What does industrial ecology need to focus on?

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After many years of trying to figure out where I fit (discipline-wise), I’ve settled into a comfortable middle ground, somewhere between engineering and geography. So I always get excited when I see my engineering colleagues start talking about social justice and the need for collaborative research with social scientists to unlock more equitable solutions. This week Dr. Joe Bozeman and a number of folks from around the world published a perspective piece in the Journal of Industrial Ecology arguing for just that. In fact, they outlined three key research priorities for a more just and sustainable urban future: equity, circularity, and digital twins.

While equity and circularity are cornerstones of my research, I was surprised and interested to see digital twins appear alongside them as a fundamental future direction. According to the authors, digital twins are “made up of a physical product or system and an in silico representation of that product or system.” Through this digital representation, cities can access real-time information about the form and function of their built and natural environments, supporting decision-making of various forms.

After spending dozens of hours mapping urban gardens in cities and simulating their effects, it doesn’t take much for me to imagine how complex and unwieldy these twins could become. To combat this, Bozeman and his colleagues argue that reduced complexity and system-of-systems approaches may yield insights that combined models of many unit-level urban functions simply can’t. In the spirit of metabolism modeling for urban agriculture, I am struck by the image of a map of urban farms and gardens as the basis for a digital twin — modeling the inputs and outputs of the urban ag sites, and projecting the effects of these systems on other city systems. Put this way, the intersection of digital twins, urban equity, and circularity feels right at home in my work, and I look forward to seeing where folks go with this.

Bozeman, J. F. III, Chopra, S. S., James, P., Muhammad, S., Cai, H., Tong, K., Carrasquillo, M., et al. (2023). Three Research Priorities for Just and Sustainable Urban Systems: Now Is the Time to Refocus. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 27(2), 382–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13360

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