On May 27, the Earth and Life Institute is pleased to welcome Dr. Benjamin Goldstein for a new ELI-Sustainability Talk. 

Abstract

Cities are engines of economic activity and human well-being, but they also drive profound environmental change; both within their boundaries and across distant landscapes. As such, urban areas cannot be understood and assessed in isolation from the farms, forests, and other spaces of production on which they depend. 

This talk presents research from the Sustainable Urban-Rural Futures (SURF) Lab at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, which develops advanced analytics to map, measure, and mitigate the environmental impacts of urban systems. 

I will explore how urban form and function shape resource consumption and environmental burdens, from household energy use and carbon emissions to the food and commodity supply chains that stretch from city centers to global hinterlands. 

Drawing on methods including life cycle assessment, consumption-based accounting, and geospatial analysis, I will show how multi-scalar analysis of urban processes can capture the environmental and social change wrought by cities in ways that traditional geographically-constrained frameworks often obscure. To demonstrate this, I will present findings on topics including urban agriculture, building materials, livestock supply chains, and residential energy use, discussing implications for policy and planning aimed at building more sustainable and just cities.

The guest

Dr. Benjamin Goldstein is Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability and head of the Sustainable Urban-Rural Futures (SURF) Lab. The SURF Lab studies and emphasizes urban sustainability at multiple scales. 

Through his work at the SURF Lab, Benjamin helps understand how urban processes and urban form drive the consumption of materials and energy in cities and produce environmental change inside and outside cities. 

He develops methods and tools to quantify the scale of these changes and the locations where they occur using life cycle assessment, input-output analysis, geospatial data, and approaches from data science. 

Benjamin Goldstein is particularly interested in combining quantitative methods with theory rooted in social science to explore multiple dimensions of sustainability and address issues of distributive justice. 

His topical foci include urban food systems (esp. urban agriculture), agri-commodities, residual resource engineering, global supply chains, sustainable production and consumption, and energy systems.

Practical

This seminar will be held on May 27 from 13:00 to 14:00 in Ocean room (de Serres building, Place Croix du Sud 2, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium).

A lunch with the guest speaker will be held next to there, in the cafeteria of the de Serres building, between 12:15 and 13:00, only for participants at the ELI-T seminar.

If you would like to attend the lunch, please register here. 
Please note that registration is mandatory for the lunch and essential for us to plan the right amount of food. Registration for the talk only is appreciated but not required.

The seminar and lunch are free and open to everyone, whether or not you are an ELI member or a UCLouvain member, as long as you are registered.

The seminar can also be attended online. Follow online here: TEAMS link.