Sustainable Bristol

Learning to live in cities

Posted on 17 April 2010

According to the UN, the world reached a historic tipping point in 2007: for the first time, we became a majority urban world. This trend is set to intensify. And by 2030, two thirds of our species will be city-dwellers.

The environmental implications of this are enormous, making some issues (public transport, waste minimisation and low-carbon housing) easier to deal with and others (total energy consumption, air pollution and overall quality of life) a great deal harder.

Living in Cities

As mega-cities such as Mumbai, Sao Paulo and Shanghai grow we have no choice but to learn to live together in sustainable ways. This will mean providing a high quality of life for all urban residents. It will also mean reducing the impact that cities have on the wider world.

The impact of cities tends to extend beyond their population or geographical area, with urban areas having a disproportionate environmental impact on the rest of the world. London, for example, has an ecological footprint 293 times its geographical area (that’s a land-mass roughly twice the size of the UK!).

The world’s major cities will face a range of major challenges over the coming decades. All of our cities need secure supplies of water, energy and food to survive. Two years ago, with global agricultural shortages and commodity spikes, UK decision makers got very worried about food security. ‘MI5’, our security services, said we were potentially just ‘four meals from anarchy’. In southern Australia many areas face acute water shortages and water storage levels are on the front page of the newspaper in Melbourne every day. And whether you believe that oil will run out sooner or later, it is clear that our cities are very oil reliant, not just for transport in the cities themselves, but also for the agriculture and global supply chains on which they depend.

And overlaying – and intensifying – all of these pressures is climate change. Cities will have to deal with not only with the policy responses such as more expensive carbon, but also the physical impacts. Throughout human history we have we built our major settlements on rivers, estuaries and coasts. Sea level rise, storms and floods are just some of the impacts they will have to contend with. For cities like Sydney, one of the major impacts might be flood water backing up through the drainage system.

It is clear that the world has to learn to live together in cities in ways that work for people and the environment. We won’t survive without new thinking and more creative approaches. We will need completely new ways to live, work, produce and consume. That gives us, perhaps more than anything else, a challenge to innovate.
Forum for the Future has been working on innovation and sustainable cities for a number of years, helping city authorities, for example, innovate new low carbon services for their citizens.

We have found that there are particular issues when you are designing for cities. It is relatively easy to build new developments more sustainably, starting with a blank sheet of paper. Places such as Masdar – a new ‘sustainable city’ being constructed in desert outside Abu Dhabi in the desert– is being built from scratch using the newest technologies.

Masdar city - zero carbon development - Abu Dhabi source: Fast Company

We will, of course, learn important lessons from such development. But a huge amount of what we have to do – particularly in the developed world – is to retrofit existing cities. We need to re-engineer cities that have been built up over hundreds of years. Often this will be through overlaying layers of digital information on the physical infrastructure to help a city function more efficiently.

Rather than designing individual products or services, for urban areas we need to design whole systems and rethink the infrastructure in fundamental ways. This goes beyond the technological innovations – such as electric cars or hydrogen buses – to social and institutional innovation – such as local food schemes or congestion charging.

And leadership is vital. Institutional politics often seem to get in the way in cities, partly because the governance structures often do not map well to the actual issues a city faces. It is, of course, preferable to have leadership and vision from the top but sometimes it can come from businesses or community groups, who help to develop a shared vision and a collective sense of where the city needs to go.

In many places, the city government itself is taking the lead. Stockholm, which was designated Europe’s first ‘Green Capital’ last year, is a great example of this. The City of Stockholm has a holistic vision, combining growth with sustainable development for the benefit of its 800,000 citizens. Some 95 % of the population live less than 300 metres from green areas. All trains and inner city buses run on renewable fuels. Green house gas emissions have been reduced by 25 % since 1990, and the city council has the ambitious target of becoming wholly independent of fossil fuels by 2050.

In Melbourne, I saw a smart, but simple, innovation by the City Council. On the wide streets, they’ve moved the row of parked cars out a few feet into the road. This creates a gap between the cars and the pavement. So, instead of cyclists being up against the traffic, they have their own safe space. This doesn’t require extra space, but makes cleverer use of the existing road.

In other cities, the innovation is more bottom up. The Transition Towns movement – which began in the UK, and now has some 275 communities, including in Australia – aims to raise awareness of sustainable living and build local resilience. Communities are encouraged to seek out methods for reducing energy usage as well as increasing their own self reliance. Another grassroots initiative is prolific sprouting of urban agriculture schemes in developed world cities. In Melbourne the city farm, which was previously a rubbish tip, is just minutes from the CBD in Brunswick, and people can learn how to grow vegetables. While ‘Cultivating Community’ is responsible for the management of 20 community gardens on public housing estates across the Victorian capital.

Elsewhere, it is businesses that are driving the innovation. IBM, for example, has launched its ‘Smarter Planet’ initiative, aimed at using information technology and outsourcing to solve the major problems facing cities, at the same time as driving new business for the company. Other major companies – such as Arup, Cisco, GE and Siemens, are also see huge potential win-wins through helping to make cities more sustainable.

In the UK, Forum For The Future has launched an ambitious 10-year programme to help make Bristol the most sustainable city-region in the UK, through tackling key sustainability challenges such as making our housing more energy efficient; helping organisations cut their carbon emissions; reducing dependency on private cars; encouraging local food; and raising awareness of sustainability.

We want to create a common understanding of what it means to be a sustainable city, deliver world-class projects in key areas, and share our experience. In Australia, the Victorian Eco Innovation Lab is taking a very similar ‘catalytic’ approach.

The future of the world is urban. Because of the rapid modernisation of countries such as China and India, we are seeing the largest rural-urban migration in history. How that urban development happens will lock-in behaviours for decades. We clearly have to find different ways to live. Cities are in many ways places of opportunity – hot-houses for economic, social and cultural innovation – so they are likely to be the places where we find these solutions. It is no exaggeration to say that the global battle for sustainability will be won or lost in our cities.

sources:
Masdar image: Fast Company.com