10. Bogotá, Colombia: In recent years, Bogotá has drastically improved its reputation, moving from a city plagued with organized crime and poverty to one that is renowned for its green living and sustainability. The capital city of Colombia boasts an efficient public transport system, more than 1,100 urban green spaces and hundreds of miles of bike trails.

It also greatly improved its air quality and water supplies.

9. Hamburg, Germany: Hamburg, winner of the 2011 European Green Capital designation is busy developing its city to bring it in align with sustainable standards, and it’s this change that’s earned it a place in the list. Hamburg is currently redeveloping 388 acres of industrial land to make way for shops, parks, housing and other essential amenities.

8. Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm took the title of the European Green Capital back in 2010 for its outstanding commitment to sustainability. Its carbon emissions are impressive, the average for a European city is 10 tons per capita, however Stockholm produces only 3.4 tons. It’s also famous for the fact that over 40 percent of the city is made up of green spaces.

7. Copenhagen, Denmark: Copenhagen has built up a reputation as being a worldwide leader in the efforts to combat climate change. It’s also renowned for its bicycles. With nearly one third of residents primarily using their bikes to get around the city – this number is expected to increase to 50 percent by 2015.

6. Curitiba, Brazil: Curitiba is undoubtedly the green capital of Brazil, with over 1,000 green spaces, 14 forests and 16 parks it’s no surprise it has made this list. A whopping 70 percent of the city’s waste is recycled and even has flocks of sheep in its parks and green spaces to keep the grass under control.

5. Portland, Oregon: Portland was the first city in the USA to take on a climate change action plan and it has plans and laws in place to ensure that the city stays within the limits so the rural land is only preserved for agricultural uses. It also has an excellent reputation in terms of its commuters with over 25 percent of its workforce either traveling by public transport, bicycles or carpooling.

4. Vancouver, Canada: Vancouver has high hopes that it will become the world’s greenest city by 2020. The city is famous for its innovative clean techniques, for example it has solar powered trash compactors which are the same size as a regular bin but can hold up to 5x more rubbish, meaning fewer pick-ups for the bin men and therefore lower emissions. It also has a vast amount of renewable sources available meaning it can draw an impressive 90 percent of its power from these green technologies.

3. Malmö, Sweden: Malmö is the proud owner of one of the largest energy parks in the world and it boasts an abundance of green space as well as a vast variety of green technology solutions. The Western Harbour in Malmö is completely powered by renewable energy from the sun, wind, hydropower and biofuels. Even the city’s buildings are green, constructed using sustainable materials they’re specifically designed to be as energy efficient as possible.

2. San Francisco, California: San Francisco has been at the forefront of sustainable living for many years, in 2007 it became the first US city to ban the use of plastic bags, this has saved over 100 million bags from being thrown into landfill each year. It also started a comprehensive recycling program in 2009 and so far has managed to save 77 percent of materials from ending up in landfill – making it the most successful program in the United States.

1. Reykjavik, Iceland: Reykjavik in Iceland has taken the top spot, and rightly so as it’s a city completely powered by renewable energy. The city is surrounded by geothermal activity which can then be converted into clean energy.

The plan for Reykjavik is for the city to be completely independent by 2050, having no reliance on fossil fuels at all.

The city currently uses hydropower and geothermal activity to provide hot water, electricity and heat for the city.

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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The tangled web of international organizations that constitutes global governance has become so remote and ineffective that few count on it to deliver results anymore. Now, after decades of turf wars and self-marginalization, international organizations must rally around sustainable urbanization.

The world is undergoing an unprecedented and irreversible wave of urbanization, with the share of the global population living in cities set to reach 60 percent by 2030. But rapid urbanization is driving up industrial fossil-fuel consumption and household water consumption, and is increasing demand for food in areas where arable land is scarce.

The current urbanization trajectory is not sustainable.

But existing efforts to alter the situation remain woefully inadequate. While the United Nations General Assembly has tasked its agency for human settlements, UN-Habitat, with promoting sustainable urbanization, the agency lacks the influence to ensure that this vital issue makes it onto the global agenda.

Moreover, international development players–including UN agencies, NGOs, corporate citizenship programs, and other charitable organizations–rarely coordinate their activities, even though their interventions are increasingly concentrated in densely populated cities.

