The June 2012 issue of Conde Nast Traveler explores what actions Mayors, like Melbourne’s Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, are taking to help cities adapt to climate change in the article “Hot Times in a Cool City.”

Australia is a land of weather extremes. Events that used to occur at widely spaced intervals are now coming with a frequency we’ve never seen before. Over the last decade, we’ve experienced extreme drought in Melbourne and hard to ration water, and then almost overnight the drought broke and for two years we’ve faced dreadful flooding,” says Lord Mayor Doyle.

To help his city adapt to cases of extreme weather, Lord Mayor Robert Doyle is chairing C40’s recently launched Sustainable Urban Development Network- a group of urban leaders who are deploying replicable, scalable solutions for building the next generation of “green” cities.The network will work to share best-practices and develop a blueprint that can be used by cities to build their own sustainable communities.  

Lord Mayor Doyle also shared the City of Melbourne’s sustainability goals being implementedas the Rio+20 summit approaches. He explained:

Our goal is to be a zero net emissions city by 2020. We initiated an ambitious program of retrofitting 1,200 commercial buildings to reduce energy use. We’ve just hit the 200 mark. Our Docklands project, which is drawing citizens to the waterfront, will set a new standard for environmentally responsible development. We are also working with other cities to develop a blueprint for sustainable living.

Watch the Lord Mayor’s interview with the C40 News Team here.

This two-year, $6.9 million project will ultimately return a savings of $1 million a year to the city as electricity use is cut by about 6.4 million kilowatt hours (kWh) a year and water consumption falls by about 53,300 kiloliters per year. All told, these efficiencies will add up to reduce the City’s carbon emissions by more than 12 percent.

How do these massive savings happen? In some cases, it’s as easy as switching out old lights for new energy efficient bulbs. In others, some buildings will receive new heating and air-conditioning systems and specialized systems to manage the electricity use of computers. Water-saving devices like aerated tap and shower heads will help reduce water usage.

“Our approach is to show by doing – we’re showing you can cut bottom line costs and seriously reduce your impact on the environment. It’s a win-win,” said Lord Mayor Clover Moore in a press release issued by the City of Sydney.

You can read more about the City’s project here.  

From the release:

"Measurement and reporting underpins the local action driving C40 Cities leadership in addressing global climate change," says Jay Carson, C40 Executive Director. "As such, the community protocol represents the interests, needs and challenges of C40 Cities."

C40 Director Mike Marinello noted that the pilot is being launched one year after the initiative was announced.

"In June of 2011, at the C40 Cities Mayors Summit in Sao Paulo, we announced to the world that we would develop a way to standardize and harmonize GHG emissions measurement and reporting," said Marinello. "Less than a year later, C40 and our partners are delivering on that promise, demonstrating that there is a will for concrete action on climate change in cities around the world."

The pilot launch is the next step in a rigorous and collaborative process which included the release of a draft standard for public comment in March.

Read the full press release on the announcement here.

“The C40 is proud to join the community of expert institutions on K4C. C40 Cities are committed to taking meaningful action grounded in research to mitigate and adapt to climate change, which aligns wholly with the goals of the K4C,” said C40 Director Mike Marinello.

The K4C platform is intended to provide coordinated support to cities in addressing climate change issues, particularly those in developing countries, and is a response to the rapid development of recent research and knowledge in this field. C40's participation in the K4C recognizes the wealth of climate actions in C40 cities and the analytical lens C40 has applied to those actions -- specifically, in the creation of core research documents, "CDP Cities 2011: Global Report on C40 Cities," authored by KPMG, and "Climate Action in Megacities: C40 Cities Baseline and Opportunities," authored by Arup.

K4C aspires to become a comprehensive, online collection of information on the topic of cities and climate change, providing:

• Updates from the field on cities and climate change
• The sharing of best practices
• Facilitating exchange of innovative initiatives
• An online portal containing advanced search tools and an interactive map

C40's organizational profile on K4C and core research documents can be accessed here. 

