More than 100 mayors from 30 countries will convene in Nantes (France) on 27 – 28 September 2013 to take part in the World Mayors Summit on Climate Change.

The high-level event will be held back to back with the ECOCITY World summit, and will capitalize on cities’ forward momentum in the fight against global warming. The first phase of the Local Government Climate Roadmap, an advocacy process aimed at voicing, engaging and empowering local governments worldwide, successfully facilitated international recognition for the role of local governments in tackling climate change. The World Mayors Summit will build on this recognition and aims to build a global consensus that will feed into the upcoming discussions at COP 19 in Warsaw (Poland) later this year and ultimately to COP 21 in Paris (France) in 2015.

Confirmed attendees include George Ferguson, Mayor of Bristol (United Kingdom), James Nxumalo, Mayor of Durban (South Africa),  Sukumbhad Paripatha, Governor of Bangkok (Thailand), Frank Cownie, Mayor of Des Moines Iowa (United States), Yvo de Boer, Special Global Advisor, Climate Change and Sustainability, KPMG, former Executive Secretary, UNFCCC, Dr. Naoko Ishii, Chair and CEO of the Global Environment Facility,
Philippe de Fontaine Vive Curtaz, Vice-President, European Investment Bank (EIB) and many others.

“Cities’ successes in lowering emissions have proven time and again that local action is the most effective way to tackle our global climate problem. The World Mayors Summit, an invitation-only event, will call for a bottom-up approach to allow cities access to financing mechanisms so that bold, innovative and necessary climate actions can continue to grow.” said Gino Van Begin, ICLEI Secretary General.

To demonstrate their commitment to stemming global warming, all mayors in attendance will be invited to sign the Nantes Declaration of Mayors and sub-national Leaders on Climate Change, which will set the foundation for the new phase of the Local Government Climate Roadmap. The document calls on local governments to join together with national governments, business, civil society and others to create a strong community working towards a low-carbon future.

The two-day event is organized by ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and officially supported by a broad coalition of international networks, including the World Mayors Council on Climate Change(WMCCC), UCLG, Nrg4sd, Climate Alliance, Energy Cities, and EUROCITIES.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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The battle against climate change will be won or lost in our cities. The path forward looks different in each city and community, but there are some common threads and best practices to start local conversations and plans. We recommend action on two fronts–audit and action.

First, establish your goals. What do you need to accomplish and when? What are the critical success factors? After setting goals, develop a task force to identify your city’s liabilities and assets. Make sure that the group is diverse and inclusive. Make sure that they have the authority to get critical information fast. How much electricity is being consumed off the grid each year? How much gasoline and diesel is being sold and burned locally each year? How much water is being consumed and how much wastewater is being produced? What are the growth trends?

Meanwhile, assemble a separate task force to start taking obvious actions that can save lives, save energy and save the planet. This plan can incorporate the audit results as soon as the information becomes available. Some easy action steps for most communities include the following:

Plentiful Parks: Parks are the “lungs of the city,” architect Frederic Law Olmsted famously said about New York’s Central Park. From the 500-year-old Giardino della Guastalla in Milan to downtown Houston’s new Discovery Green, parks provide both a place for harried city residents to take a deep breath, relax, and connect with nature, and a cooling counter to the heat-island effect created by all that asphalt. (Not to mention a buffer against flooding.) Green space has even been shown to improve physical and mental health.

Efficient Public Transportation: While commuters in Beijing, Dubai, and Lausanne, Switzerland, have shiny new metro systems to ride to work, transit authorities in Mexico City, Istanbul, and Los Angeles have cleared the way for buses by simply putting them in their own lanes. But whether they’re high-tech or humble, transit solutions that allow people to get around quickly and easily without a car are a key element to a green city. Electric vehicles and charging networks are gaining momentum.

Bike Lanes: While the density of cities makes them great in theory for getting around by bike, heavy traffic (and angry drivers) can make cycling unpleasant and even dangerous without designated lanes. The most bike-friendly cities create separated bike paths, provide parking (and even solar-powered showers!), institute bike-sharing programs, and allow cyclists to bring their bikes on buses for longer trips.

High-Profile Green Buildings: Showcase developments that seek to be the biggest, tallest, green building may get flak for their aesthetics or be seen simply as “window dressing” for governments and corporations seeking some green cred. But as long as they’re not all a city’s doing, a prominent, striking eco-friendly structure such as the San Francisco Federal Building or the green roof on Chicago’s city hall provides a very visible symbol of green intentions and draws attention to the latest technologies.

Comprehensive Recycling and Composting Programs: Yes, recycling is the classic individual environmental act, but it’s not much good without someone to provide conveniently placed bins and reliable collection. The greenest city initiatives are going further than gathering cans and bottles, by adding electronics and food waste to the list of items recycled and composted, and by instituting larger-scale programs to recycle water for industrial use.

Urban Forestry: Our urban forests are a vital part of the equation.

