Tianjin Eco-city: Gloria Ng, who leads Service Innovation Practice, at the Institute for Systems Science at NUS Singapore told me about the Tianjin Eco-city collaboration between Singapore and China: “We aim to build an economically thriving, environmentally friendly, socially harmonious and resource-efficient city. The key concept underpinning the planning and development of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city is the “three harmonies” – man living in harmony with man, now and for future generations; man living in harmony with economic activities; and man living in harmony with the environment.” http://www.tianjinecocity.gov.sg/ She also mentioned that Singapore recently hosted the World Cities Summit: http://www.worldcities.com.sg/
Archive of posts tagged smart
Where We are Losing: The 2010 State of the Future report
Where We are Losing: The 2010 State of the Future report has just been released by the Millennium Project (http://www.millennium-project.org). I urge you all to read it soon.
I especially think the service science community needs to engage in understanding where we (as an instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent planetary community) are losing: fewer people voting, more corruption, more green-house-gases, more homicides, higher temperature, more unemployment, and more terrorism. Both the carrying capacity of the planet and quality of life will be determined by the service systems we evolve and design as well as interconnect and don’t interconnect over the next century. A good summary of the report is the following interview at the Kurzweil website: http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-state-of-the-future
Our ecological footprint?
How Big Is Our Ecological Footprint: The carrying capacity of Earth depends on the quality of service systems that exist. Here is a nice website and quiz to help build awareness of our ecological footpprint http://www.myfootprint.org/
Of course, “Our Ecological Footprint” is a classic book by Mathis Wackernagel (search Google books). There is a great deal of work required to model humanities ecological footprint http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/footprint_basics_overview/ as well as to understand nature’s service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature’s_services and ecological service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_services
What is a holistic service system?
Defining What is a Holistic Service System: I am looking for ideas about what is a good definition for a holistic service system. My own definition is to first offer some examples: cities, universities, luxury resort hotels. And then mention that holistic service systems are a type of system of service systems (service network), that must address: transportation, water/air, food/products, energy, communications, buildings, retail, finance, health, education, security-governance. And then to give an out of this world example – a space ship. And finally, a more mundane example, a luxury ocean liner… So what is a good definition for a holistic service system? My primary interest these days is apply service science to the study of universities and cities — two tightly coupled “holistic service systems” — nations and states are also good examples of holistic service systems. Populations of holistic service systems balance interdependence and independence. An interesting finding so far is the near linear correlations between % of GDP of nations and % of universities in the top 500….. A good source of data is http://www.arwu.org/ARWUAnalysis2009.jsp For exanmple, China makes a nice country to look at over the last few years, since they have jumped both in GDP and top-500-universities. So far the leader though is still the US, with 23% of WW GDP and 30% of top-500-universities…. So universities and cities as tightly-coupled holistic service systems are of keen interest these days… a city-making industry is beginning to emerge, and universities seem to be a core aspect of new cities. In IBM University Programs (IBM UP) WW, we are very interested in helping to align universities on the idea of an emerging “city-making” industry. The key is not just a city-making industry, but making it economical to re-cycle and re-make cities as a sustainable investment decade over decade… even the most environmentally friendly buildings today, may look like dinosaurs in 20 years as green-tech gets onto its own Moore’s law of continuous improvement. Think of super-computers 20 years ago compared to super-computers today. Green buildings are approaching their own kind of decade-based accelerated improvement curves due to new materials and techniques.