Two weeks ago, the big picture of New York City’s green building efforts became a little clearer. Until now, a building owner, an architect, a consultant, a student, a policymaker, or anyone interested in learning what New York City was doing with buildings needed to delve through numerous City agency websites to find information, all the while finding it difficult to grasp the big picture of how these efforts were making a collective impact on the City’s sustainability goals. Even City employees had a hard time connecting agencies’ efforts. Facilities managers and other individuals complying with various regulations, such as benchmarking under the city’s comprehensive Greener, Greater Buildings Plan would have to research disconnected web pages jam-packed with information, yet difficult to navigate.

Recognizing these challenges, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability and the Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications, with input from various City agencies and other organizations, created the PlaNYC Green Buildings & Energy Efficiency (GBEE) website, available at www.nyc.gov/gbee. GBEE is the latest one stop shop for information about New York City efforts in buildings and energy efficiency; similar resources are emerging from other cities, such as Philadelphia. Not only does GBEE aggregate information about efforts undertaken by different agencies. It also provides that valuable context absent from each stand-alone website. GBEE links related projects together on the same page, categorizes efforts based on their regulatory, incentivized and other characteristics, and provides resources on every page.

GBEE also contains a section on the history of New York City’s leadership in green building and energy efficiency policies. Few are aware that the role of large buildings in the environmental movement took hold in New York City in the late 1990s, resulting in the world’s first green skyscraper and the first green residential high rise in the U.S. – both in New York City. Through a brief glimpse of the past, viewers can see how far the City has come in greening its buildings and get a better sense of the City’s next steps. Additionally, the City is continuing its tradition of innovation with efforts such as the Mayor’s Carbon Challenge, Municipal Entrepreneurial Testing Systems (METS), and NYC CoolRoofs. As GBEE brings together all these efforts together for the first time, interconnected content demonstrates how the whole is greater than the sum of many parts.

Mohammed Al-Shawaf, a manager for the Washington D.C.-based think tank SustainAbility, writes “Why city mayors are a sustainability director's new best friends.”

Al-Shawaf cites three reasons the Mayoral role is integral in leading city-wide sustainability efforts:

1. They are employing sustainability as a framework to tackle the immense challenges facing their cities;
2. They are decisive, accountable actors, using their administration's agility to respond to issues today in a way that is simply not happening nationally and internationally;
3. They need you as much as you need them.

The article also highlights the work of C40 Mayors as an example of how cities can decisively lead in creating innovative sustainable development initiatives from SustainAbility’s March 2012 reporttitled Citystates: How Cities Are Vital to the Future of Sustainability:

City mayors have their hands on the major levers of mitigation and adaptation in their cities. Dr. Rohit Aggarwala, special advisor to Mayor Bloomberg in his role as C40 [a global network of cities committed to climate change initiatives] chair, stresses that, "Mayors control the streets in most of their cities. Half of our mayors control their transit system. Most mayors have either direct control or significant control over planning decisions...[and] at least some influence over the standards to which their buildings are built." He concludes: "At the end of the day, waste, water, energy consumption and buildings and transportation policy -- those are the jobs of mayors in cities."

To read the full GreenBiz article, click here.

Houston Mayor Annise Parker (center) with Green Office Champion Brian Yeoman (to the right of Mayor Parker) and other award winners. Photo credit: City of Houston.

Last week, Mayor Annise Parker announced the Challenge award-winners, including special recognition for Brian Yeoman, C40-CCI City Director in Houston. According to Mayor Parker, the Challenge was a success with more than 375 buildings and their tenants participating, representing 75 million square feet. Additionally, Houston placed fourth (up from seventh last year) in a national ranking of cities with the most LEED certified buildings.

Congratulations to the City of Houston, Brian Yeoman and the rest of the Green Office Challenge award winners. You can read more about the Challenge here.

