Posts Tagged ‘Sustainable Cities’
10 Actions by Mexico City to Address Climate Change
Posted in Events, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on November 22nd, 2010
Sustainable Cities Net: Posting from the UCLG Congress in Mexico City 18-25 November
The City of Mexico launched their publication “10 Actions to Address Climate Change” here at the Dome on Friday night, with the assistance of a range of guest speakers including Pedro Miranda, Head of Siemens One. Siemens have sponsored the publication, which outlines programs the City has implemented over the past 4 years to reduce GHG emissions. These actions include:
- Transport Corridors / Zero Emissions Transport Corridor
- ECOBICI Individual Transport System
- Minibus and Taxis Replacement Program
- Metro Line 12
- Sustainable Housing Program
- Solar Energy Use Regulations
- Mexico City Goverment Enviromental Management System
- Green Roofs Program
- Recovery of the Rivers Magdalena and Eslava
- Restoration of Ecosystems and Compensation for Maintaining Environmental Services
Download the publication in Spanish and English. We had the opportunity to ask Pedro Miranda some questions after the presentation, and the videos will be hosted at http://www.youtube.com/siemens
Based on our time here over the past week, the ECOBICI appears to be well-established, and there’s a Ciclovia here in the city on Sundays – people were being “fitted” for bicycles as we travelled to the World Mayors Climate Summit early this morning.
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Sustainable Cities Net: posting from Mexico City
Posted in Events, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on November 18th, 2010
Centro Historico, photo: K Archdeacon
On behalf of Sustainable Cities Net, I (Kate) am attending and blogging on the United Cities and Local Governments Congress and the World Mayors’ Summit, held this week in Mexico City. The content will appear here and also on a site created by Siemens, who provided a similar service at COP 15 and will do so at COP 16 next month. Over three thousand delegates from around the world will attend the presentations from city mayors on the pressures and responses they meet in their own city. The opportunity to expand the discussion and learn about pressures, models, scales, successes and failures in other cities is unique, and the material from Sustainable Cities Net and Sustainable Melbourne will make its way into my perspective and reports. Bloggers from other countries will be there too, so keep an eye on all the sites for a diversity of opinion!
About the Congress & Summit:
The UCLG Congress – The Local and Regional Leaders World Summit – is organised every 3 years and it brings together over 3000 local and regional elected representatives and practitioners from around the world.
Since its creation in Paris in 2004, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) has worked to make the voice of mayors and local and regional officials heard, in order to guarantee that cities and regions take their rightful place in the international community. The cities and regions, including their inhabitants, that we work for, are being faced with stark challenges from global phenomena and events that demand individual and collective action from local authorities, such as: climate change, shared sustainable development, financial crises, dialogue between cultures.
The Local and Regional Leaders World Summit, November 18 – 21 in Mexico City, which will bring together mayors, presidents of regions, local elected officials and their partners, will be an unprecedented occasion for exchange and debate on the role of local governments in development and in the efforts for greater between citizens and also between cities and regions.
The World Mayors Summit on Climate (WMSC) will be held on November 21, 2010 in Mexico City, so that mayors from different regions of the world can sign a voluntary Pact (the Global Cities Covenant on Climate “the Mexico City Pact”) that sends a clear message to the international community on the strategic importance of cities in the struggle against climate change.
http://www.uclgcongress.com/
(UCLG English programme, Spanish programme, French programme,)
http://www.wmsc2010.org/
(Programmes on the site)
To follow the posts from the Summit follow or bookmark this link, http://www.sustainablecitiesnet.com/tag/mexico-city/.
We will be posting regular Sustainable Cities content as well, so keep adding your articles and photos!
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Sustainable Cities: Challenges for the Asia Pacific – Series podcast from ABC.net.au
Posted in Opinion, Research, Sustainable Cities by Rob Eales on November 16th, 2010
This series of podcasts from 2008 from ABC Radio, Radio Australia. It discusses the challenges of cities in the Asia Pacific region with a broad range of local and regional participants. It discusses transport, infrastructure and livability along with community and identity, how they are defined, exist, can be planned for as well as how they affect the fabric of cities.