Trees Offer Big Benefits

• Minimize energy consumption by strategically placing more trees near residential and commercial properties to help us minimize energy use;
• Maximize tree placements along roadways, railways, and other open spaces to help offset carbon dioxide gases, while minimizing the heat-island effect in many urban areas;
• Promote urban agroforestry initiatives;
• Generate more oxygen, while minimizing air pollution;
• Create and preserve urban habitat for wildlife; and
• Use tree-planting events to help educate communities about carbon neutrality and energy management.

Mixed-use and Infill Development: Good planning is key to a green city. While other metropolises sprawl further and further out, Hamburg, Germany, is renovating its obsolete harbor into a walkable mixed-use neighborhood with office, retail, and residential space, while Sacramento, California, is giving new life to old alleyways. Such projects “recycle” existing space that’s already woven into the urban fabric, making them easy to get to and get around.

Green Leadership: Not every city official is going to be a “knight on a shining bicycle” like London Mayor Boris Johnson, who stopped an assault as he was cycling by. But government officials such as Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, former Austin Mayor Will Wynn, and the city council of Marburg, Germany, are heroes in their own right for cleaning up their cities’ sewer systems, promoting wind power and biodiesel, and making solar installations mandatory on new and renovated buildings. An active citizenry provides leadership from the ground up to prod or encourage politicians in the right direction.

Smart Energy Policies: Buying renewable energy and mandating efficiency measures are two ways a city can use its economic clout to help build a market for greener products while lowering its own environmental impact (and, often, operating costs). Phoenix, Arizona, for example, is boosting the amount of power it draws from renewable sources and constructing new city buildings to LEED standards, while San Francisco is building a big new solar array, Austin, Texas, is mandating home energy audits, and New York City is looking into offshore wind farms.

Good Green Fun: Going green shouldn’t be all work and no play, and the best green cities celebrate their eco-friendly lifestyles with farmers’ markets full of tasty (and unusual) treats, bars and restaurants serving the best organic fare, intriguing exhibits by ecologically minded artists, and music festivals that offer bike valet parking and solar-powered stages.

Sewage Management and Wastewater Reclamation: Sewage is the next frontier. Many cities are looking at wastewater reclamation and sewage sludge as assets. Unfortunately, both parts of the waste stream are liabilities that are being mismanaged now. It is a public health disaster and it is getting worse every day.

The largest prion pathway in the world is human sewage. Thanks to misinformation and mismanagement, cities are dumping tons of it daily on farms, ranches, forests, playgrounds, golf courses, parks, forests, and beyond. If you consider yourself a homeland defender, demand that the EPA and environmental protection agencies around the world update the risk assessments on the land application of sewage sludge, also known as biosolids. These agencies have been spreading pathogens and lies for more than 30 years. It has caused a public health disaster and an ecological disaster.

The EPA’s fraudulent risk assessments on wastewater reclamation and disposal of toxic sewage sludge are outdated and fail to account for radioactive waste, carcinogens, pharmaceuticals and more, not to mention a deadly and unstoppable form of protein known as a prion, which is shed from people with neurodegenerative disease via blood, saliva, urine, feces, mucus and other bodily fluids.

Wastewater reclamation is an even bigger threat to public health than biosolids/sludge. This illegal dumping of infectious waste is reckless and it’s contributing to a public health disaster, not to mention its contribution to the rapid spread of chronic wasting disease among deer, elk, moose, reindeer and other mammals. Neurodegenerative disease is the fastest-growing cause of death in the world. Sewage isn’t fuel, fertilizer or a safe source of drinking water. Unfortunately, it’s the source of deadly and unstoppable disease. Safer alternatives exist.

Learn how to make your city more resilient.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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As more people pack into cities, the environmental risks are growing—and so are the calls to make urban areas greener. What’s the best way to tackle this job? And how can leaders navigate the challenges?

Richard M. Daley was mayor of Chicago as it undertook an ambitious program to make the city greener. Here are edited excerpts of his remarks.

You have to ask, what’s your responsibility to the city? First of all, cleanliness. Picking up trash. After that, you start doing landscaping, basically planting trees, which is important to the air quality. You get people who have not worked involved in this effort through a re-entry program. You also have to explain why you’re doing it. When we started the effort in Chicago, the media said.

“Why are you spending this money on trees? You’re just beautifying the city.” You have to explain to them how environmentally important that is. Then you have to have the city lead by example. Usually, government mandates everybody else to do it and exempts themselves. We said, we’re going to start being a green government. All public buildings are basically built with the U.S. Green Building Council. We also have a green center of technology to educate developers, architects, engineers, contractors, trade associations and unions.

There’s also permitting. If you’re going to build green, give them a special permit to do that as quickly as possible. You also look at the water situation and conservation. The public doesn’t always understand sustainability, but they want somebody to lead it. And from my experience, we don’t have a national plan for the environment. It’s basically the city and the private sector or not-for-profits. And as you do all this, you need the business community to become your advisers and to work with them.