--Juliette Michaelson, Director of Strategic Initiatives, Regional Plan Association (RPA)

Juliette Michaelson's insightful words strike at the heart of why the RPA, America's oldest and most distinguished independent urban research and advocacy group, convened the recent Transit Leadership Summit, gathering the heads of some of the world’s largest transit systems through a strong roster of C40 Cities in attendance. In total, 10 C40 Cities were represented: Barcelona, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Santiago, Sao Paulo, Singapore, and Stockholm, as well as Montreal and Washington, D.C.Photo credit: RPA.

“Collaboration and knowledge-sharing is a hallmark of C40, as our existing city-led networks clearly show,” says Terri Wills, Director of Global Initiatives, C40, in partnership with the Clinton Climate Initiative. “This event -- bringing together a small yet global group of top transit leaders for face-to-face discussions -- is an unprecedented opportunity for learning, whose benefits and impact will be felt by C40 Cities well into the future.”

Over the course of four days at Pocantico, the Rockefeller Estate in New York, the select group of 30 participants engaged in frank and in-depth discussions in a closed-door setting. The Volvo Research and Education Foundations had sponsored the development of case studies from the transit agencies of cities in attendance, highlighting particular challenges as well as successful innovations. In response to the studies presented, transit executives and experts provided ideas and insights based on their own experiences.

Discussions at the event were thought-provoking, and covered a range of issues, including fare policy, public-private partnerships, strategies for modal shift, and rider experience. While there was often agreement on the challenges faced by transit agencies, the diversity of views on proposed solutions led to lively debates. The opportunity to engage with peers and experts was invaluable, participants said; many spoke of having gained new ideas and insights to take back to their agencies and implement.
Summit participants gather at at Pocantico, the Rockefeller Estate in New York. Photo credit: RPA.

On leaving Pocantico, Summit participants were keen to continue the dialogue and find ways to collaborate going forward. To this end, the RPA, Volvo Foundations and C40 will  advance several next steps, including developing a research paper with Volvo, and engaging mayors across the global C40 network to create a common understanding of the challenges transit agencies face. The parties are already planning a subsequent event to develop further areas of potential collaboration identified in Pocantico.

For further reading on the Transit Leadership Summit, please see Juliette Michaelson’s recent article on the subject.

Below is a reprint of an article about urban ingenuity and innovation by Edwin Heathcote, architecture critic for FT, that originally ran on November 16, 2011. If you are an FT subscriber, you may find the piece here.

Urban Ingenuity

By Edwin Heathcote

The city is a machine for innovation, an incubator of ideas born of necessity as people from different places and social classes rub against each other creating a static electric field of ideas and inventions.  If we look at Rome in the first century, Baghdad a thousand years later, Birmingham in the eighteenth century, London in the nineteenth century or New York in the twentieth century, the city stands out as an engine of progress and modernity.  Yet it does not necessarily last.  No one would call contemporary Venice a hub of innovation whilst the city that was only a few decades ago at the forefront of industrial innovation and production, Detroit, has become the most famous, and epic example of how quickly it can all collapse.  So how can a city continue to innovate?  How can a city continue to create a hospitable home for entrepreneurs and ideas? 

Richard Florida, author of ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’ and urban planning guru, believes the first thing governments must do “is to get out of the way - stop ‘squelching’ entrepreneurial culture”. It is a familiar notion – the idea that however well-intentioned governments and municipalities might be, their involvement is rarely the spark that sets things off.  So why have Silicon Valley in California and Cambridge in the English fens developed as centres of innovation but other regions languish? Is it the concentration of education and technology industries? Or just sheer luck?

Prof Florida is sceptical about the influence of universities too – no matter how good Stanford or CambridgeUniversity. He believes the role of educational institutions can be overestimated ‘Look at Michigan and Ann Arbor’ he says, contrasting the presence of a great educational institution with the terminal decline of the state’s rust belt cities from Flint to Detroit.