It is still current and thought provoking, with the local participants providing a broad range of technical, historical and cultural viewpoints from across the region.
http://www.abc.net.au/ra/podcast/cities/podcast.xml
Food! Slow Food! – A visit to the Salone de Gusto biennial
Posted in Events, Models, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on November 12th, 2010
 Salone is a rare coming together, an opportunity for the stewards of the world's food biodiversity, to share and market their wares. (Photo credit: Bernard Pollack) | The endless aisles of Slow Food‘s biennial Salone del Gusto, held at the massive Lingotto Fiere building in Turin, are laid out like a map of the world, albeit skewed a bit towards the land of Caesar. Imagine your favorite farmers market and then multiple that by 100. It’s hard to know where to start and it’s even harder to know where to end. Cheese maker next to apricot grower next to caper forager next to oyster farmer. After a few days, directed grazing becomes sort of like a game of memory. Was that table offering up incredibly sweet almonds in the Spain section or somewhere in Africa? And did you see those ingenious butcher-case containers, developed by cattlemen from Italy, with a shoulder of rare breed cow along with a leek, carrot, celery and peeled garlic all ready for a busy family to become a stew or roast? And wasn’t it great that the Mexico section included mezcal distillers and cocoa growers, offering up both sips and chocolate nibs, a very fortunate pairing of food biodiversity? American craft brewers like Dogfish Head and Rogue were pouring samples a short walk from small-batch beers from the United Kingdom and Germany, as well as an impressive display of micro-brews and micro-spirits from every corner of Italy–apparently the new wave of brewers and distillers ain’t just limited to Brooklyn and Boulder. |
Future biodiversity – The role of cities and local authorities
Posted in Models, Research, Sustainable Cities by Kate Archdeacon on November 10th, 2010
Source: Stockholm Resilience Centre
Image: AcidFlask via flickr CC license
Slowly out of the shadows by Sturle Hauge Simonsen
Cities demand a stronger voice in curbing global biodiversity loss.
It has yet to receive the same acknowledgment as climate change, but putting the breaks on biodiversity loss is becoming increasingly important on the political agenda.
Reports state that continuing biodiversity loss is predicted, but could be slowed (pending required policy choices) and a Stern review-like report on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) has given natural assessments a significant boost.
Better frameworks, please
As countries strived to carve out the careful wordings for a ratification of the Convention on Biological Diversity at the COP10 in Nagoya, cities and local authorities used the momentum to boost their own role in managing biodiversity.
Their message is clear: Give us a better policy framework and we will unfold the local potential to protect global biodiversity.
As the world turns increasingly urban, with more than five billion people projected to live in cities by 2030, it is becoming increasingly recognised that cities are important role players in halting global biodiversity loss.
A world class revolution in the making? Sydney’s clean energy plan.
Posted in Sustainable Cities, Visions by Rob Eales on November 1st, 2010
Source: The Fifth Estate
Image: pierre pouliquin via flickr CC license
From Sydney’s clean energy plan could be a world class revolution in the making by Boris Kelly
A packed house at Sydney Town Hall on Monday 25 October heard Alan Jones, chief development officer, Energy and Climate Change for the City of Sydney, declare his aim to transform Sydney into a carbon free city reliant on 100 per cent renewable energy, in a plan that has been lauded as potentially one of the world’s “great revolutions”.
The purpose of the event, part of the City Talk series, was to update the community on progress of Sydney City Council’s 2030 Sustainable Sydney plan.
The plan has set a target of reducing carbon emissions by 70 per cent by 2030, but Jones went further, suggesting that with the addition of bio-gas to power the City’s proposed trigeneration plants, the magic 100 per cent could potentially be achieved.
In his introduction to the event, leading climate scientist Tim Flannery called the City’s master plan “one of the great revolutions that we are seeing around the world.” In a video recorded interview Flannery told the audience: “You won’t know Sydney in 10 years time. The sources of energy will be utterly transformed and this is being done by the City of Sydney because there is no other organisation that can do it. The City has access to the land and the services.”
Read the rest at The Fifth Estate
Retro-Fitting Suburbia: TED Talk
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on July 16th, 2010
Source: TED
Images above: Suburban retrofits contribute to sustainability in a variety of ways, most of which are manifest at Belmar in Lakewood, CO. It replaces an auto-dependent, private mall with an urban, walkable, and bus-served mix of uses and public spaces. It provides a range of housing types, diverse architectural styles, and variety of cultural activities, including but not limited to shopping, with the intention that it function as a downtown. It also uses green bonds to finance rooftop photovoltaics and a small wind farm.
Ellen Dunham-Jones fires the starting shot for the next 50 years’ big sustainable design project: Retrofitting Suburbia – dying malls rehabilitated, dead “big box” stores re-inhabited, parking lots transformed into thriving wetlands. Ellen Dunham-Jones teaches architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is an award-winning architect and a board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism. She shows how design of where we live impacts some of the most pressing issues of our times — reducing our ecological footprint and energy consumption while improving our health and communities and providing living options for all ages.
