The Age of the Megacity

Introducing the newly named Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The 21st century is not just the Information Age. It is also the Age of the Megacity. And the Viterbi School is poised to be part of it, thanks to a historic gift from Los Angeles visionary Sonny Astani.

Jean-Pierre Bardet

It is no coincidence that the profession of civil engineering shares its root with the word “civilization,” both deriving from a Latin word for city, “civitas.” The story of civilization is the story of cities, of large numbers of people living together on relatively small plots of land, of their need for resources, waste disposal, structures that don’t fall down and transportation systems.

The advance of civil engineering technology has enabled cities to grow from gatherings of thousands to hundreds of thousands to, now, “megacities” of tens of millions of people.

“Megacities are more than just large cities—they are the key nodes of the world,” says Dean Yannis C. Yortsos in announcing the Astani gift. “They are financial and global command centers. Today, one-fifth of the world’s GDP is generated in the 10 economically most important megacities. They are a new, dynamic organism, with unparalleled complexity, but also with immense vitality.

Mihran Agbabian and Carter Wellford

“A city like Los Angeles is a magnet for businessmen, entrepreneurs, professionals, artists and writers—a place where creative people congregate and great universities flourish. A city like ours is a center of commerce, an economic driver of an entire region. Most importantly, it is a nursery for ideas and innovation.”

But the very success of megacities has created a dilemma. The problems civil engineers have historically addressed with great success have grown both more complicated and more urgent.

Megacities are pushing the limits of habitability around the world—the urban problems of water supply, energy supply, transportation, pollution, waste disposal and disaster preparedness have been amplified to unprecedented proportions. And residents of Los Angeles (or New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Mexico City or any of the other 15 megacities with 10 million-plus urban areas) are only too aware of these issues.

Roger Ghanem and Amy Rechenmacher

In 2007, for the first time in human history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas. At the Viterbi School, civil and environmental engineering faculty are focusing on this challenge, backed by the Astani naming gift.

Megacities exacerbate risk, produce congestion and environmental stresses, present interconnectedness at an unprecedented scale and strain resources, which they must import. For millennia, engineers have dealt with all these various issues separately and independently. But in today’s complex urban environments, these issues must be dealt with in a combined, holistic fashion, with the impacts of each element considered in the context of all the others.

Jean-Pierre Bardet, chairman of Civil and Environmental Engineering, who has succeeded long-term chairman Carter Wellford, notes that this new vision brought together areas that had previously worked separately, such as transportation, pollution, energy, water-supply waste disposal, disaster planning and even crime, into a unified whole. The key words, he says, are resiliency, interdependency and sustainability.

Sami Masri

These elements were already in place at the school: USC, says Bardet, has nurtured more than a century of civil engineering study and practice, and is now well-positioned to “plant the flag of megacities” here.

A feature inherent to megacities is the potential for catastrophic losses in the case of natural disasters. Earthquakes are one such risk, threatening megacities such as Tokyo and Los Angeles. Historically, the range of Viterbi expertise in this context has been impressive. In structural engineering, USC civil engineers worked and continue to work on numerous approaches to urban issues, with great success. Mihran “Mike” Agbabian carried out basic research on forces and materials, a body of work that earned him membership in the National Academy of Engineering. Sami Masri was an early proponent of a novel approach to the problem of making buildings quake-safe—creating structures that could react to earthquakes. These techniques were incorporated into buildings in Japan and at USC. On campus, Kaprielian Hall is built on structures meant to absorb impact and allow the building to move—to bend without breaking.

Hank Koffman

Yan Xiao and James Anderson specialize in the study of materials and methods to quake-proof buildings. In the wake of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, both were deeply involved in post-mortem analysis of what went wrong, including ways to test buildings for damage and testing of components designed for use in freeway repair to insure soundness.