Given that promoting sustainable urbanization and improving coordination would bolster progress in other priority areas (including women’s rights, climate change, youth unemployment, and literacy), sustainable urbanization must become a bureaucratic priority. And it must be complemented by a technological disruption, with investments channeled toward developing and distributing innovations that would make cities more livable, efficient, and sustainable.

In fact, many useful innovations, such as energy-generating building materials and zero-emissions transportation, already exist; they simply need to be made accessible to those who need them most. Devices like small-scale water-filtration systems, portable heart monitors, and low-cost tablet computers are already dramatically improving the lives of the world’s poorest citizens and helping to level the economic playing field.

The future impact of global governance rests on forging new alignments that facilitate the flow of vital knowledge and technologies from an increasingly diverse array of sources to urban populations worldwide. The tools needed to make urban life more sustainable are no longer flowing only from North to South and West to East. China has taken the lead in exporting solar photovoltaic cells, while clean-tech parks are arising even in the Arab world.

Governments, companies, supply-chain managers, corporate-citizenship strategists, NGOs, and others should commit to reducing their carbon footprints and to leveraging their resources to contribute to sustainable urbanization. Opportunities to make such contributions are appearing constantly across all sectors.

In construction, for example, contractors are forming partnerships with labs to test materials that better reflect heat while absorbing energy to power cooling systems, and utility companies are leveraging new software tools to deploy smart meters in homes and offices. Two US cities–New York and Seattle–have raised efficiency standards for new construction to record levels.

Similarly, automobile manufacturers, mobility-services companies, and local governments are working together to advance sustainable transportation by providing incentives for efficient non-ownership of vehicles. Now, carpooling is gaining prevalence in cities like Berlin.

Furthermore, MIT has developed the foldable electric CityCar, four of which can fit into a parking space. At last year’s Rio+20 conference, the eight largest multilateral development banks pledged $175 billion (5.2 trillion baht) to develop sustainable transportation.

Information technology can also reduce stress on the transportation system. For example, Singapore is harnessing its near-complete fiber-optic network to reduce urban congestion by introducing a spate of measures encouraging workers to telecommute. As these measures take effect, self-sufficient satellite towns will likely develop, reducing transportation-related energy consumption further, while fostering a more active civil society.

Singapore is leading the way in another area as well: Production and distribution of potable recycled water. Many cities worldwide are following its example, expanding their water catchment and treatment programs.

Meanwhile, vertical farm experiments–which aim to augment urban food supplies by cultivating crops in skyscraper greenhouses–are proliferating from the American Midwest to Osaka, Japan. And India has become a leader in converting biomass and food waste into energy.

Of course, the billions of farmers and villagers worldwide should not be forgotten. Interventions like rural electrification, the provision of drought-resistant seeds and agricultural technology, and the expansion of micro-insurance are vital not only to rural populations’ welfare, but also to catalyze a new ”Green Revolution,” without which city dwellers will face severe food shortages.

With new, innovative solutions appearing every day, the real challenge lies in bringing them to scale–and that requires international cooperation. But the ”smartest” cities are not necessarily the most technologically advanced. Rather, they are the places where technology and public policy support citizens’ welfare and aspirations. This crucial fact will guide discussion at the New Cities Foundation.

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 e-commerce siphons an ever-larger portion of retail sales, what keeps businesses and consumers congregating at shopping malls?

For Simon Property Group, the largest real estate company in the world with approximately 326 retail properties in North America and Asia, at least part of the answer is tied its innovative sustainability agenda.

By testing groundbreaking new energy-efficiency and waste-management processes, for example, the mall operator hopes to encourage successful retailers to take up residence because their operating costs might be lower in a Simon Property than elsewhere.

“These systems range from very simple to very complicated, but the common theme is how can we make it easier for our tenants,” said George Caraghiaur, Simon Property Group’s senior vice president of sustainability.

Energy management systems have been installed across a large portion of its facilities, which cover a massive 245 million square feet. Daylight harvesting technology helps handle tasks such as turning lights on and off when appropriate, while telematics applications are being deployed to help malls automate their cooling and heating settings according to ever-changing variables, such as outside air humidity. The team also is evaluating its demand-response options, in order to earn price breaks when utilities face peak load situations.