They have to be part of the solution, the same as with the not-for-profits and citizens. There always has to be that. Government cannot do all of it alone.

We should have a commission representing federal, state and local governments, and the business community. You would need a three-quarters vote to make decisions. And where does the money come from? Look at offshore profits that companies are making. Bring them back at a 5% tax. Then say that the companies are going to contribute 15% into an infrastructure fund each year.

At a national level, every company. And then X amount of money will come from local and state governments. You also look at the rules and regulations that are involved to see if you can save money there. Let’s say you’re doing a water and sewer project, not just in Chicago but including Indiana and Wisconsin. Let’s say one of those areas has certain laws, rules and regulations that cost more money than anyone else. Maybe it just costs more money and doesn’t get you better safety or better efficiency. So you can cut down the cost of the project by looking at that.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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The question isn’t an idle one. Urban populations around the world are expected to soar in the next 20 years, to five billion from more than three billion today. If the current rate of urbanization holds steady, cities will account for nearly three-quarters of the world’s energy demand by 2030. Most of the increase will come in rapidly developing countries like China and India; China’s cities alone will have to deliver water, housing, transportation and other services to 400 million additional urban dwellers by 2030.

So, cities aren’t going to have be made a little greener; they’re going to have to be rethought from the ground up. The goal: compact living environments that require less resources and that get the most out of the land, water and energy they do use. “There’s going to have to be new forms of energy, new ways of delivering energy and new forms of infrastructure,” says Warren Karlenzig, president of Common Current, a consulting firm on sustainable cities based in San Anselmo, Calif. “All this will be necessary to allow cities to operate the way they do now.”

It wasn’t long ago that the idea of a green city seemed absurd.

Cities were considered a blight on the environment: energy-hogging, pollution-spewing, garbage-producing environmental hellholes. But in recent years, they’ve begun to be seen as models of green virtue. City dwellers tend to walk more and drive less than their suburban counterparts, and dense urban development encourages transit use. Apartment living generally means lower per-household energy use. Building on these strengths, planners and developers are devising innovative solutions to meet urbanites’ energy, water, transportation and sanitation needs well into the future.

Some improvements are fairly easy, such as switching to energy-efficient LED lighting in buildings and streetlights, or setting aside bike lanes and widening sidewalks to encourage alternatives to driving (although such moves aren’t without political hazards, as a recent battle over bike lanes in New York shows).

Others are more ambitious, requiring new construction or even an extensive rebuilding of city infrastructure—consider what is needed to add a second set of pipes for a water-reuse system. Some of the most ambitious projects—and the greatest source of innovative ideas—are the dozens of “eco-city” developments in the works or on drawing boards around the world. Projects like the Songdo International Business District near Incheon, South Korea, are testing grounds for the latest in green technologies.

Green initiatives aren’t just found on blueprints for new cities.

Chicago, for example, has about 350 green-roof projects covering more than 4.5 million square feet. Of course, many of these initiatives can be expensive, with high up-front costs. Urban planners say savings from lower energy bills and other operational efficiencies can more than cover the added expenses, but the break-even point can be years out. Still, cities—unlike the average homeowner considering rooftop solar panels—can take a long view and make investments with a decades-long payback. So, how can cities—old or new—take green to a new level? Here’s a look at some of the ways.

District Heating In a typical office building, heating and cooling account for nearly two-thirds of total energy use. So an alternative to traditional electricity or natural-gas HVAC systems can go a long way toward making cities greener. One solution: tapping the excess heat produced by nearby utilities or industry. A network of pipes distributes the heat, which can be used for hot water, space heating and in absorption chillers to provide air conditioning in the summer.

These district heating systems are considerably more efficient—capturing up to 90% of the available energy—than in-building boilers. And they can tap any number of heat sources, including high-efficiency natural-gas turbines, large-scale solar thermal systems, biomass incinerators or furnaces in a steel mill. Common in Europe, high-efficiency district heating systems are being used in South Korea’s Songdo IBD and are in the plans for other eco-city developments.

Micro Wind Turbines The giant windmills that dot the countryside aren’t suitable for cities, where vibrations can rattle windows and the noise would be annoying. So developers are turning to microturbines. These small generators sit atop commercial or residential buildings and are designed to take advantage of the quirks of big-city wind patterns—lots of turbulence and frequent, sudden shifts in direction. The turbines are generally small, rated at one to three kilowatts each. But when installed in arrays and combined with high-efficiency solar panels, they can generate a large share of a building’s energy needs, especially when the structure is equipped with a full set of energy-saving features.

A handful of companies provide micro wind systems around the world, and the devices, while more expensive per kilowatt than bigger systems, have been installed at scores of locations, including PepsiCo Inc.’s Chicago office building.

