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In the 21st century, adequate habitat and functioning infrastructure are critical for global societal and economic stability. In addition, growing urbanisation and environmental pollution cause challenges to societies.
With increasing velocity, humanity faces that the current way of living is not sustainable. Thus, habitat,infrastructure, urbanisation, environment and sustainability are definitively among the most striking challenges of the 21st century.
By consulting, planning, building, maintaining, exploiting and processing of global resources, civil engineers contribute significantly to the existence of these challenges. This is a high responsibility, but due to the heavy involvement, together with adjacent disciplines such as architecture, geosciences, chemistry,
physics, environmental sciences and economics, civil engineers also hold the key to mitigate these challenges and provide a brighter global future.
Solutions towards greener, more sustainable and economically viable materials do exist, and there is ongoing research on how greener technologies can contribute to better livelihood and economic growth, but their level of implementation is limited, a major reason for which is that these approaches require more fundamental understanding rather than standard application.
Today, in scientific events often a certain separation between researchers from laboratories with highly sophisticated equipment and those from less privileged laboratories can be observed. It is not an uncommon situation that results presented at conferences are rubbished or ridiculed because the investigator only used low-end analytical methods.
The assessment of the study is then biased based on the equipment, regardless of the actual quality of the study.
In many regions of the world the urbanisation process is accelerating dramatically. This puts pressure on urban planners but also politics to develop strategies for sustainable city growth. With the rapidly increasing demand for living space in urban areas, cities typically grow vertically. This is largely driven by real estate markets and sometimes also by the desire for status symbols.
Certainly, vertical urban growth makes sense, when horizontal growth destroys important flora and Fauna (e.g. in rain forest regions), but in many cases vertical growth is result of real-estate business and Expansion limitation due to state or country borders. However, economics and borders are made by humans. They follow human-made rules. Gravity does not. Therefore, from a point of view of sustainable materials and resourceuse, the trending vertical growth of cities may come under scrutiny.
The following aspects should be considered, when a decision is taken between a new quarter with limited number of storeys or a new skyscraper.
Sustainability means meeting the needs of today without compromising the needs of the next generations. How can we meet the needs of the next generations, if we do not even know what these needs are? If we do not listen to the next generation and learn from them? Do we even meet the needs of today for everyone on earth?
Innovation, science and engineering are driving forces to mastering the global challenges of the next decades. The basis is education. ISEE stands for Innovation, Science, Engineering and education. This book summarises the presentations, discussions and Statements that were made during the ISEE-Africa conference held in Nairobi in 2019 from January 30 to February 1.
The ISEE conference is a gathering of international researchers, scholars, and students, who came together to discuss jointly relevant topics related to better education for the engineers and architects of the future.
Today, we know that the climate change is real. Many regions in the world are already suffering significantly, and the only way for humanity to overcome the challenges is to develop more sustainable technologies to the benefit of the entire global society. However, sustainable technologies require for deeper understanding, more conscious thinking, and smarter engineering. The only way how this can be achieved is to educate the developers, the decision makers, the engineers of tomorrow in a more knowledge driven way, and to equip them with the assertiveness required for the implementation.
In this book, topics of construction and sustainable materials are linked to educational challenges. It addresses teachers, academic and political decision makers, and change drivers. The specific objective is to be critical, thought-provoking and inspiring. This way, we do hope that the book can deliver credible solution strategies for enhanced education for a new generation of decision makers with higher awareness of global and environmental challenges as well as innovation potentials.