The Urban Canopy: Greening Our Cities
Urban areas have traditionally been characterized by high population density and heavy construction to support modern amenities such as transport and commercial buildings. But these concrete jungles now face increasing pressure from expanding populations, limited resources, and the growing impact of climate change.
One of the key indicators for measuring SDG 11 is the area of public and green space in a city – and the lack of natural space creates an unhealthy urban living environment. As cities, we must drive a decarbonization agenda. Becoming low-carbon is the first step towards mitigating carbon emissions and achieving ecosystem resilience. At the same time, we need to ensure that urban planning is capable of dealing with the pressures of climate change in the adaptation agenda.
You see, green public spaces have the potential to lower urban temperatures, mitigate air pollution, and build natural environmental resilience. The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Cities has even included increasing green canopy cover in its top ten list of urban planning initiatives. It’s a no-brainer, really – trees and greenery make our cities more livable.
Bringing the Jungle to Freetown
Take Freetown, Sierra Leone, for example. It’s one of the most crowded cities in the world, characterized by rapid but uneven growth. In fact, 38% of the city’s expansion had been in either medium- or high-risk areas. Adding to the challenge, the mandate for urban planning doesn’t even belong to the city itself!
But in January 2019, Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr launched the Transform Freetown plan – a three-year vision for developing the city to address its socio-economic challenges and environmental vulnerabilities. One of the key initiatives is the “Freetown the Tree Town” campaign, with the aim of reducing erosion and run-off and increasing vegetation cover in the city by 50% by 2022 through planting one million trees.
As the mayor said, “Green infrastructure creates a more liveable city. Our city has suffered from floods, loss of biodiversity, poor air quality. Trees will really restore that.”
By 2020, the city had already planted 245,000 seedlings and nurtured 15 different species of trees across sites. And they’re using a locally developed app called Treetracker to track the growth of the trees through machine learning assessments of the tree canopy. This way, the city can leverage community stewards to help ensure the survival of the trees and issue impact tokens as a reward for good care.
The objective is to ensure equitable distribution of vegetation cover across the city and to include the entire community in the process so that Freetown becomes more resilient to future challenges. It’s a holistic, community-driven approach to urban greening that other cities would do well to emulate.
Healthy Cities, Healthy Citizens
The health crisis during the pandemic made the case clear – there is a community role in creating a better health environment, and cities need to pay more attention to the well-being of their citizens. Globally, five of the top ten causes of death are related to unhealthy behavior. This brings into the spotlight the need for preventive medicine.
As Uwe Brandes, Faculty Director at Georgetown University’s Global Cities Initiative, said, “The pandemic quickly catalyzed the awareness of the relationship between public health and community-based health and in many cases highly localized insights into neighbourhood-based health. Public health goals are only relevant to the degree to which they can be implemented at the local scale of the community or the urban neighbourhood.”
The factors that affect a person’s health and behavior are complex, so communities – both physical and virtual – must play a part. Cities will develop health care ecosystems that move away from a focus purely on diagnosing and treating sickness and injuries, to one that is equally focused on supporting well-being through early intervention and prevention.
Instead of being designed and funded to treat individual patients one by one, these ecosystems will have a greater appreciation of the interconnectedness of communities. The social determinants of health will be better understood, and government and the private sector will collaborate to address some of these challenges.
As care moves outside of the hospital walls, new community players and disruptors will become critical in forming the new ecosystem. Scientific advancements and the affordability of personalized health care – genomics, micromics, metabolism, and behavioural economics – will ensure that care is tailored for individuals and their families. The citizens’ health journey will be underpinned by interoperable data and analytics, guiding them through positive health choices and behaviours.
Chicago’s Healthy Approach
Take Chicago, for example. The city is prioritizing the establishment of a highly interconnected health and wellness ecosystem. In 2016, it launched Healthy Chicago 2.0, and in 2020, it launched Healthy Chicago 2025 – a cross-sector collaboration that is the city’s multi-stakeholder plan to maximize health equality and well-being for its citizens.
As cited in a report by the Chicago city government, “During Healthy Chicago 2.0, instead of just treating diabetes or counseling people on what to eat, we also worked on strategies to increase access to healthy foods and create more walkable neighborhoods.”