Pumped Hydro Storage/Micro Hydropower Wind and solar power are notoriously fickle, producing more power than needed at some times and less than needed at others. A city that wants to rely on such intermittent sources needs to find a way to bank that power. One technique: pumped hydroelectric storage. When wind or solar power is plentiful, electricity is used to pump water to an upper reservoir; later, when power is needed, the water is allowed to flow downhill, turning turbines in the process. (The lakes have the added benefit as open-space landscaping.)

Large-scale pumped-hydro systems are increasingly used for storing energy, and many isolated towns rely on small-scale micro hydro plants to generate electricity. Adding a pumped-storage capability isn’t technically difficult, but it’s expensive, especially on a small scale, and current technology generally requires a large “drop,” or change in elevation to produce much power—though companies are working on lower-flow hydro turbines that can work in more level settings.

Walking and Biking When it comes to transportation, dense urban areas like Manhattan already have an advantage over suburbs: By packing people, jobs and services close together, they reduce the need for many car trips and provide the density to support bus and transit services. Green-city planners do even more, designing streets so that walking is safe, convenient and interesting—with wide sidewalks, landscaping and abundant crosswalks—and providing separate designated bicycle lanes. Songdo’s 1,500 acres are designed so that most shops, parks and transit stops can be reached in less than a 15-minute walk, and the city also has a 15-mile network of bike lanes.

Personal Rapid Transit Not every urban trip can be made on foot, bicycle or public transit. Cities can encourage greener auto choices by providing electric-vehicle charging stations in parking garages. A futuristic solution: personal rapid transit, or PRT—pod-like, self-powered vehicles that can carry as many as six passengers. The vehicles can travel along dedicated roadways, like an automated airport transit system, or on streets equipped with buried magnets. There are no fixed schedules or routes; passengers pick their destinations, and a central computer guides the car without intermediate stops.

Although still a novelty, PRTs are operating at Heathrow International Airport near London and at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Masdar City, an eco-city development in Abu Dhabi. Masdar, however, has put on hold plans to deploy the pod cars throughout the entire planned two-square-mile development.

Pneumatic Garbage Collection Even the greenest cities produce lots of garbage, which creates two problems: collecting the trash and getting rid of it. On the collection side, a centralized waste system, using an underground network of pneumatic tubes, can replace the fleets of trucks that block traffic, tear up streets and burn fossil fuels. The tubes can collect garbage from both households and outdoor trash bins and carry it to a centralized collection and sorting facility. Though some systems handle only food waste, others are set up to handle separate streams for paper and other recyclable trash. The systems are used in scores of cities world-wide; a pneumatic trash-collection system on New York’s Roosevelt Island has been in operation since 1975.

Waste to Resources Getting to zero waste is as important to cities as getting to zero carbon. This doesn’t mean just encouraging residents to recycle—cities also can deploy technologies to tap the energy and other valuable resources buried in the trash. Advanced anaerobic digesters process organic garbage waste and the sludge left over from treating wastewater to produce biogas, which can be burned for energy; more common in Europe, the technology is just being deployed in the U.S. for handling municipal garbage.

High-temperature plasma-arc gasifiers can consume nearly the entire waste stream, making a synthetic gas that is burned to produce electricity; the leftover slag can be used in building materials. One novel approach under consideration by the PlanIT Valley project, an eco-city development planned for northern Portugal: Aluminum cans are processed with water and energy, producing aluminum oxide and hydrogen, which can then be used to power fuel cells. But because aluminum oxide requires tremendous energy to make aluminum, it may be more economically feasible just to recycle aluminum containers.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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Cities in the Middle East are quickly emerging as world leaders in sustainability, especially in the areas of net zero energy and waste.

Population and economic growth due to the region’s oil reserves are the primary drivers in its aggressive push toward sustainability. With population expected to grow exponentially in the next 25 years, sustainable cities can offset their impact on the planet, while minimizing the planet’s impact on them.

Dubai Sustainable City. The ambitious Dubai Sustainable City project will begin construction in July 2013. The project has reportedly reserved 70 percent of the total space for green developments. Included in the development plan are villas, an environmental sciences university, a school, a commercial center, a shopping mall, a luxury hotel and resort, a planetarium and a grass amphitheater.

Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi has taken dramatic steps toward sustainability in its Abu Dhabi Environment Vision 2030.

The project will focus on developing and enforcing policies regarding sustainability issues such as climate change, clean air, reduced noise pollution, water resources, biodiversity, and waste management.

Masdar City. The first six buildings in Masdar City were completed late last year. Once the city is completed in 2025, it will host 40,000 residents and 50,000 commuters. The finished city is expected to be the new global leader in renewable energy and clean technologies. It has already earned many awards for its vision and progress.

Although Masdar’s striking design hoped to echo traditional Middle Eastern architectural style, Architect Norman Foster acknowledged that function was as much a factor as fashion. Abu Dhabi’s intense heat, that frequently tops 150 degrees, posed the biggest problem for energy efficiency. Foster studied methods used by ancient cities in the region to control climate. He then bolstered these techniques with modern technology, using solar power to make buildings and protected areas feel as much as 70 degrees cooler.