Structures rest on the ground, and studies of how earthquakes can affect the various soils, as well as the structures of the sands, clay, earth and rock, are critical. Bardet is an expert on the phenomenon of liquefaction, when shaking turns moist sandy soils into soup that buildings sink into. Geoff Martin is an expert on how to secure buildings and other structures to the soil in earthquake-prone environments. Amy Rechenmacher, a recent NSF Early Career Award winner, contributes additional expertise in the area. And Hank Koffman directs one of civil engineering’s fastest growing areas: construction management. He is studying organizational ways to make building structures faster, cheaper and more efficient.

James E. Moore II

Mihailo Trifunac and his colleagues Vincent Lee and Dave Wong in the Strong Motion Earthquake Engineering group, operate the Los Angeles and Vicinity Strong Motion Network, which has contributed valuable data for numerous engineering and seismological studies. The group also maintains and develops equipment and processing methods for ambient vibration testing of full-scale structures.

Seismic studies are greatly aided by new computer tools. Grid computing techniques co-created by the USC Information Sciences Institute were incorporated into the NEESGrid network. This network creates both large-scale simulations of major quakes centered at possible geographical points, and also creates composite systems, combining real and virtual elements that can test structures for quake resistance. ISI’s Carl Kesselman and Bardet were co-principal investigators on one NEESGrid study; Erik Johnson is also researching in the field.

Najmedin Meshkati

Additional potential natural dangers to certain coastal megacities are posed by tsunamis, the huge waves generated by undersea quakes or landslides. Systematic studies of these waves, both theoretical and in the field, have been pioneered by Costas Synolakis, whose Tsunami Research Center, arguably one of the best in the world, became an internationally trusted center of information after the 2004 Indian Ocean disasters.

Transportation and congestion is a critical megacity issue. Petros Ioannou of the Ming Hsieh Department codirects METRANS, funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation, with the aim of fostering high-quality research to solve pressing urban transportation problems. James E. Moore, II, who has an appointment in the Astani Department, in addition to chairing the Epstein Department, has long researched thorny urban transportation issues. And Najmedin Meshkati is an authority in ways of dealing with all forms of risk, from sources natural and human. This expertise will be brought to bear in addressing megacity problems.

Costas Synolakis

The dense urban concentration of megacities creates new environmental problems, associated with consumption, transportation and utilization of resources. Viterbi experts are pioneering new methodologies. Constantinos Sioutas has carried out, by far, the most detailed and accurate measurements of soot and dust pollution in the Los Angeles area at the USC Southern California Particle Center, filling a major gap in knowledge about conditions. By enabling medical researchers to look for medical correlations to pollution levels, Sioutas is undergirding the important discipline of environmental health. Ronald Henry has long been an expert in air quality. Joe Devinny used bacteria to get rid of noxious vapors from wastewater, and his work estimating costs for storm-drain water treatment last year won him an award from the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board. A team led by Mike Pirbazari developed ways to clean up water contaminated by gasoline and other pollutants. Teh Fu Yen has pioneered an innovative multiagent process using bacteria, fungi and other methods to clean up highly dangerous toxic waste.

Constantinos Sioutas

Energy, water and other resources issues are of equally critical dimension in a megacity context. Don Zhang, who recently joined the Viterbi School, specializes in modeling and the study of the complex movement and changes in groundwater, as well as the potential of geological formations as holding places for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Carbon sequestration is of key and immediate concern to the use of fossil fuels. A collaboration with the Mork Family Department Petroleum Engineering faculty Kristian Jessen and Iraj Ershaghi is being launched to bring needed new insights and provide answers to these critical questions. J.J. Lee is devoting his research to water resources.

And, the task of trying to bring the insights of all these areas together to better understand the impact of growth is critical. Roger Ghanem, who has been highly influential in spreading the megacities focus in the department, is an internationally known expert in modeling—creating mathematical representations of complex, interconnected systems.

That story is turning over a new chapter—one that the Viterbi School is ready to help write.

“USC civil and environmental engineering aspires to be in the lead in addressing these challenges,” said Yortsos. “Our location at the heart of Los Angeles gives us the motivation, the credibility and the geographic relevance to become the flagship in this mission, not only in this country, but also in the world.”

Joe Devinny	Geoff Martin	Don Zhang