Managers can access all of the data that Simon Property collects so they can compare consumption to other sites.

Aside from what it can do for tenants, Simon Property seeks to attract the sort of shopper who cares about his or her individual environmental footprint. One demonstration is its substantial investment in electric-vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, meant to help assuage lingering range anxiety associated with EVs.

“Malls are somewhere between work and home, so it’s a natural place to put them,” he said. “If people come to the mall, they will spend time here.”

Caraghiaur is the first to acknowledge that some programs Simon Property is trying are challenging and unproven, which is one reason the company lets individual property managers take the lead when tackling new initiatives. But two ongoing pilot programs make it clear the company is willing to take risks.

In North Carolina, for example, the Concord Mills outlet mall has created a dedicated “Plastic Room” where a hydraulic baler is used to compress clear packaging materials such as shrink wrap, garment bags and other shipping materials generated by the local retailers and notoriously difficult to sort out. Local partners pick up the 160-pound bales at regular intervals for recycling.

Over the past six months, 140 retailers at the Concord Mills site have helped the mall staff collect about 20,000 pounds of materials, diverting it from landfills, according to Caraghiaur.

One big challenge was figuring out where to install the baler and store the bales.

“Most malls are designed to house tenants and make the shoppers’ lives comfortable, but they are not necessarily configured to make it easy to do recycling,” he said.

The plan is to collect a year’s worth of data to document costs versus benefits. That information will be used to identify other locations where similar projects might be feasible.

“Our goal is to learn what issues we will face,” Caraghiaur said. “In the end, we will take the lessons learned and apply them elsewhere.”

Simon Property has been aggressive in installing charging stations as a perk for EV drivers, placing about 100 systems at more than 40 properties so far, mirroring EV adoption trends.

It hasn’t stopped there: Its location in Carmel, Ind., agreed in early 2013 to test a first-of-its-kind system developed by several technology companies, including Toshiba, Duke Energy, ITOCHU Corp., Tom Wood Automotive Group and Indiana’s clean tech program, called Energy Systems Network.

The fast-charging system relies on 10 kilowatts (10 kW) of solar generating capacity and it comes with an integrated, 75-kW battery from Toshiba to store that power, so the chargers still work when it’s cloudy or after dark.

Simon Property doesn’t charge for usage. Instead, Caraghiaur said, it views the chargers as an amenity for shoppers who happen to be parked at the mall.

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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City mayors, development planners, and civil society representatives met on Monday in Antigua, Guatemala to kick off the 43rd Organization of American States (OAS) General Assembly to discuss challenges linked to rapid urbanization in the Americas and exchange best practices for the sustainable development of cities and communities.

Participants also discussed priority areas for cooperation on urban sustainability ahead of the 7th World Urban Forum in Medellin, Colombia, in 2014.

The public roundtable discussion on the theme Building Sustainable Cities and Communities in the Americas: From Demonstration Projects to Scale was hosted by the Spanish Agency for International Development (AECID) Cooperation Training Center in Antigua and jointly organized by the Department of Sustainable Development of the OAS and the Permanent Missions of Guatemala and the United States.

The meeting took place in the context of the Sustainable Communities in Central America and the Caribbean initiative, which was launched in 2012 under the framework of the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA) with support from the U.S. Department of State. This initiative supports the implementation of 14 community-level demonstration projects in the following priority areas:

• Clean energy and energy efficiency;
• Resilience to natural disasters;
• Sustainable transport solutions; and
• Waste management and recycling (including electronic waste).

Ambassador Carmen Lomellin, U.S. Permanent Representative to the OAS, emphasized the need for collective action to address shared challenges and invited all OAS member states to contribute to future collaboration on urban sustainability through the OAS. She noted that the roundtable provided an important opportunity for dialogue that facilitates the exchange of lessons learned and best practices in urban design and planning.

Ambassador Lomellin pointed to the Sustainable Communities initiative as an example of fruitful cooperation under ECPA.