As these two sustainable cities in the United Arab Emirates gain the attention of the global green building community, we hope many more regions will adopt strategies for creating their own sustainable cities.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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Since its founding, the U.S. has seen its population steadily move from rural to urban environments: the 1790 U.S. Census reported a 95 percent rural to 5 percent urban ratio, the 1890 U.S. Census, a 28 percent to 72 percent ratio, the 2010 U.S. Census, a 20 percent to 80 percent ratio.

While urbanization has produced large-scale economic and community development throughout the country, it has also created challenges with water and sewage, air quality, vehicle traffic, energy systems, and natural resource consumption.

Architects, engineers, urban planners, government officials, academics, and community leaders have begun to develop a possible solution known as eco-districts.

An “eco-district” is a defined urban area in which collaborative economic, community, and infrastructure redevelopment is explicitly designed to reduce negative and create positive environmental impacts. Eco-districts were developed in order to scale the success of green building initiatives. By focusing on buildings and systems found within a defined district rather than an individual building, eco-districts are seen as the next step in reducing the environmental impacts of cities. Supporters claim that an individual building is not necessarily the optimal scale for water conservation, energy efficiency, and renewable energy creation systems, to name a few.

An eco-district, on the other hand, has the potential to accrue more significant benefits and savings from greater systems optimization and integration because of the larger yet manageable scale of a district. As the Portland Sustainability Institute puts it, “Districts are…small enough to innovate quickly and big enough to have a meaningful impact.” Currently, many U.S. cities are in the early stages of testing the viability of eco-districts, including Living City Brooklyn’s Gowanus project; five pilot projects in Portland, Oregon; Washington D.C.’s SW Ecodistrict.

While the term “eco-district” may be new to many, supporters view eco-districts as a part of a forward-looking continuum: from green buildings to eco-districts to eco-cities.

Though eco-cities are the longer-term goal, advocates of eco-districts presently view districts as more logistically possible than entire cities. And, equally as important, eco-districts are considered more politically possible than other initiatives such as a carbon tax or infrastructure redevelopment because they may not require major legal changes or federal spending.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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“To date, the trend towards urbanization has been accompanied by increased pressure on the environment and growing numbers of urban poor,” said the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Executive Director, Achim Steiner, at the launch of the report in Nairobi, Kenya.

“But unique opportunities exist for cities to lead the greening of the global economy by increasing resource productivity and innovation, while achieving major financial savings and addressing environmental challenges,” Steiner said.

The report, ‘City-Level Decoupling: Urban Resource Flows and the Governance of Infrastructure Transitions,’ argues that sustainable city infrastructures can sustain economic growth while using fewer resources.

Around three-quarters of the world’s natural resources are already consumed in cities, and the proportion of the global population living in urban areas is set to rise to 70 percent by 2050.

The study says much greater effort is needed to support new and improved infrastructure for water, energy, transport, waste and other sectors – generally located in and around cities – to wean the world off unsustainable consumption patterns, and avoid serious economic and environmental implications for future generations.

The report, which was produced by the UNEP-hosted International Resource Panel (IRP), features 30 case studies around the world that show how sustainable infrastructures have created scores of green jobs and reduced environmental degradation.

Fore example, in Melbourne, Australia, carbon emissions dropped by 40 per cent after the introduction of energy efficiency measures in public buildings, while in Cape Town, South Africa, an upgrade of low income housing with solar water heaters and efficient lighting has saved over 6,500 tons of carbon per year, cut respiratory illnesses by 75 percent, and reduced the cost of hot water for poor households.

Other efforts involve reducing oil consumption by moving more people and goods onto public transport powered by electricity, or re-establishing urban farms to supply locally grown food.

The cost of meeting the urban infrastructure requirements of the world’s cities between 2000 and 2030 is estimated at USD 40 trillion – both through the building of new infrastructure or retrofitting existing facilities, the report states.

“Older cities may have to retrofit and replace inefficient infrastructure into which they have been locked for decades to achieve decoupling, but newer and expanding cities have the advantage of flexibility. They can ‘get it right’ the first time,” said the Executive Director of UN-HABITAT, Joan Clos.

“In an era of rising energy prices, an early transition to systems that consume increasingly cheaper renewable energy sources will pay off quickly,” Clos said.

The report also provides recommendations for city planners to minimize environmental damage and maximize the potential for using resources more sustainably.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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Qatar unveiled plans to develop sustainable cities at the Middle East Arab Future City Summit, which opened in Doha yesterday. The summit will showcase sustainable technologies for urban development. Rashed Saed Al Naimi, Director, Al Rayyan Municipality inaugurated the event organized under the patronage of Municipality and Urban Planning at St Regis Doha.

