| Street Talk |
What Innovation-technological or otherwise- would make any city a substantially
more liveable place?
Scientific American put this question to urban leaders and their readers. Here's what they said
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Urban Face-lifts
A total makeover. Cities are responsible for about 80 percent of carbon pollution. In Sydney we have decided to reduce our carbon emissions by 2030 by 70 percent from 2006 levels through decisive action taken now to retrofit our central business district using various technologies.
The innovation here is not the technology itself but its application at the scale of a city. A series of master plans will create low carbon zones accross the city, with co-located trigeneration energy systems (combining power, cooling and heating), recycled water treatment, and automated waste collection/utilization. And although individually these ideas and technologies are not new, bundling "green infrastructure" together in this way-and at city scale-is an Australian first.
In Sydney our energy comes from coal-fired power stations located more than 200 kilometers away. Our ultimate goal is to take city off the national electricity network. We are looking at 70 percent of our electricity coming from local, decentralized energy and the remaining 30 percent from renewable-energy technologies. Interim reports sugest the tri-generation network alone could cut greenhouse gas emissions in city buildings by 40 to 60 percent, avoiding some of the high costs of transporting electricity from the country to the city, as well as reducing the need to upgrade the grid to cope with the future demand.
-CLOVER MOORE, lord mayor of Sydney, Australia |  |
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Cell-Phone Paradise
Communication is at the heart of the future. A future city would need to respond to people on a personal level. Our cell phones can become devices that are able to open the door to our home, pay our bus and subway charges, make purchases at any store with a tap and a password, and give us unfettered access to the internet.
-CRAIG BRAQUET, Long Beach, Calif |
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Sustainability Lessons
Public transportation has to be a priority and include, for daily commuting, small, nonpolluting cars integrated into a "public transporation system," as Paris did with the Velib bicycle-sharing scheme. Second, people need to get involved with sustainability by using fewer cars, separating recycle gargabe at home, living close to work or working close to home, and teaching children about sustainability. Children are phenomenal agents of change.
-JAIME LERNER, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, which implemented, during Lerner's first tenure in the early 1970s, an innovative transportation system that has been imitated worldwide |
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Wires of Light
It's time for cities to bring fast, reliable fiber-optic broadband to every home and business. When people gave up the old phone modem for the cable modem, that spurred a revolution in our economy and even in the way we interact with one another. The much greater speeds enabled by fiber will do even more. They will create a platform for new innovations and allow urban residents to invent things we can't even imagine today. Fiber-optic broadband is a missing piece in creating a more liveable and prosperous city in the 21st century.
-MIKE McGINN, mayor of Seattle |
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Lockdown for Gridlock
You could collect data from different kinds of sensors-cell phone signals, surveillance signals, carmounted [radio frequency identification] tags, and so on and then create some algorithm to change traffic-light timing to prevent gridlock, help buses move more efficiently and let people know where to park their cars.
-CHARLES D.LINN, writer, editor and architect |
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A Place to Put Your Head
In Vancouver homelessness has erouded the city's "livability". I would like to see forms (emphasis on the plural) of housing that appeal to the homeless-forms that they will use. This undertaking will necessarily address the root causes of their issues. Those afflicted by mental health, poverty, substance abuse and joblessness and runaways make up this population, and we cannot subject them to a one-size-fits-all approach. A place to put your head in safety and comfort-if it isn't inalienable right, it ought to be one. If our citizens are healthy and productive the rest falls into place.
-JAY PELTON, Vancouver, B.C. |
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iCities in the Desert
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| ...continues |
| Source: Scientific American |
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