agency becomes input for another. And the combined data yield still further significance.

Most urban studies centers are based in the social sciences, Redman observes, and are in some way affiliated with schools of urban design and planning. What is unique in the conception of the consortium is its focus on urbanization considered in the context of the natural sciences, in particular the biological and environmental sciences. Although all disciplines involved are equally important and relevant, it is the "broad and firm concern"with the natural sciences that marks the consortium as unique in its conception and poised to bring ASU to international prominence in urban studies.

Within two or three years, Redman notes, strategic relationships will evolve between consortium participants and research groups, centers, institutes and other consortiums based in academic institutions around the world, as well as possibly a dozen or more community and state agencies and organizations and other partners at the national and international level. According to Fink, initial conversations have already taken place with groups at Harvard and Stanford, as well as academic institutions in England, France and Germany. Ann Kinzig, assistant professor of biology, anticipates that the consortium will forge partnerships as institutional vacuums in scientific and scholarly expertise become apparent. "We are calling ourselves a consortium rather than a center,"she notes, "because we intend to fill in any gaps in strength with partnerships."

Because the research interests of consortium participants are so diverse, the list of academic units from which partnerships may evolve is long and varied. The Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability (ISTS), for example, a group based in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is concerned with promoting environmentally sustainable human development. The National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), one of whose member institutions is the University of California, Santa Barbara, is an independent research consortium that offers expertise in geographic information systems (GIS). The Southern California Studies Center at the University of Southern California has produced an enormous body of research on the urban dynamics of large metropolitan regions. And to complement ASU research in air pollution being conducted by the Environmental Fluid Dynamics Group, Fink cited the potential of collaboration with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, a UK consortium with headquarters at the University of East Anglia.

As the umbrella organization for existing ASU research groups, some of long standing and invariably of great repute, the consortium at once subsumes existing units and becomes more than the sum of their parts. The Center for Environmental Studies (CES) is its bedrock and the publication of one of its key research projects was taken as a propitious moment to announce the formation of the consortium.

CES is itself an interdisciplinary consortium of over fifty faculty members and dozens of community and institutional partners, organized to promote research on human-dominated environmental systems. CES facilitates collaboration among researchers, assists in decision-making about environmental issues, advances identification of key local and global environmental issues, and collects reliable information for scholars, policymakers and the greater public.

The first product of the new consortium is an atlas created by a CES research group called Greater Phoenix 2100 (GP 2100) that seeks to provide data and analysis to regional decision makers. The Greater Phoenix Regional Atlas: A Preview of the Region's 50-Year Future, is comprehensive in scope, with chapters devoted to an exhaustive regional description, transportation, water, air quality, pollen and allergies, changing demographics, Hispanic education, housing affordability, the high-tech new economy, open space preservation and the urban heat island. Each chapter includes maps illustrating aspects of the issue, along with commentaries and essays by regional experts.

Linked with similar studies in other metropolitan areas and global city regions, GP 2100 seeks to coordinate federal, state, and academic information programs relating to the environment of the region, notes Frederick Steiner, founding director of GP 2100 and one of the authors of the atlas. According to Ray Quay, assistant director in the City of Phoenix Water Services Department and also a former director of the project, the atlas is actually a "demonstration project"to exemplify the breadth of the center's scientific and scholarly concerns.

An online version of the atlas -- an "Urban eAtlas"-- will soon be available. Continually updated, it could offer unlimited modeling capabilities, contributing to the creation of a regional version of the interactive urban planning game Sim City. "Sim Phoenix,"as Steiner explains, could become an interactive tool to "visualize the consequences of 'what if' scenarios,"and lead to the development of an even more elaborate visualization project, a "decision theater"that Steiner describes as "a physical space in which scientific data, group dynamics and interactive computer technology are used to develop simulations of the region's futures and considerations of their consequences."High-resolution stereoscopic visualization will allow participants the illusion of walking through possible "landscapes of the future."

Another important component of the Center for Environmental Studies is the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) project, one of only two NSF-funded sites specifically studying the ecology of urban systems. Unlike typical LTER sites -- pristine locations removed from extensive human modification and dominance of ecosystems -- the CAP LTER site focuses on an arid-land ecosystem profoundly influenced, even defined, by the presence and activities of humans.

CES is home to other projects, including an interdisciplinary study that will trace the effects of the introduction, spread and abandonment of agriculture at six U.S. long-term ecological research sites, with cross comparisons in Mexico and France, using a variety of monitoring strategies, quantitative modeling and comparative data. Agricultural Landscapes in Transition is particularly compelling when one considers that agrarian transformations represent the most pervasive alteration of the terrestrial environment during the past 10,000 years.

All consortium projects exemplify the interdisciplinary scholarship that President Crow so enthusiastically hopes to foster, with participants coming from disparate disciplines in the natural sciences, social sciences, engineering and the humanities -- archaeologists; artists; biologists; chemists; aerospace, chemical, civil, and mechanical engineers; geographers; geologists; historians; physicists; psychologists; sociologists; and urban planners and designers, not to speak of the policy experts and practitioners involved.

Among these is Philip Christensen, of Mars research fame. The impact of urban growth around the world -- not only in Phoenix, but in cities like S‹o Paulo, Cairo and New Delhi -- is being tracked in a terrestrial remote sensing project called 100 Cities, led by Christensen, Edgar and Helen Korrick Professor of Geological Sciences, and principal investigator for NASA programs, including the Mars Global Surveyor thermal emission spectrometer (TES) and Mars Surveyor 2001 Orbiter thermal emission imaging system (THEMIS). Christensen is currently using spacecraft observations to study environmental and urban development problems on Earth. Data provided by ASTER (Advanced Spaceborn Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) will be used to monitor growth in metropolitan Phoenix and other large urban regions, with an emphasis on those in arid and semi-arid environments.

