Green Urban Communities: Are We Ready?

Stockholm has managed to create a highly reliable bicycle system and bicycles have become part of everyday city life.

Cities can be the solution to climate change because their urban density presents a more efficient use of infrastructure and a greener way to live. As they grow, leveraging this advantage, while minimising unintended consequences of pollution and congestion is critical. The right long-term planning and investment choices made by cities now will improve people’s lives, create jobs, improve competitiveness, spur economic growth and mitigate climate change in the future.

Attractive, green urban communities located at public transit nodes can be designed anywhere in the world that combines office, residential and retail use. These mixed-use developments match density to transit capacity, rewarding city-dwellers with less expensive and more environmentally-friendly options while improving their quality of life. Experience has shown that merely providing density adjacent to public transit nodes isn’t enough--Effective policy changes such as, mandating reduced maximum car parking for homes rather than a minimum (which is unfortunately still the case in most cities in emerging markets) will also be needed to avoid perverse impacts.

Urban communities could largely power themselves and It’s possible for adoption to happen virtually overnight. More than a million gleaming solar hot water collectors now decorate the residential rooftops of Rizhao, a city of nearly three million inhabitants located in China’s Shandong province. More than 99 percent of Rizhao households power their hot water and space heating from this renewable energy source. Rizhao has cut its per capita carbon emissions by half compared to a decade ago, and its energy use by one-third.

Vauban Solar Settlement and business park in Freiberg Germany creates more energy than they consume and earn 6,000 euros per year for their residents.

Besides pushing for higher energy efficiency standards in new and existing buildings, cities can be retrofitted with fuel cell-powered cogeneration systems that generate electricity and re-purpose waste heat at the district level. By using high-efficiency, triple-effect absorption chillers, waste heat is supplied to buildings for space heating and water heating or to generate chilled water for air conditioning. Buildings that receive their energy supply from district cogeneration systems don’t require their own HVAC systems or boilers, resulting in efficiencies of up to 40 percent.

Cites in emerging markets have the potential to leapfrog the transit paradigms established in previous centuries by adopting new technologies and business models. Bus rapid transport (BRT), a term that refers to modern bus systems with dedicated traffic lanes, is a great starting point for cities to inexpensively develop a mass transit infrastructure. In Brazil, Curitiba has roughly three and a half times less car travel per person than a car-dependent city such as Brasilia, because of its extensive BRT system. With the drop in battery storage costs, buses can switch to electric to provide more efficient, green and quiet public transportation. With the astronomical rise in car ownership in cities in emerging markets (Number of vehicles in Mumbai up 50% in last 5 years), investment in BRT will have to be complemented by government policies that disincentivise car ownership. [also see my earlier post on Low Carbon Mobility]

Delhi Metro has eased some of the traffic but the city is yet to fully adjust urban planning to maximise the benefits

Most cars in cities sit idle 90 percent of the time or more, hogging space and providing little value. Urban planners can reduce parking spaces, introduce such disincentives as electronic road pricing, and place a quota on car purchases that aren’t electric. This enables alternative bike, scooter and car-sharing programs to sprout, providing a competitive array of accessible options to dart around a city. For example, the motorcycle-sharing service GO-JEK has become a crucial workaround in traffic-clogged Jakarta. Autonomous cars should be approached cautiously, as they may result in greater emissions.

Most of our cities that we presently inhabit today have grown organically and naturally to meet market demands. This has been a linear process and indeed most of the engineering systems that serve us are simple linear processes. Input-process-output and waste. Rarely is there any real crossover of these systems or sharing of resources. For example, rarely is the city’s power plant placed near the sewage plant despite the fact that as a by-product of sewage processing methane is produced which could be used directly to generate power and heat (where needed) for the community.

Source: Herbert Girardet, “Towards the regenerative city”, World Future Council, 2013.

An alternative model that has been put forward by people such as Herbert Giradet is that we should view our cities more as holistic metabolic processes which are integrated and linked, sharing wastes and resource to maximise efficiencies and minimise waste production (and costs).

This will require a new multiprong holistic approach to the development of the city. Are our city leaders and urban planners ready?