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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Cities around the world are under pressure. Budgets are tight. Growth is necessary. Demands and costs are escalating. Extreme weather is taking its toll. Efficiency and sustainability are priorities, but where should they start to balance the moving pieces? Civic leaders have a new resource in the fight to achieve prosperity and

sustainability. More than a dozen top technology firms have formed the Smart Cities Council to provide cities with tools and best practices that can guide them in the right direction and save them time and money.

Operating under the theme “Livability, Workability, Sustainability,” the Council has gathered the world’s foremost firms in areas such as smart energy, water and transportation. These firms, which make up the Council’s Steering Committee, include Alstom, AT&T, Bechtel, Cisco, Electricite de France, General Electric, IBM, Itron, Microsoft, National Grid, Qualcomm, and S&C Electric.

In addition to lead partners, the Council’s associate partners include ABB, Alphinat, Grid2020, Invensys, MaxWest Environmental Systems, Opower, and Zipcar (a division of Avis).

According to Itron, the Smart Cities Council was formed to help address the unprecedented challenges facing the world’s cities, including accelerated population growth and constrained resources. The council aims to equip city leaders with fresh approaches to policy, governance, development and technology that enable long-term livability, workability and sustainability. Of course, resilience is an important part of the equation as well.

“People have built communities around energy and water for ages. Past generations have extracted more energy or more water to accommodate growing populations. This is simply not possible given the scale and urgency of today’s challenges. We must be more strategic, more resourceful and more innovative than ever before,” says Russ Vanos, Itron’s senior vice president of strategy and business development.

Mayors and city leaders can tap into this global hub to develop a comprehensive and collaborative road map for their city, to gain advice on the most effective ways to move forward, and to compare notes with like-minded leaders.

“All over the world, rapid urbanization is putting enormous stress on city resources and infrastructure,” explained founding Chairman Jesse Berst. “Cities are at a crossroads; many are nearing the point at which they could easily become overwhelmed by issues related to crime, congestion, and public health and safety. To prevent this, cities can use smart technologies to not just manage problems, but to usher in a new era of prosperity and sustainability.”

A “smart city” uses digital technology to deliver better, more efficient services to its citizens. It enables access to information via data collected from devices and sensors that are embedded in roadways, energy and water infrastructure, buildings and more. For example, smart power and water grids improve efficiency and reliability, as well as provide customers with detailed information to help them reduce their bills. For another example, a smart transportation network optimizes multi-modal travel throughout the city with real-time bus updates, taxi locations, and the ability to reserve parking spots.

Thousands of smart city projects are underway around the globe, but major hurdles remain.

Cities have significant questions and challenges with regard to the four chief barriers of technology, financing, policy, and citizen engagement.

Smart City Guide

The Council was formed to lower these barriers to adoption through education, outreach, and tools for cities. One of the Smart Cities Council’s first initiatives is the development of the Readiness Guide, which will launch as a beta version at the 81^st Annual United States Conference of Mayors next month.

The Readiness Guide will be the first collaborative and comprehensive vision of a smart city. It will provide city leaders with a conceptual technology roadmap to address growth strategies in an effective and systemic way, focusing on key issues such as energy, transportation, water, and public safety. The content of the Readiness Guide is greatly influenced by the expertise of the Council’s partners, as well as its Advisory Board, which is made up of independent experts from research, academia, and advocacy.

“Far too many cities are undertaking individual projects without an overall plan, and without considering the ways that different departments can share costs and data,” noted James Whittaker, Executive Director of the Smart Cities Council and a principal in Mercator XXI, a co-founder of the Council. “For the best results, it is essential to have a comprehensive, holistic vision — yet no such help exists today. The Readiness Guide is the first-ever collaborative, comprehensive resource.”

The Council also has initiatives underway to address financing, policy, and citizen engagement. To accomplish these important but challenging tasks, the Council has marshaled the world’s leading authorities. “It takes an ecosystem to build a smart city,” said Berst. “We salute our member organizations. They have demonstrated that they are not just leaders in innovation, but — equally important — in collaboration.”

The Smart Cities Council is comprised of the foremost experts and leading global companies in the smart technologies sector, who serve as advisors and resources. Its goal is to accelerate the growth of smart cities worldwide by providing city leaders with access to financial tools, policy frameworks, visibility campaigns, and advocacy.

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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