Posts Tagged ‘integration’
Making Cities Flow: Integration & Infrastructure
Posted in Models, Opinion, Research by Kate Archdeacon on March 3rd, 2011
Source: Forum for the Future
Image: fsse8info via flickr CC
From “How to make a city flow” by Matt Kaplan & Anna Simpson:
Cities never really sleep. Even in the small hours, before commuters surge from their homes onto the roads, the things they need for the day ahead are travelling to and fro: groceries from the countryside; water down the pipes; electrons through cables; news down the wire.
In many cities, all this ebb and flow is like a relay race without proper teams: there’s no real coordination, and so the baton keeps falling between the runners. The people responsible for public transport don’t speak to the ones distributing the food; the energy providers don’t communicate with the information experts. Delivery vans make a one-way trip and come back empty; leftovers from the canteen travel, at best, to composting sites, and at worst, to landfill – while fresh and processed food is brought in from far away.
The daily frustrations of city dwellers asides, this failure to think and plan across different sectors means we waste everything from energy, food and water, to money, time and space – all critical resources that no city with a burgeoning population has to spare. By 2040, two in every three people on the planet will be living in urban areas, and providing them all with the bare necessities – never mind a seat on the bus – will be a huge challenge.
It may seem a way off yet, but less than 30 years isn’t much time in which to make major changes to infrastructure that – in some of the bigger cities – has been around for centuries. Where do we start, and whose job is it anyway? In an effort to help get things started, Forum for the Future has launched ‘Megacities on the Move‘, a new initiative in partnership with the FIA Foundation, Vodafone and EMBARQ (the sustainable transport centre). It’s set out six key priorities for action to ensure the smoothest flow of people and resources.
[...]
Read the rest of the article by Matt Kaplan & Anna Simpson – the section reproduced here is less than a quarter of it!
—
Harvesting the wind – integrating existing energy structures with new
Posted in Models by fedwards on June 3rd, 2009
This article, Harvesting the wind, was originally published by Suzanne LaBarre on 13 May 209 on the Metropolis website. It demonstrates an innovative model to integrate existing powerlines with wind energy. An alternative version of distributed systems perhaps? The full article can be found here.
Harvesting the wind
From the window of a TGV hurtling through France, the countryside flattens to a smudge—electrical towers rise and recede in clusters, and tall, lanky wind turbines seem to whip off pirouettes like a young Moira Shearer. Most passengers turn their heads, nodding off on a neighbor or burying their noses in Le Monde, but for a triÂumvirate of young designers, the sight is a view of the future. The passing turbines and pylons augur a new way to harness renewable energy in a country that relies almost entirely on nuclear power. “When we’re riding on the train, we al-ways see pylons, and some turbines too,†NicÂola Delon says. “We say, ‘Both are here. Can’t we mix them together?’â€
TransLink – Vancouver Transport Governance
Posted in Models, RDAG by Kate Archdeacon on December 5th, 2008
This governance structure attempts to coordinate and achieve balance between different modes so that they are integrated.