“But US universities are better than Chinese and Indian universities’ he admits ‘because they encourage the formation of groups and of discussion.  The San Francisco Bay Area was always open to art, music, literature and ideas and most places are not open – even if they think they are.  These [cities] accrete entrepreneurs over time.”

That openness needs to be not only to ideas but to people.  “50 per cent of all technology start-ups in Silicon valley” he says “had an immigrant on the founding team.  Steve Jobs’ father was a Syrian immigrant and we all know about Sergey Brin.” 

Yet both London and New York, big cities Florida cites as critical centres of innovation, are introducing stringent new rules on immigration, whereas more openness and high-skill immigration would, he says ‘up your odds of attracting the right sorts of people – entrepreneurs, like athletes  are born and not made.’

Florida puts the success of cities down to his 3T’s “Technology, talent and tolerance.”

Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, in his recent book Triumph of the City, points to the “ability of skilled cities to reinvent themselves”.  He only has to look around the corner to Boston to see a city that has made its living as a trading post, a port, a manufacturing centre, a financial centre, a high-tech hub for producing military equipment and which spawned early computers and the emergence of management consulting.  He also points to how industrial Milan reinvented itself as a design capital, its status prosperously surviving the decline of European manufacturing. 

Milan has seen a remarkable adaptation of both its centre and its post-industrial edges as a city of studios; fashion, architecture, product design are all accommodated in roomy buildings in a city that has invested in the infrastructure of fairs and the transport to get to them, employing some of the world’s finest architects to design them and make them attractive.   Ricky Burdett, Director of the LSE’s Cities Programme points to Turin as another city that has managed to reinvent itself. He cites ‘the way in which Turin and the broader region, Piedmont, were proactive as the downturn kicked in, allowing significant investment between universities, foundations and industry to create high tech and innovative clusters.’  Professor Burdett credits the two consecutive mayors of Turin, Valentino Castellani and Sergio Chiamparinoas hugely influential in cutting through Italy’s notorious red-tape to re-zone areas of the city and in attracting EU funds.  “It’s also about stabilising economies’ Burdett adds ‘not just a question of creating new jobs.  You have to ask what would have happened to Turin, or Barcelona, or Munich if these policies weren’t carried out?”

State or municipal intervention doesn’t always work, however.  Edward Glaeser is scathing about the efforts to rehabilitate Detroit.  Money was thrown at construction but achieved negligible results.

Yet steel city Pittsburgh has managed to transform itself into a contemporary metropolis of tech clusters and vibrant neighbourhoods.  Its success seems to result from a lucky combination of careful, consistent investment and seed money for start-ups from the Pittsburgh Technology Council (established perceptively early, in 1983), an ethnically mixed city of vibrant and distinctive neighbourhoods defined by good restaurants and cafes and, critically, cheap property prices. 

London categorically does not benefit from cheap and plentiful real estate.  Yet here too there has been an effort to establish a tech cluster on the eastern edge of the city.  Old Street’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ was recently seized upon by ministers as an example of a cluster of successful urban innovation (with over 600 tech firms) but it grew spontaneously, without municipal intervention.  On the border between the wealth of the City and the fashionable bohemia or Shoreditch and Hoxton, this was a young, funky place to be. Charles Armstrong, entrepreneur and founder and chief executive of Trampoline Systems (a social analytic software company) who has been based in the area since 2003, suggests three points which have defined Silicon Roundabout’s success. “Density – the concentration of relevant businesses; diversity –a range of different businesses, not all tech-based”  He points out that “this was a fertile fashion, art and design scene before it was a tech hub” and finally “Connections – the network of cafes and bars, networking opportunities and events”.

Mr Armstrong has used his background in ethnography todevelop his Tech City Map, a real time representation of the spread of the cluster and its influence through social media and connections  in real time, with tweets popping up on screen as they happen.   He suggests that the local authority, Hackney, has been helpful in ‘zoning regulations and in maintaining a balance of businesses but also in ensuring that in new buildings a proportion of the accommodation needs to be provided as incubator space’ ensuring the continuing availability (at relatively affordable rates) of space for start-ups as the area becomes more popular. 