As part of the Healthy Chicago 2025 plan, the aim is to close the racial life expectancy gap and to continue prioritizing other issues such as ending the HIV epidemic, improving mental health, and creating a drug-free society. The city conducts knowledge-sharing and awareness events to communicate with residents about health care essentials and educate them about public health issues. And technology is used extensively to power innovative tracking and delivery models.
Cities are becoming hubs of preventive care, wellness, and community-based health – and it’s an approach that Plug & Save Energy Products wholeheartedly supports. By promoting healthy, sustainable urban environments, we can pave the way for a brighter tomorrow.
Hyperlocal Havens: The 15-Minute City
The 15-minute city concept – primarily developed to reduce carbon emissions by reducing the use of cars and motorized commuting time – is a decentralized urban planning model in which each local neighbourhood contains all the basic social functions for living and working. Many argue that creating localised neighbourhoods in which residents can get everything they require within 15 minutes by walking, cycling, or on public transport will ultimately improve the quality of life.
As Maimunah Mohd Sharif, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, said, “I would like to live in a self-sustainable city. As an urban planner, I focus on the importance of neighbourhood planning, and the 15-minute city offers you that self-sustainability.”
Such hyperlocal havens entail multipurpose neighbourhoods instead of separate zones for working, living, and entertainment, reducing the need for unnecessary travel, strengthening a sense of community, and improving sustainability and liveability. In contrast to the fragmented urban planning that results in sprawl, with people having to travel long distances across the city to get to their destination, compact cities of the future or “hyperlocalisation” prioritise strategies for urban infrastructure that aim to bring all the elements for living and working into local neighbourhood communities.
The 15-minute city is an iteration of the idea of “neighborhood units” developed by American planner Clarence Perry during the 1920s. The theory of “new urbanism” – an urban planning and design concept promoting walkable cities – subsequently gained popularity in the US in the 1980s. Similar versions of urban cells or 30- and 20-minute neighbourhoods have also emerged across the globe in the past decade.
Paris Leads the Way
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, aims to decarbonize the city’s economy and make Paris a healthier place for its citizens through her programme “La ville du quart d’heure” – the quarter-hour city. The initiative focuses on reducing carbon emissions, prioritizing pedestrians and cyclists, and decentralizing the city.
The priority areas include easy access to workplaces, stores, schools, clinics, and cultural activities. The concept for this ecological transformation is based on four pillars: proximity, diversity, density, and ubiquity – aiming to fulfil the basic social functions of living, working, supplying, caring, learning, and enjoying.
Paris has adopted an approach of “hyper-proximity” and “multipurpose localities” which seeks to reduce drastically the number of car lanes to free up road space for pedestrians and cycles, and to utilize public spaces for varied purposes such as daytime schools serving as sports facilities and places for night-time leisure activities.
As part of the transport planning, the mayor has announced 350 million euros of funding for pedestrianization, which will focus on creating a cycle lane in every street in the region by 2024 and removing 60,000 parking spaces for private cars. The impact is already being felt – there’s a new public garden replacing a parking lot, and the surrounding buildings have been renovated into 70 public housing apartments.
The 15-minute city model may not be entirely applicable to every city, but remote working and the digitalization of services have increased the impetus to apply the principle of neighbourhood planning regardless of city size. And with climate change as a major global concern, this pedestrianization approach contributes to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and supports environmental sustainability. It’s a vision of the future that Plug & Save Energy Products fully supports.
Mobility Makeovers: Sustainable and Intelligent Transportation
This is one area where cities should expect huge disruption. Some major changes in how people move around in cities are already under way, but the trend will accelerate further in the next decade with electrification, autonomous driving, smart and connected infrastructure, modal diversity, and mobility that is integrated, resilient, shared, and sustainable – powered by disruptive business models.
As Kent Larson, Director of the City Science group at MIT Media Lab, said, “I am completely bored with Smart City IoT systems that try to optimize the flow of traffic so you get more throughput of cars. I am more interested in getting rid of cars in cities.”
Less Need to Travel
It is expected that in general, people will travel less than they have in the past. With new urban planning concepts such as the 15-minute city promoting compact environments, connected corridors, and changes in the way that people work, movements within urban areas will decrease substantially, and bicycles, scooters, and even walking will increasingly be the preferred options in community neighbourhoods.