Although his work with satellite data has focused mostly on Mars, Christensen says that planetary surface data provided by the cameras and spectrometers he has developed work just as well here on Earth. He has been intrigued for years about the possibility of monitoring the temperature, environment and changing conditions of cities around the world. "The LTER program at ASU has provided an opportunity to compare information collected from detailed ground studies with those obtained from orbit and has given us insight into what we can learn from monitoring cities from space,"Christensen explains. "The LTER project evolved our thinking to consider the issues and problems facing cities around the world -- especially those that are developing rapidly -- and led me to believe that satellite images can bring something important to the table for ASU's consortium."

With input from natural scientists and social scholars, the consortium is an ideal setting for urban ecology, the academic specialization of biologist Ann Kinzig. Following decades of reductionist science -- "continued efforts to parse nature more and more finely"-- the project to understand the component pieces must find its complement, she observes, in an effort to "discover a whole that is different than the sum of its parts."That effort will not succeed, she maintains, without combined analysis in the natural and social sciences, necessary prerequisites to successful urban ecology: After all, "with cities you find people in the middle of ecosystems."

The consortium has a much broader role than basic research in the natural sciences and the dissemination of information to planners and policy makers, according to Kinzig. With the consortium, scientists and scholars will look at the full spectrum of how cities are structured, how they change over time, who engages in deciding their course, what kinds of information is required to make those decisions and what do the structures we impose on our cities mean for the surrounding areas.

"One focus will be individual cities -- what do we need to know to make a particular city a good place to live, with an obvious focus on Phoenix -- but another larger set of questions would address what it means, more generally, for the world to be urban, and for these urban centers to be interacting in a network. As we structure ourselves increasingly into networks -- not just of urban centers, but also networks of computers and networks of trade -- we need to understand their dynamics,"Kinzig observes, "and what that means to our quality of life from a social and environmental perspective."

Urban planner and designer David Pijawka, professor in the School of Planning and Landscape Architecture, is interested in the science that informs plan making and appreciates the integration of theory and practice represented by the consortium. "The consortium will be applying and utilizing state-of-the-art spatial science and planning support systems to answer growth-related questions specific to rapidly urbanizing regions,"he observes. "The use of such tools to answer questions of urban form and function, and to test alternative urban futures represents the next level of urban planning research."His colleague, Subhro Guhathakurta, an associate professor in the school, considers the formation of the consortium timely because it has become apparent that debates about urbanization must be framed in the context of sustainability. It is essential, he states, to examine the "dynamic relationships between growth, the environment, the economy and quality of life."

Despite the extraordinary complexity of the challenges posed by large-scale urbanization, Patricia Gober, an ASU professor of geography and an expert in urban geography, demography, and the urban environment, remains optimistic. Because Phoenix has already sustained rapid growth under difficult environmental conditions -- "the ragged edge of human habitation,"according to Phoenix attorney and cultural commentator Grady Gammage, whose formulation she quotes -- Gober believes the region is well-suited to meet both the environmental and social challenges ahead.

"Our resilience,"she observes, "is a function of a technological capacity to engineer discomfort, uncertainty and unpredictability out of the natural desert setting, an ability to assimilate newcomers and share with them a common vision of the present and future, an uncanny ability to reframe the local identity in response to large-scale societal change (from agricultural paradise and tourist mecca to World War II training ground, center for electronics production and retirement haven) and an unparalleled ability to deliver the American Dream in the form of an affordable single-family home."

People often ask what is likely to limit growth in metropolitan Phoenix, Kinzig observes, a question frequently considered in the Los Angeles basin. Most assume it will be inadequate water, but the more likely limiting factor, she believes, will be deterioration in the quality of life: too much population, urban sprawl, pollution, traffic, heat and degradation of the pristine desert. At that point, she observes, we will have lost the great advantages of living in Phoenix. And those very qualities that attract people, business, and investment to the region will be lost.

When asked about her vision for the future of metropolitan Phoenix, Kinzig replies that scenario-building is an exercise in thinking about potential extremes. In one possible scenario, we overlook the consequences of rapid urbanization and encroach too far into the desert, with the built environment accelerating the urban heat-island effect and a corresponding increase in particulate matter and haze. Coupled with a possible climate change, life in the region becomes unbearable. On the other hand, if we severely restrict growth in order to preserve the environment, we eliminate economic and intellectual opportunities and only those already in the region benefit.

In between exist a wide range of positive scenarios, which more closely balance economic and intellectual opportunities with environmental concerns. "No scientist can predict the right balance,"she cautions. "That is a matter for the public."And the role of the consortium, according to Kinzig, is to allow the public to make choices with the best available information. The worst-case scenario, she notes, is to make choices unthinkingly -- without a real understanding of their implications.

In order for the metropolitan Phoenix region to continue to prosper in the face of rapid urbanization, the participants in an April 2001 ASU workshop -- academics, authorities in regional planning, and local and national policymakers -- that provided the intellectual foundation for the Greater Phoenix 2001 project, Frederick Steiner writes, concluded that three overlapping spheres of influence must be cultivated: "the creation of knowledge capital, the enhancement of social capital and the preservation of natural capital."With the creation of the Consortium for the Study of Rapidly Urbanizing Regions, Arizona State University has taken an important step in advancing all three.

The College Farm sat on 326 acres from 1956-83. The land has since been developed as the ASU Research Park.

University Archives Photograph, ASU Libraries

The ASU Research Park at Elliot and Price roads was once farmland.