Features of the Qatar National Master Plan which would be soon launched were discussed by Ali Al Khayat, Senior Urban Planning Researcher, Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning. The plan outlines spatial development plan for the cities, town centers and urban settlements. Its planning policies enable sustainable planning decisions and development applications, said Al Khayat.

The conference is held to discover environmentally friendly technologies, where many companies are showcasing their smart city solutions.

Qatar’s future development is dependent on its effective embrace of sustainable technology driven development strategies, says Sean Patrick O’Brien, Vice President, Urban Matters and Public Security, SAP.

Many high profile city leaders, urban planners, developers, sustainability experts and investors, along with the world’s largest technology firms are participating at the summit.

The event is a platform for the public and private sector to discuss the strategies and challenges involved in developing smart grids, integrated transport systems, sustainable buildings and ICT infrastructure.

Cities are becoming larger and more complex than ever, yet future cities will be cleaner, more sustainable, and will offer an enhanced quality of life to their citizens, explained Lynn C Reyes, Services Lead, Smarter Cities – Middle East and Africa Region, IBM Global Business Services, in her presentation on Smarter Cities for Smarter Growth.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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Never before have the world’s cities faced such a daunting combination of challenges, or required such technological creativity to solve them. Cities are at a crossroads. While 50 percent of the world currently lives in cities, by 2050 that figure will be nearly 70 percent.

Unless radically different ways of living emerge quickly, many cities will be environmental disasters, plagued by overcrowding, squalor, and disease. As it is, cities currently consume 75 percent of the world’s resources and account for a similar percentage of all CO2 emissions.

We Will Invest $350 Trillion In New Urban Development By 2040. Even More Spent On Regeneration and Retrofitting Existing Cities.

Avoiding ecological disasters and their impact on society is why the smart city movement has sprung up over the past decade. Though there is variation in how the phrase “smart city” is interpreted, broadly speaking it is about harnessing technology to transform urban infrastructure. The goal is to make better use of energy and resources and in doing so to improve the lives of citizens. A whole ecosystem of information technologists, social biologists, economists, engineers, urban planners, and many other experts from medical, manufacturing, and architectural disciplines have coalesced around a smart city vision that offers a radical new approach to urban living.

Governments and city officers everywhere are eager to see what this approach can do for them, not only in terms of the environment but also to help them better compete in the global battle to attract and create new businesses. In other words, this huge challenge is creating a business bonanza.

Examples of smart city projects around the world are plentiful:

• Amsterdam and San Francisco are using Urban EcoMap.org, an interactive Web service created by network equipment supplier Cisco that displays environmental footprints, broken down by postal code, in order to raise awareness and build community activity around emission reduction.

• In Cambridge, UK, the city council is looking at smart city applications for rubbish bin collection. The bins will send signals when full, and the collecting carts can plan the most fuel-efficient routes.

• Again in England, the Birmingham city council is working with IBM to develop a strategic decision-making tool to support citywide planning on future investment decisions. The city is one of a hundred Smart City Money Makers municipalities to which IBM is awarding a total of $50 million worth of technology and services in its Smarter Cities Challenge program. Says IBM: “The cities have been selected because of the strong personal commitment by each city’s leadership to put in place the changes needed to help the city make smarter decisions.”

• San Francisco has adopted one approach that might be followed by other budding smart cities: Its mayor has appointed a chief innovation officer, whose job is to make sure technology is a driver of change in city government. Numerous electorates in other areas are displaying much greater interest in what their local governments are doing to embrace smartness.

• In Rio de Janeiro, IBM has been working with city officials on a flood and landslide forecasting system, which includes a command center that integrates more than 20 city departments to improve emergency response management. IBM is working with 2,000 cities worldwide on similar systems.

• In Ethiopia, Siemens is helping create a sustainable urban locale called Masdar City, about 6 kilometers from downtown Abu Dhabi. By implementing a power grid combined with advanced building technologies, Siemens, along with MIT, GE, BASF, and other partners, aims to create the cleanest city in the world. These projects typify the smart cities trend. Andrew Comer, director of environment and infrastructure at consulting engineering firm Buro Happold, says:

“A key aim is to develop cities that are able to exploit technology and create infrastructure networks that are linked together. This integrated approach will enable greater increases in efficiency and reduce demands on natural resources.”

But as Volker Buscher, director, smart cities, at global consultancy Arup, points out: “Every city has its own context, and no single approach will transform each one into a smart city.”

The Technological Basis of Smart Cities Smart cities deploy advanced information technologies to monitor and respond to every aspect of city life in ways that minimize carbon emissions and maximize quality of life.

Smarter Cities

Built on a smart infrastructure grid that senses and responds to the environment in a continuous feedback loop without human intervention, these cities offer the potential to regulate and optimize our energy usage, our traffic movements, our communications, and our ways of doing business. If, for example, a building is generating more heat than it requires or is using more water than its cooler system provides, sensors detect the resource overflow and automatically divert it to other buildings via the urban grid.