The UK government is keen to see the phenomenon spread eastwards to Stratford as part of the legacy of the huge Olympics regeneration (and has established Tech City UK as a body

To encourage the spread) but the same dynamic just isn’t there.  Even if the £308m taxpayer-funded media centre is turned over to tech companies, as has been mooted, it would be difficult to foster the same urban intensity as Shoreditch.  Innovation can be encouraged, but almost never kick-started from zero - although it will be interesting to see whether the much-touted Songdo in South Korea, billed as the world’s first smart-city, will manage it.  The key, it seems, is to spot the first stirrings and fine tune the conditions.

Key factors in urban innovation:

A good mayor

Mayors in Barcelona, Munich, Turin, Bogota and Caracas have radically influenced their respective cities’ futures through tenacious and intelligent intervention, through the reduction of red-tape and zoning and construction restrictions and the careful balancing of social, business and cultural agendas. 

Ethnic mix

Cities with lively, tolerant, changing and mixed ethnic populations tend to attract the best people from around the world.  But the big established cities need to be wary of ghettoising new immigrants to the peripheries, Paris and New York have already seen their city centres gentrified and London is in danger of going down a similar path.  If downtowns can be kept flexible cities will retain an advantage.

Education

Although Richard Florida may disdain the link between education and tech start-ups, every successful centre from Bangalore to Silicon Valley has, at its heart or on its periphery, a good university. 

Intensity

The more tech firms there are, the greater the density but the trick is to get them communicating.  This means bars, coffee shops, corridors and shared streets.  Real innovation often comes through serendipitous meetings or conversations over coffee so tech clusters need places for unexpected encounter.  Cool bars attract bright young people and the proximity of the creative industries helps both groups to spot new opportunities and trends emerging.

Photo credit: The City of Rio de Janeiro.

Integration of information in real-time is the main function of the Operations Center, allowing decisions to be based on the best data, and carried out across all City departments. In this way, highly-skilled operators are able to anticipate natural disasters such as landslides, and alert affected communities; as well as to improve the response time to any sudden occurrence in the city, such as accidents and fires.

Every day, approximately 600 employees (divided into three shifts) work with representatives from 30 agencies responsible for issues such as traffic, public transport, weather forecasting, civil defense. The Center never closes, monitoring the city 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Control Room includes the largest screen in Latin America, consisting of 80 46-inch monitors that display the city’s everyday routine via cameras and other technological systems. Indeed, the Operations Center receives images from more than 800 City Hall cameras, the Police and other agencies.

A benchmark in global technology, the Center also contains a modern internal georeference system pertaining to the main services provided by the City. “The major traffic issues and the city works are some of the items we map. The operator simply looks at the screen to identify anything unusual in the routine of the city”, explains Savio Franco, the Executive Chief of Operations.

Another important feature of the Operations Center is the Crisis Room. During emergencies, Mayor Eduardo Paes gathers his secretaries and other relevant individuals to discuss immediate solutions to problems. Today, the Operations Center is one of the first public facilities to be concluded ahead of time in the run up to Rio+20 , the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games -- three of the many mega-events that the City of Rio de Janeiro will host in the coming years.

Natural disasters are a daily concern at the Operations Center, in light of more extreme weather experienced in recent years. To combat this, Rio City Hall purchased a weather radar that covers a 250 kilometer area around the city, making Rio the only city in Brazil to own such advanced equipment. Meteorologists also count on an advanced mathematical model developed exclusively by IBM for the city of Rio de Janeiro. Daily weather briefings are gathered by an expert meteorological team at the Control Room and all relevant information collected at the Operations Center is immediately broadcast to Rio’s citizens via the media (who are present in a press area with a view of the Control Room) and social networks 24 hours a day.