Dunham-Jones is widely recognized as a leader in finding solutions for aging suburbs. She is the co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs. She and co-author June Williamson share more than 50 case studies across North America of “underperforming asphalt properties” that have been redesigned and redeveloped into walkable, sustainable vital centers of community—libraries, city halls, town centers, schools and more.
Watch the TED talk.
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Cities and their Regions: Catalysts for Change
Posted in Events by Kate Archdeacon on June 9th, 2010
The Golden Jubilee Congress of the Eastern Regional Organisation of Planning & Human Settlements (EAROPH)
Congress Objectives and Philosophy
The main theme of the Congress is the impact of population change related to climate management and the associated issues that are being debated at an international level including infrastructure planning, water security, renewable energy and sustainable tourism. The conference aims to draw these themes together to allow debate about their impact on the Asian Pacific rim. The key purpose of the conference will be to focus the various opinions presented by international speakers into a forum that allows for policy directions coming from the Congress to be directed to the EAROPH Executive, the Planning Institute of Australia and all spheres of Government within the region.
Local Government Caucus
A parallel session to be hosted by the Lord Mayor of the City of Adelaide, The Right Honourable Michael Harbison, will be conducted at the Town Hall on Wednesday, 3rd November 2010 to allow visiting Mayors and Executive Local Government Staff to address the topic of Leadership as a Catalyst for Change within the region. It is proposed that the Lord Mayor will lead a forum of speakers during a morning session that will focus upon the need for strong leadership at a Local Government level to address the impacts of growing cities on environmental sustainability through ‘green initiatives’. The afternoon will be devoted to inner-city inspections of buildings and sites devoted to the principles of sustainability. The conducted tour will be undertaken on the World’s First Solar Electric Bus, “Tindo”.
Student Forum
On Sunday, 31st October 2010, the combined Universities of Adelaide, Flinders and South Australia will come together to present a forum for students and young professionals. The objective of this forum is to provide a platform for students and young professionals to raise issues and concerns related to congress themes. The guest speakers will include those delivering keynote addresses to the Congress. The forum wil be facilitated to enable students and young professionals to focus on the topics from their perspective and learn from each other.
October 31 – November 4, 2010
Adelaide, South Australia
Visit the website for registration and further information.
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Communicating Visions: Designing Sustainable Cities
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 2nd, 2010
By Rasmus Brønnum, Sustainable Cities (Denmark):
New media always transforms the way we communicate. Now, it’s not that we havn’t seen moving-pictures before, but the fact that architects have begun to produce short movies presenting how they think, work and define architectural qualities, is something new and still-to-see from a lot of firms. In this case the issue is sustainability presented in, not one, but three fast shifting projects.
Watch the new shortmovie “Designing Sustainable Cities, three aspects – three plans“ from the danish architect office Vandkunsten.
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The Future of Personal Transportation in Megacities of the World: Study
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on March 29th, 2010
Source: University of Michigan Transport Research Institute via Going Solar Transport Newsletter
Image: Real-time Bus Map by kecko via flickr CC
From “The future of personal transportation in megacities of the world” by Luoma, J., Sivak, M., Zielinski, S.
Summary:
This study examined the future personal transportation in megacities of the world. Of particular interest was the future role of personal vehicles. To span ranges of geographical, political, and economic factors, the following 15 megacities were included in the analysis: Chicago, New York, London, Moscow, Paris, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Sa?o Paulo, Bangalore, Calcutta, Delphi, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. The current and future values of the following factors were considered: population, wealth, level of motorization, public transportation, and modal split. Also discussed were selected urban transportation plans and strategies.
Based on the analysis, projections through 2025 were made for each megacity for changes in ownership of personal vehicles; distance traveled per capita by personal vehicle within inner core, for commuting, and for leisure; and for number of road fatalities per capita. The forecasts include the following:
• The largest increases in personal vehicle ownership will occur in the four Indian megacities and Shanghai.
• There will be no increase in the use of personal vehicles for inner-core transportation in any of the megacities.
• No increases are expected in the use of personal vehicles for commuting. • The largest increases in the use of personal vehicles for leisure traveling (and the largest increases in road fatalities) will take place in Shanghai, followed by the four megacities in India, Rio de Janeiro, and Sa?o Paulo. Overall, no substantial decrease in the reliance on personal vehicles is foreseen in the next 15 years anywhere in the examined megacities. To the contrary, an increased role of personal vehicles is forecasted for the megacities in India, China, and Brazil.
The above trends are based on treating the different transportation modes as independent and exclusive options. However, there is growing implementation and use of new mobility networks—integrated networks that provide a variety of connected and IT-enhanced transportation options door-to-door. Although such networks are expected to reduce the reliance on personal vehicles, the magnitude and nature of this effect remain to be ascertained.