Utility suppliers will play a central role in smart cities, with smart metering of water and energy consumption used to gather data that can automatically trigger more efficient usage. Transport systems will also be in the vanguard, with, for example, traffic sensors reacting to temperature changes, directing sand trucks to icy areas or ambulances and police to crash zones.

Currently, a smart city infrastructure is based in part on readily available and relatively low-cost technologies – smartphones, broadband wireless Internet, netbooks and tablets, and smart meters – that improve sharing of data and information. But we are heading toward much greater interconnectivity among many different systems. The goal is an urban nervous system that exploits advanced sensor technologies to feed information to a central “brain,” which then controls fundamental aspects of the city’s behavior and energy usage.

Smart City Technology Innovators

There isn’t a major information technology, engineering, or architectural company in the world that isn’t involved at some level with smart cities. Companies like IBM, Accenture, Siemens, Cisco, Foster, Arup, Gehry, Oracle, O2, Ericsson, Arup, Buro Happold, and many other global names – all have dedicated departments involved with multiple national and local government agencies.

Says Andrew Comer of Buro Happold: “It’s been estimated by Booz & Company that $350 trillion will be spent on new urban development over the next 30 years – and then there’s the regeneration and retrofitting of existing cities as well. If only a small percentage of it is spent on technology the market is huge, hence the interest from the big IT firms.”

ABI Research believes the global market for technologies that support and enable smart cities will grow to more than $39 billion in 2016 – nearly quadrupling the level of $8.1 billion in 2010.

In the Municipality of Paredes in northern Portugal, Living PlanIT, a firm specializing in software solutions for smart cities, plans to build a city of the future by 2015. The company’s Website states: PlanIT Valley will combine intelligent buildings with connected vehicles, while providing its citizens with a higher level of information about their built environment than has been possible previously. Its efficiency will extend into the optimum control of peak electricity demand, adapted traffic management for enhanced mobility, assisted parking, and providing emergency services with the capacity to have priority when needed in the flow of traffic.

Once completed, PlanIT Valley will serve as a “living laboratory” and showcase for the solutions created by Living PlanIT and its partners. Steve Lewis, founder and CEO of Living PlanIT, became involved with property development in 2004 and was shocked by the inefficiencies of real estate and construction. He studied engineering and manufacturing processes in the aviation and automotive industries, and came up with insights that underpin his company’s approach to building smart cities.

The Living PlanIT platform is the Urban Operating System (UOS), which supports middleware, networked sensors, and applications created by Living PlanIT and its partners for city environments. Lewis, who’s worked at IBM and Microsoft, believes he can use this technology to build office blocks for 35 percent less than the present rates. He sells the smart city concept to real estate developers by highlighting the increased property values that will follow. He estimates that $15 trillion will be spent on IT in retrofitting existing cities over the next 15 to 20 years.

Lewis explains that this growth is being accelerated by machine-to-machine, or M2M, networking. Far more robust than the current Internet, this kind of smart-city infrastructure can be relied upon to transfer highly sensitive and complex data without the risk of losing connectivity. Lewis compares the move to M2M to the transport transition from horses to steam engines. Living PlanIT’s business model is partly predicated on licensing apps to developers and corporations, which then incorporate them into their own operations. After six years in business, Living PlanIT claims annual sales exceeding £1.5 billion (more than US$2 billion).

Obstacles to Smart City Deployment

According to Volker Buscher of Arup, on a scale of 1 to 10, we are probably only at level 3 or 4 down the smart city route. There’s a whole host of issues and barriers to be overcome, including a lack of political impetus and leadership; difficulty getting machines to talk to each other; and the central issue of funding. Many of the trial projects that prove that smarter cities can deliver improved outcomes have included substantial funding from research. The financial and commercial models that would justify investment from government and other sources are still largely missing.

While new smart cities understandably attract much of the media limelight, states Martin Powell, head of urban development at Siemens: “The real challenge is looking at the existing big cities and retrofitting them. This is much trickier.”

The infrastructure of established cities, of course, complicates the processes involved in laying down smart grids. Many more groups and individuals are party to the development, and not all of them wish to cooperate, for a variety of reasons. Politicians may listen to the objectors more than to the advocates. And as Powell says: “The thinking in creating smart cities has to be long term, but politicians often have more short-term priorities.”

Dave Fitch, a smart cities consultant at Dere-Street Research, who has worked on some of the major smart city projects in the UK, says that it’s essential that politicians have a vision of where they want cities to go: Technological leadership will not develop a smart city – we need a vision of what we want from our future cities, which means clear policies on issues such as cars versus public transport. Too often, infrastructure and change management are dirty terms… And sometimes people at the top aren’t equipped to take these decisions, or they fear their decision-making will be challenged by the radical changes that smart cities deliver to their citizens.

Another major challenge to be overcome is data privacy. Andrew Comer at Buro Happold says there are serious questions to be asked about governance of smart cities: Who owns the data generated and gathered through the smart grids? Who can use it? What security and safety measures are put in place? And who benefits – is it the private investors who fund the infrastructure, or the citizens or the municipality? Ideally, all should benefit, and those benefits will be significant if we can get it right.