Based on this forecast, the Operations Center can also trigger sirens installed by the City Hall in areas at risk from landslides, allowing the residents who live in those areas to find shelter at municipal support locations during the rains. As such, the Operations Center is not only responsible for the day-to-day running of the city, but also for saving lives.

To learn more about the Operations Center, please watch this YouTube video.

Centro de Operações Rio: Prontidão é Tudo

Quando o Rio de Janeiro, uma cidade participante da Rede C40, tomou ciência dos riscos e desafios – desde condições meteorológicas extremas até congestionamentos, e com a proximidade dos mega eventos, como a Rio+20, a prefeitura decidiu criar o Centro de Operações para servir os cariocas (moradores do Rio de Janeiro). Erguido em tempo recorde e situado na região central da cidade, o Centro de Operações da Prefeitura do Rio foi inaugurado em dezembro de 2010 e até hoje é tido como um dos centros mais modernos do mundo.

Informação integrada em tempo real é a principal ferramenta do Centro de Operações, permitindo que as decisões, baseadas nos melhores dados, sejam rapidamente tomadas por todos os órgãos da cidade envolvidos. Dessa maneira, operadores altamente qualificados são capazes de antecipar desastres naturais, como deslizamentos, e alertar comunidades em áreas de risco; bem como melhorar o tempo de resposta para qualquer ocorrência que afetar a cidade, como acidentes e incêndios.

Diariamente, cerca de 600 funcionários, divididos em três turnos, trabalham no local que concentra 30 órgãos responsáveis por questões como trânsito, transporte público, previsão de tempo, defesa civil etc. A central nunca fecha, pois monitora a cidade 24 horas por dia, 7 dias por semana. Na Sala de Controle está situado o maior telão da América Latina, formado por 80 monitores de 46 polegadas, que transmitem a rotina diária da cidade através de câmeras e outros sistemas tecnológicos. De fato, o Centro de Operações recebe imagens de mais de 800 câmeras da prefeitura, Polícia Militar e outros órgãos.

Referência tecnológica, o espaço também conta com um moderno sistema interno de georreferenciamento dos principais serviços prestados pela cidade. “As principais ocorrências de trânsito e as obras nas vias são alguns dos itens mapeados. Portanto, basta o operador olhar para o telão para identificar qualquer anormalidade na rotina da cidade”, explica o chefe executivo de operações, Sávio Franco.

Outro importante espaço do Centro de Operações é a Sala de Crise. Em momentos de emergência, é lá que o prefeito Eduardo Paes se reúne com secretários e demais envolvidos para discutir soluções imediatas para os problemas enfrentados. Hoje, o Centro de Operações é um dos primeiros equipamentos públicos concluídos com antecedência para o Rio+20, a Copa do Mundo 2014, e os Jogos Olímpicos de 2016, três dos principais eventos que a cidade sediará nos próximos anos.

Os desastres naturais são uma preocupação diária no Centro de Operações, à luz das condições climáticas extremas que vêm ocorrendo nos últimos anos. Para combater isso, a Prefeitura do Rio adquiriu um radar meteorológico com um raio de alcance de 250 km, tornando-se a única cidade do país a contar com um equipamento próprio dessa magnitude. Os meteorologistas também contam com um avançado modelo matemático para previsão do tempo, desenvolvido pela IBM exclusivamente para a cidade do Rio. Com isso, diariamente são realizados dois briefings meteorológicos na Sala de Controle comandados por profissionais especializados e todas as informações são imediatamente repassadas aos cidadãos cariocas por meio dos jornalistas, presentes 24 horas por dia numa sala de imprensa com visão privilegiada para a Sala de Controle, e também pelas redes sociais.

Com base nessa previsão, o Centro de Operações também pode acionar sirenes instaladas pela prefeitura em áreas onde há risco de deslizamento de encostas, permitindo aos moradores que se abriguem nos pontos de apoio durante as chuvas. É assim que o Centro de Operações consegue não apenas melhorar a operação do dia-a-dia da cidade, mas também salvar vidas.