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There is a growing concern within urban and environmental economists’ way of thinking that a collision between climate change and urbanisation is in fact unavoidable if governments continue to take no action. The root of the problem is simple the world’s cities account for 70% of emissions; however they cover 2% of the planet’s land mass. It is estimated that 59% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas by 2030 coupled with the fact that every year the number of people who live in urban areas grows by 67 million with developing countries accounting for 91% of this trend. The extreme densities of these areas create vulnerable consequences from increase intensity of frequent warm spells, heat waves and extremely high sea levels. Urban areas are naturally energy-intensive due to the increased transport use, heating and cooling and economic activity to generate income. However, it is because of these dependencies that future populations will be stripped of their assets and livelihoods due to future climates changes affecting water supply, physical infrastructure, transport, ecosystem goods and services, energy provision and industrial production (Squires, 2013)
There are four key roles for governments to play: (1) as a regulator with regards to aspects such as building and planning, (2) as a policy maker for issues that directly affect but go wider than the industry, such as energy efficiency and climate change, (3) as a sponsor to support research and development and articulate a vision for the future, and (4) the role as a client the government can make the greatest progress in implementing the sustainability agenda (it is also within this role that the authors of this paper contest that the US government should provide mandatory system analysis ‘Multi-Attribute Trade space Exploration’ (MATE) at the design stage of government developments through the use of BIM Life Cycle Analysis and tools such as Owners Projects Requirements - OPR tool). Evidence has indicated that even with the progression of Private Finance Initiative a high level of government commitment is inevitable due to the nature of public goods that there will always be a significant element of public sector procurement. It is because of the public sector that the construction industry has a unique role to play in a sustainable economy because government buildings have a life cycle reaching 100 years (Myers, 2008).
The research methodology identified in this paper adopts MATE’s applied decision theory approach for operational environment of engineering systems characterized by disturbances such as 9-11 psychological attack on the US interdependent economy causing $1.2 trillion loss in the valuation of US stocks and engineering systems vulnerable to natural threats, Hurricane Katrina ‘New Orleans’ flooding 80% of the city and costing 2,000 lives and over $80 billion in damages (Richards, 2009).
The objective of this paper is to develop an architecture that can convey new knowledge to students, such as MATE for survivability which can be introduced as a system analysis to improve the generation and evaluation of survivable alternatives during design, applying decision theory. However, in order to achieve such an objective the individual perspective learning outcome must link through a deep learning experience ‘active learning’ (understanding a subject, making connections and recognizing underlying principles). Demonstrations of such learning outcomes will be possibly through case studies such as California HSR Authority and the California Growth Council High Speed Rail (HSR) network and the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (tool for predicting engineering flows since the early 1970s, due to the development in computer programming and turbulence models) and OPR tools incorporated into BIM models.