From imaginary SDGs to sustainable metabolism of cities and megacities

Almost a third of a century of our life in the new country (1991–2022) can be divided into two roughly equal chunks of 15.5 years each. The result of the first one was a natural failure of the “electricity reform” after its deregulation and disintegration, blackouts in 2005, accidents in winter 2006, and a hard summer in 2010. During the second period, the energy system began to recover and come together. Despite the ill-considered and inconsistent policy of energy saving, the energy intensity of all sectors (except oil and gas extraction) was gradually declining, while the total energy intensity of the country was growing, and specific consumption grew by almost a third, from 6.5 to 8.5 tonnes of fuel equivalent per person per year. In addition to industry, the energy efficiency of the housing stock and the housing and utilities sector as a whole has increased — the supply of heat to district heating is decreasing slightly against the background of over 1.2 billion square metres of real estate being commissioned over the years.

But the situation is very uneven across the country — regions differ 100-fold in population, 150-fold in territory, 50-fold in energy consumption, and 3,500-fold in population density, which determines the energy sector ¹.

Our work on urban climate adaptation since 2016 as part of an inter-university team of MPEI, Moscow State University, Moscow State University, and institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences — IFA, IG RAS, INP RAS, and IEI RAS — has revealed many interesting things at the intersection of sciences and approaches. Moscow’s climate is not that much warmer, but rather it is becoming more like Leningrad’s: absolute humidity is increasing, the number of clear days is decreasing — largely due to the growing exposure of the city to the main greenhouse gas, water vapour, as well as low-grade heat.

The vulnerability of energy, utilities, transport, networks and buildings has decreased over the years, an NMN warning system has been established and developed, and the city’s unique eco-monitoring complex is actively complemented by the one near Moscow.

Based on the body of work, we have identified four key and linked groups of indicators of climatic sustainability/adaptability of the megacity technosphere. These are, by and large, resource and energy free (and exergy free) in combination with flow (capacity) and structural balance of life support systems. According to these indicators, Moscow has advanced significantly over these years and has built up reserves for further growth and development.

Energy efficiency of the megacity technosphere	Resource efficiency of the megacity technosphere
Use of waste, low-concentration energy flows	Balancing of load/peak schedules and power system capacity

Let’s look at them again and ask ourselves: “What did Texas lack, which also had a pretty good record on these criteria and yet failed abruptly a year and a half ago to cope with an unremarkable (for them) cold snap. So what was lacking — determination or awareness of threats and vulnerability?”

But, if technical indicators alone aren’t enough, let’s try to take it up a notch. Starting from the ideas of our great predecessors — academicians V.I. Vernadsky, K.Y. Kondratyev, M.I. Budyko, N.F. Reimers, Y.A. Urmantsev, we are moving from unworkable fables about “sustainable development” to flow models of homeostasis and balance of technosphere, ecosystems and society.

The key term describing the megacity’s dynamic system in all its diversity, the flow of resources and waste, water and energy is metabolism. It is a good time to remember the Japanese school of metabolist architects under the leadership of the extraordinary Kenzo Tange, who built a beautiful memorial park at the site of the death of his countrymen and parents in Hiroshima and created the incredible EXPO 1970 complex in Osaka. Then there was the amazing aquapolis in Okinawa in 1975, and it seemed that we were about to see these beautiful ideas become reality.

And, besides him, dozens of researchers started looking at the most different cities on the planet from this perspective — half a century ago. But all these beautiful and mathematically thought-out models did not become the basis for real urban planning decisions and slowly came to naught. There were many reasons for this, and a lot of water has flowed away during those half a century.

Now, half a century later, humanity is once again trying to ignore this balance, hiding behind newfangled constructs like smart-city, sustainable, carbon-free and digitalisation. And all the attempts to create a sustainable city from scratch (with very significant resources and costs) — Masdar and Songdo, Lavasa and Amaravati, Innopolis and Skolkovo are not encouraging at all. Now let’s wait for another sber story — Rublevo-Arkhangelskoye.

Suddenly it turned out that it is practically impossible to create such a city in an empty place, it can only be grown — in a careful interconnection of three components — technosphere, society and ecosystem, balanced spatially and functionally in strict accordance with the climate, functionality and a dozen of other important features of time and place.

Let’s look at our city through the lens of this balance, and we see that three large typological groups of areas with green spaces make up almost 60% of the city districts (62 out of 107 — not including the TNAO areas).

Moscow has unique prerequisites for such spatial balance even within the Moscow Ring Road, of course, the ring of suburbs along the Ring Road aggravates the picture somewhat, but the territories of the TNAO give hope. Protected areas and those who create and protect them. Few city residents understand the true price one has to pay for curbing the aggressive encroachment on any free piece of the city, including blasphemously ‘encumbered’ with trees and parks.

It’s a good time to remember another striking result of our systematic work over the past five years. The damage caused by climate change to society was 35–50 times greater than the damage to hardware and urban infrastructure, which we tested four times. Among other things, this means that investments in socio-environmental projects are more efficient and pay off — in working capacity, public health, reliability and sustainability of technosphere, and adaptation of the entire megacity to the vicissitudes of life and weather cataclysms.

Dear ecologists — fans of the SDG iconostasis, economists — fans of profitability norms and share prices, we urgently need working tools to assess and capitalise on the ecosystem effects of all kinds and species, parks, squares, plantings and green roofs.

Hear us, woeful four-letter developers who manage to shove “business houses” with three times the thermal protection lagging behind 15-year-old norms into the vulnerable urban fabric. People will never forget or forgive you for the Martian spiders on Dorogomilovskaya and the construction bacchanalia at the former Serpe and Molot. Aggressive infrastructure development is surely still a national project? Zaryadye, the incinerators in Vienna and Copenhagen, Berlin’s zoo and Abu Dhabi’s mangrove park will be remembered as places of power.

Hear the voices of your great predecessors, who created our great city and great invincible country decades ago under very difficult circumstances. They had it harder than we do today, regretting so much the currency exchange rate, the loss of mental comfort and the impossibility of a weekend flight to Europe.