Cities must spearhead a new industrial sector in precision manufactured housing (PMH). PMH offers new jobs; reduced build times and costs; greater quality control; cleaner and safer construction processes; better air quality; and low construction waste and energy use.
Leaders must be bolder still. Rather than building homes with steel and concrete, by combining PMH with low- or zero-carbon materials such as engineered timber, we can dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of new buildings. Green belts can contribute to growing these homes of the future with trees and forests, while protecting and enhancing the crucial interrelationship between urban areas and their rural hinterland. These are homes that will lock away carbon, in greener, denser cities and be part of a circular, sustainable, and environmental economy.
In Chapter 14, The Resourceful City, Conor Riffle takes on one of the oldest challenges facing cities: how urban areas manage and dispose of their resources. Since the earliest Roman civilizations, cities have disposed of waste in landfills. As the world hurtles to 9 billion people and beyond, as our cities absorb more than half of the Earth’s residents, and as climate change threatens our species’ survival, the landfill model is unsustainable. Instead, leading cities are moving towards solutions that keep resources circulating for as long as possible – replacing the old, one-way paths to landfill with circular economies. This chapter highlights urban policies and technologies that are helping cities finally kick their landfill habits – and creating healthier, wealthier cities in the process.
In Chapter 15, The Zero Waste City, Terry Tamminen and Peter Lobin ask us to imagine a city without waste. “Trash” bins become sources of energy, fuels, and raw materials for products and buildings. Forests remain standing, because we no longer cut them down, only to throw away the resulting paper, cardboard, and wood in landfills or incinerators, nor do we discard half of the food grown on cleared land, necessitating the clearing of even more land to grow more crops. We no longer send armies around the globe to secure barrels of oil, only to throw away that valuable resource in the form of plastic, much of which we used only for a few minutes. We cut our energy usage and bills in half, making the switch to renewables easier and faster. The Zero Waste City shows how ending the concept of waste saves money, protects ecosystems, and creates new jobs using resources that are literally under our feet, with examples that can be rapidly scaled up to address climate change and ecosystem destruction. The chapter highlights the exciting new policies, technologies, and finance that now allow us to convert up to 95% of today’s “waste” into tomorrow’s valuable resources.
In Chapter 16, The Resilient City, Sarah Wray and Richard Forster show us that while COVID-19 has knocked the world sideways, the past year has also witnessed a series of parallel and compounding crises, including social unrest, intense weather events, and the economic fallout from the pandemic. This perfect storm looks set to be a pivotal moment in changing attitudes to resilience, with a clear focus on learning lessons to strengthen communities against future shocks and stresses – whether economic, social, or environmental.
The Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) role in cities is a relatively new one, but the advent of COVID-19 has seen CROs receive greater support in terms of funding, staff resources, and proximity to the mayor due to a recognition of the urgent need for a holistic strategy which can help cities face up to the various threats they face. Smart city initiatives are playing a key role, too, with cities using digital tools and data innovation to support resilience efforts.
While COVID has shown that cities must adopt a holistic approach to digitalization and resilience, it is equally important that they have the means to implement this. Resilience is becoming a growing consideration for investors, and cities are also increasingly incorporating resilience considerations into their own spending decisions. This chapter highlights examples from the cities of Rotterdam, New Orleans, Edinburgh, and more.
In Chapter 17, The Fragile City, John de Boer points out there is growing recognition that the cumulative impact of converging environmental, social, political, and economic risks is straining the ability of many cities to deliver essential services to residents in times of shocks and stresses. The COVID-19 pandemic brought cities around the world to a halt, causing massive disruption and suffering for hundreds of millions of people. The pandemic exposed the fault lines in our cities that make them fragile. This includes growing inequalities in income, gender, race, and opportunity, as well as structural factors linked to exposure to violence, poverty, extreme pollution, and natural disasters. This chapter assesses the sources of fragility rooted in our cities and explores approaches that could help cities develop more resilient urban systems, enabling them to function, and even thrive, in times of crisis.
In Chapter 18, The Data City, Seth Schultz and Eric Ast propose a bold and pragmatic vision for the role that cities can play in ensuring a just, equitable, and safe future for humanity. There’s good reason to be optimistic about the long-term ascent of data-centric techniques within the political sphere and the potential for collaboration between public and private sectors around the globe. However, due to the immediate nature of the climate crisis, a clear-eyed view of our current trajectory dictates that intrepid action towards accelerating action is necessary. By leveraging their power over procurement processes and budgets to dictate the conditions for how data are collected and accessed, and tapping into rich local technological and research ecosystems, cities can embrace a new and more effective role within the data ecosystem. This approach, the Procurement + Platform Pivot, pulls cities around the world out of a cycle of dependence and data poverty and into the driver’s seat in a role that they play best: convener.
In Chapter 19, The Measured City, Patricia McCarney positions cities in a highly connected world and advances the need for globally standardized data to empower sound city leadership on the global stage. Until recently, this interconnected world was traditionally reserved for national governments, connecting through trade, security, and global monetary policy, all supported by sound, standardized measurements – Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Gross National Product (GNP), and other national income and monetary measures. Cities have been rising in stature as critical sites in this highly connected world. Cities are critical sites where investment, invention, prosperity, climate mitigation, security, health, and social wellbeing can either succeed or fail. However, globally standardized, comparable measurement, so valued at national level to drive data-informed global relations, has lagged at city level. The chapter advances the need for globally standardized measurement in cities and examines what global standards exist for city data to drive and enable the “Measured City”. The chapter provides a look into the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the recent emergence of the ISO 37120 Series that has created a global standard for city data that enables comparative apples-to-apples data for the first time. The chapter answers the core question “Why is ‘The Measured City’ so important for cities today, and how are cities embracing global standards to propel their success?”
In Chapter 20, The Smart City, Noorie Rajvanshi tells a story, through data, of how technologies can drive climate action in cities. In this chapter we dive into learnings from over 40 cities worldwide, highlighting results of technology modeling with the Siemens City Performance Tool. Cities, irrespective of where they are located or their climate or socioeconomic standing, share a common understanding that these three actions will produce deep carbon reductions and lead the way to zero-carbon cities – decarbonization of the electric grid, reducing energy usage in buildings and transport, and electrification of everything. Many of the technologies that will enable the implementation of these actions already exist and have been proven to work on a large scale, but there is always room for innovation!
In Chapter 21, The Just City (Part I), Hayley Moller explores the interlocking challenges