The world’s top 10 urban innovations
Healthy, vibrant, and green communities are one of the major goals outlined in Smart Prosperity’s newly released report.
Success means making the most global progress in building livable, sustainable, modern communities over the next decade. We envision that by the 2020s, Canada’s cities and rural communities will rank among the world’s most improved on metrics of sustainability and livability. There are already examples all around us of progress on this front.
In 2015, the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Cities developed a list of the 10 best examples from around the world of cities creating innovative solutions to a variety of problems:
- Digitally Reprogrammable Space
As urban populations grow in limited spaces, the focus in many cities is shifting to better, multi-functional uses of infrastructure to get more from less.
From New York’s famed Highline (pictured above), to Toronto’s Corktown Common, a lush park and community meeting space on a former brownfield, to the potential held by advances in digital buildings, cities can find success by reprogramming their spaces to get maximum value — for people and nature.
2. Waternet: An Internet of Pipes
With costly water losses from leaking pipes of 25% to 30%, some municipalities have turned to cloud-based solutions to connect pipes to the Internet of Things.
Smarter water management systems can improve flood control and rainwater collection, and identify blockages or leaks before major damage occurs, leading to both environmental and economic savings. A new MIT pilot project using sensors to monitor viruses and pathogens in sewer pipes holds potential for outbreak detection and prevention, and the measurement of health policy effectiveness.
3. Adopt a Tree Through Your Social Network
Trees are a great way to engage citizens in environmental efforts, and offer climate, air quality, and stormwater management benefits.
The Australian city of Melbourne encourages its residents to support urban foliage through its Urban Forest Strategy, which covers over 70 000 trees. All trees are tagged in a database, where citizens can adopt them, name them, track their growth and carbon offsetting, and share with their social networks. Each tree even has its own e-mail address!
4. Augmented Humans: The Next Generation of Mobility
Cities are increasingly recognizing that making pedestrian and bicycle commuting easier can lead to reduced congestion and pollution.
From increasingly popular bike-sharing programs, to new pedestrian bridges and paths, to the imaginative Foster+Partners SkyCycle London concept, the potential advantages of safer and hassle-free biking and walking are evident.
5. Co-Co-Co: Co-generating, Co-heating, Co-cooling
Co-generation (power + heat) is shifting to tri-generation and quad-generation systems that also take on cooling and use captured CO2.
The city of Toronto unveiled the first municipally-owned trigeneration system in 2007, providing heat, power, and cooling to the Enercare Centre at Exhibition Place. The project provides an energy reduction of 7,400 tonnes of equivalent CO2 emissions — lowering costs and increasing energy security.
6. The Sharing City: Unleashing Spare Capacity
Sharing homes (e.g., Airbnb), cars (e.g., Zipcar), and other products (e.g., Streetbank) is becoming increasingly popular, and cities are moving toward shared facilities and clustered services to get more from less.
Ottawa-based car sharing company VRTUCAR was founded in 2000, with one car and four members. Today they serve thousands in Ottawa, Gatineau, and Kingston allowing flexibility for their users and environmental advantages through reduced pollution — representative of the growing global sharing economy.
7. Mobility-on-Demand
Digital information and communication technologies, combined with self-driving vehicles, can manage traffic more efficiently and reduce congestion and pollution.
Such tools are already emerging, such as New York City’s HubCab–a transportation tracking tool aimed at reducing commuting congestion, decreasing vehicle emissions, and dramatically lowering the cost of mobility infrastructure.
8. Medellin Revisited: Infrastructure for Social Integration
Medellin, Colombia, shows the potential for infrastructure and urbanism to be used as a tool for social development.
A renewed focus on constructing modern libraries in cities in Canada and around the world is illustrative of this ideal. Halifax, Nova Scotia has recently constructed a highly acclaimed new library to serve as community resource, gathering place, and beacon of sustainability.
9. Smart Array: Intelligent Street Poles As a Platform for Urban Sensing
The anticipated conversion of four billion street lights to more energy-efficient LED lights offers the opportunity to add sensing technologies that collect data on weather, pollution, traffic, and parking.
Cities around the world such as Edmonton, Alberta are accelerating plans to convert traditional streetlights to LEDs to reduce costs, lower GHG emissions, improve safety, and a slew of other benefits.
10. Urban Farming: Vertical Vegetables
One way to reduce food waste is to grow food on consumers’ doorsteps, with roofs, walls, and parking lots filled with stackable, soil-less hydroponic systems.
One example is Montreal’s Lufa Farms, who built the world’s first rooftop commercial greenhouse in 2011. Through innovation and technology, they are striving to change the way cities eat — growing food sustainably, where people live — and envision a city of rooftop farms.
Source: Global Agenda Council on the Future of Cities (2015)
Smart Prosperity is a brand new Canadian initiative aimed to build a stronger and cleaner economy. The initiative is backed by a broad group of Canadians from all parts of society (business, resources, cleantech, youth, Indigenous people, researchers, environmental groups, labour organizations).
To learn more, please visit www.smartprosperity.ca
