Smart cities key to solve climate change

Smart Cities: A Solution to Climate Change For a growing number of businesses, collaboration between companies and even industries is critical to success. Respected Harvard professor Amy C. Edmonson and journalist Susan Salter Reynolds team up to show how one creative startup exemplifies this new, intensely interactive form of leadership in Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016). The following excerpt about the potential of smart cities has been excerpted from Chapter 1: ”Building the Future.” Cities as Problems, Cities as Solutions Historically, cities have gotten a bad rap. Cities are resource hogs. Higher average living standards in cities compared with rural areas translate into greater energy use and higher per capita carbon emissions. Cities are responsible for roughly 70 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions but house only half of the population. The city as physical or moral cesspool is an engrained postindustrial image. Here urbanization and squalor go hand in hand. In part this notion is a true depiction of rapid, unplanned growth. Vast population increases at the edges of so-called megacities give rise to health hazards, desperate places, shantytowns replete with environmental risks, and crime, often in the shadow of affluent suburbs. The favelas of Brazil provide vivid examples. As many have noted, global urbanization brings a host of challenges. The UN World Economic and Social Survey 2013: Sustainable Development Challenges report calls for a “transformation of the energy system,” particularly in cities: To achieve this energy transformation together with food and nutrition security, sustainability of cities, and other development goals after 2015, large-scale investments will be needed. Such investments will require sufficient levels of supply of long-term financing, and they will have to be carried out both by public actors through increased public expenditure and by the private sector, which will depend critically on creating the right incentives for investments in sustainable development. Well-Developed Cities Showcase Sustainable Development A recent study comparing data from 100 cities in 33 nations showed that cities without well-developed public transportation had dramatically higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Denver, for example, weighed in with twice the greenhouse gas emissions per capita (21.5 tons) of New York City and even Shanghai. In his popular albeit controversial 2010 book, Green Metropolis, David Owen makes the case that cities are, in fact, an ecological way to live because they boast density, which means less driving compared with suburban communities. Economist Edward Glaeser makes a similar point in Triumph of the City. Both books fairly gush about the social, economic, and environmental virtues of cities. A growing chorus of voices conjures the city as a sparkling solution to environmental ills, with images of silent transportation gliding along, energy-producing architecture in harmony with the environment, and landscaping both beautiful and edible. Open space, places to walk and play. Cafés everywhere. Green parks. Bicycles. The Emerald City. Interest in smart sustainable cities has grown as people in different sectors investigate pieces of the urban population boom puzzle. The idea that humans are the problem, long a tenet of the environmental movement, has shifted a bit to make room for a vision of people as problem solvers. Despite substantial differences in beliefs, strategies, principles, and methods, most agree that an explosion in the apparent need for cities offers a clear, if challenging, opportunity for getting it right, for building cities that are viable and dynamic, exciting and green, and hotbeds of innovation and efficiency. Smart Urbanization Peter Calthorpe, a founder of the Congress of New Urbanism, an organization promoting sustainable, walkable, mixed-use urban communities, and the author of Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, has written that “urbanism is the foundation for a low-carbon future,” and the most cost-effective solution to climate change, even more so than renewable energy. Urbanism allows us to do more with less. Calthorpe’s eponymous urban design firm, Calthorpe Associates, was named one of the 25 “innovators on the cutting edge” by Newsweek for its work redefining models of growth in America. “Good urbanism,” Calthorpe maintains, is defined by “three basic principles”: One is human scale, which has to do with designing public spaces around the pedestrian rather than the car. Ironically, human scale can exist in incredibly dense places, like Manhattan, or in relatively low density places, like the historic centers of our rural towns. . . . Diversity is another key ingredient of urbanism . . . you have to have a range of uses mixed together, you can’t isolate housing and shopping and employment into separate zones. . . . You [also] need a diverse population — you can’t isolate age groups, income groups, and family types. . . . The third principle, which wasn’t historically part of urbanism, is conservation and restoration. These principles — human scale, diversity, and conservation — are not at odds with smart technologies but rather are complementary strategies for improving urban livability and resource use. Meanwhile cities are widely recognized as engines for economic growth and innovation. Today only 600 urban centers generate about 60 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP). Tokyo, with its 35 million people and nearly $1.2 trillion in economic output, ranks among the world’s top 15 economies, larger than the nations of India and Mexico. Cities encompass the largest and fastest-growing concentration of natural resource consumption and are, consequently, a logical place to focus sustainability efforts. Taken together these perspectives — viewing cities as solutions that foster livability, sustainability, and innovation — have laid a foundation for smart-city innovation.