The potential for systemic privacy infringement is a concern that smart city planners are addressing. Steve Lewis at Living PlanIT, for instance, claims his company has found a way to electronically “cloak” users of smart-city networks. Some might fear that techniques like these could mean putting cities at the mercy of proprietary systems. But spokespeople from Siemens, IBM, and other vendors say that succeeding in the smart cities field will require cooperation.

“Open architecture is the direction of travel,” says Rick Robinson, an IBM executive architect. He compares the integration required for smart city technology to integrating Websites in the early days of the Internet.

Steve Lewis shares a similar view: The old way of “screw you, this is the system” can’t be the way forward. It’s got to be an open-data format. Of course we have trade secrets – it’s how we earn. But trying to stuff one system down other people’s throats does not allow inclusivity or future integration, and that’s essential to the interoperability smart cities rely upon.

Advocates of smart cities also point to the problem of fusing infrastructure with technology – where infrastructure has 100-year life spans and technology only a few years. Comer says it will be necessary to design smart-city infrastructure in a modular fashion: It requires an approach that allows cities or developers to “unplug and replace” systems – a capability for “unhooking” whole parts of networks or systems and replacing them with new models that are more efficient.

Smart Cities Need Smart Money

The biggest challenge to smart city deployments may be funding. Some analysts have questioned the smart city business model, claiming that several developments to date are vanity projects with no visible return on investment. Planet Valley in Portugal is at least a year behind schedule because of the collapse of the bond market in 2007/8; and Masdar has also experienced funding problems. Both projects, however, have put these stumbles behind them, and Lewis and Powell both detect a strong appetite from lenders, despite the global recession. “Banks like risk, and smart cities offer a range of different risk levels,” says Lewis.

But Comer points to the creation of value in hard monetary terms as still a major obstacle: There is no evidence yet of return on investment. If we cannot answer the ROI question, we are expecting investors to take risks in a climate when risk is still not a particularly attractive option. Smart Cities should be able to operate on reduced operational costs, and there should also be other benefits, such as spinoff industries on the back of access to large data sets, asset value-protection through greater resilience and future-proofing, etc. All those things should generate value – but we need the evidence, and, as a consultant, it is our role to provide that evidence – but at the moment it’s a step-by-step process.

Smart cities are gathering momentum, but it may be awhile before that propels the many projects now underway into a general move toward more innovative and future-focused urbanization.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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A survey of North American cities by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the Global Cool Cities Alliance found that confronting the challenges of extreme weather, adapting to a changing climate, and improving the health and resiliency of urban populations are driving cities to develop and implement strategies to reduce excess urban heat.

Nearly two thirds of the cities surveyed cited local extreme weather events as a key reason for initiating urban heat island mitigation strategies.

“U.S. cities are waking up to the growing threat of urban heat and employing a number of innovative approaches suited to their location and priorities,” said ACEEE researcher and report author Virginia Hewitt. “Our report will help local planners adapt these practices to even more communities across the country.”

ACEEE and GCCA surveyed 26 cities in the U.S. and Canada representing all of the major climate zones, geographies, and city sizes. Despite the diversity of the respondents, several common themes emerged. Local governments are “leading by example” by requiring use of “cool” technologies, such as reflective roofs on municipal buildings, lining city streets with shade trees, and raising public awareness. Additionally, more than half of the cities have some kind of requirement in place for reflective and vegetated roofing for private sector buildings. Almost every city had policies to increase tree canopy and manage stormwater.

By addressing their urban heat islands, cities are more effectively delivering core public health and safety services, making them attractive places to live, work, and play.

The report includes case studies on how several cities have responded to urban heat, demonstrating the variety of strategies employed. In response to a study that found that Houston’s roofs and pavements can reach 160⁰F, the city now requires most flat roofs in the city to be reflective. After an extreme heat wave in 2008, Cincinnati lost much of its urban canopy, and instituted an aggressive forestry plan. Washington D.C. has instituted a wide suite of programs such as Green Alleys, which helps residents manage excess stormwater by replacing pavement with grass and trees, and requiring reflective roofs on all new buildings.

Most city governments are not acting alone to reduce excess heat.

States, neighboring jurisdictions, utilities, developers, contractors, and local building owners are collaborating to create incentives for communities to reduce urban heat and mainstream these practices.

“We recognized a number of years ago that keeping New York cooler was an important part of protecting public health and becoming more resilient. We started with cool-roof volunteer programs that raised awareness and understanding, while coating 5 million square feet of rooftops. These voluntary efforts led to the cool roof ordinance requiring investments in reflective roofs on certain buildings,” said Wendy Dessy of NYC Service.

Greener Cities is a division of Crossbow Communications. Greener Cities is a resource for sustainable and resilient cities and communities around the world.

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