The 2012 TED Prize is awarded to….the City 2.0.

The City 2.0 is the city of the future… a future in which more than ten billion people on planet Earth must somehow live sustainably. The City 2.0 is not a sterile utopian dream, but a real-world upgrade tapping into humanity’s collective wisdom. The City 2.0 promotes innovation, education, culture, and economic opportunity. The City 2.0 reduces the carbon footprint of its occupants, facilitates smaller families, and eases the environmental pressure on the world’s rural areas. The City 2.0 is a place of beauty, wonder, excitement, inclusion, diversity, life. The City 2.0 is the city that works.

The TED Prize grants its winner $100,000 and “one wish to change the world.” How will this prize be accepted on behalf of the City 2.0? Through visionary individuals around the world who are advocating on its behalf. We are listening to them and giving them the opportunity to collectively craft a wish. A wish capable of igniting a massive collaborative project among the members of the global TED community, and indeed all who care about our planet’s future.

Individuals or organizations who wish to contribute their ideas to a TED Prize wish on behalf of The City 2.0 should write to tedprize@ted.com

The wish will be unveiled on February 29, 2012 at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California. On a Leap Year date, we have a chance, collectively, to take a giant leap forward.

http://www.tedprize.org/announcing-the-2012-ted-prize-winner/

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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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Post Carbon Fellow Rob Hopkins was one of the speakers at the recent TEDGlobal 2009 conference in Oxford, UK. Among the other speakers at the event was UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

From the TED blog report:

Hopkins says that our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability. We will not have oil forever. For every five barrels we consume, we only gather one. There are 98 oil producing nations but 65 have already passed their peak. “Is our brilliance and creativity going to evaporate?” he asks. The answer he gives is no, but he says that our options have to be realistic and mentions that climate change scientist have an increasingly terrified look in their eyes.

He asserts that our society seems to have the idea that technology will solve everything, pointing out that this idea is always popular at TED. But, Hopkins says, we can’t create new lands and energy systems at the click of a mouse. There are still people mining coal, as we speak. We live in a world of real constraints and demands. Energy and technology are not the same thing.

Hopkins outlines the qualities of the transition response: viral, open-source, self-organizing, solutions-focused, sensitive to place and scale, learns from its mistakes and is a joyful process. It’s not about winning the argument, he says, it’s about changing the climate. Transition depends on the idea of resilience, which he thinks is a more useful concept than sustainability.

Sustainability wants the supermarket to be more energy efficient, while resilience questions the vulnerability of depending on the supermarket.

Read the full TED Blog report.

TED Fellows may apply or be nominated by another individual. Please follow this link to apply. To nominate a candidate, email fellows@ ted.com. The program will accept applications for fellowships from March 6, 2009 through April 3, 2009.

For more information the TED Fellows program visit http://www.ted.com/fellows.