Electrification and Autonomy
It is estimated that in 2030, electric vehicles (EVs) will have around 32% of the total market share for new car sales globally, although there will be differences between regions. And recent Deloitte research in the United States estimates that by 2040, up to 80% of passenger miles travelled in urban areas could be in shared autonomous vehicles.
This development will be led by major technology-based corporations or the automotive and transport sector, as well as technology-based start-ups. Solutions such as passenger drones by EHang and drone delivery by Amazon are making rapid advances. Logistics companies also look increasingly to autonomous technology to meet the rising demand for goods.
Shared and Intelligent Mobility
Cities will also benefit from an increase in on-demand multimodal mobility and Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platforms, such as in Helsinki. Residents will be able to plan and book door-to-door trips digitally, use the same fare card for all transport modes, access automated last-mile cargo shipment services, and have end-to-end real-time visibility of freight in transit – all with seamless payment models.
Data will play a central role in these shifts, and customized travel is something that cities will start to deliver, segmenting their customers (citizens) in a mobility context and implementing strategies for each market segment. The value of intelligent mobility is forecast to grow to $850 billion by 2025, representing more than 1% of global GDP.
LA Leads the Charge
Los Angeles is working towards implementing sustainable and smart mobility solutions. The city aims to reduce air pollution by accelerating the electrification of transport. According to a recent study, LA accounts for about half of electric vehicles in the United States and has committed to having 5 million electric vehicles by 2030.
LA’s urban mobility plan has a focus on improving the accessibility and environmental friendliness of its public transport system. The city has launched multiple compressed natural gas (CNG) buses and deployed the first of 40 zero-emission electric buses on its Orange Rapid line in July 2020. The entire LA Metropolitan Transportation Authority Metro bus fleet is expected to be electric by 2030.
With a target to further improve air quality, LA launched its Zero Emission 2028 Road Map in 2019. The initiative involves advisory partners BMW, Tesla, Greenlabs, CSUN, Itron, and PCS Energy. And in December 2020, the city launched an urban air mobility programme to analyse the issues identified by diverse stakeholders in the public airspace and property rights. The programme is likely to support the development of solutions to build and integrate a community-centred aerial mobility technology with its other multimodal platforms.
Plug & Save Energy Products applauds these efforts to create intelligent, sustainable, and accessible urban transportation systems. By reducing our reliance on private cars and embracing electrification, shared mobility, and multimodal connectivity, we can build cities that are truly livable and environmentally responsible.
Inclusive Cities: Empowering All Citizens
Cities are not only centres of economic development, they symbolise equality, healthy communal coexistence, and prosperity for all. Social inclusion should be a key pillar of urban growth and development for the cities of the future, bearing in mind the three building blocks identified by the World Bank: spatial inclusion (providing affordable housing, water, and sanitation), social inclusion (expanding equal rights and participation), and economic inclusion (creating jobs and offering citizens opportunities for economic development).
As Sameh Wahba, Global Director of Urban Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land Global Practice at the World Bank, said, “Inclusion is not a feel-good thing. Obviously, it is about equity, it is the right thing to do, but it is fundamental also for the economic survival of cities.”
Cities should be planned and designed to generate social and economic outcomes for everyone, avoiding the costs that occur when people are excluded. Although the poor are usually the most affected, cities will also remove the barriers caused by differences in gender, race, nationality, disability, or religion.
Inclusive design could mean building gender-inclusive urban centres to provide safe and secure spaces for carers, installing wheelchair-accessible features, building greener and safer neighbourhoods, and investing to create secure and joyful spaces for children to play and accessible places for the elderly. An inclusive social care system will embrace migrants and offer them tailored services that address their particular needs and circumstances, just as for everyone else.
Medellín’s Transformation
Two decades ago, the city of Medellín, Colombia, was infamous for its high homicide rates, economic inequality, and social exclusion. However, the city started to transform into an urban inclusive community through an integrated planning approach to improving connectivity, education, and public facilities with a special focus on the poor.
Initiatives such as Medellín Metrocable, the world’s first cable car system for public transport, connected the city’s poor neighbourhoods with the city centre. And the San Javier outdoor escalators, built in 2011, connected one of the poorest and most violent neighbourhoods, Comuna 13, on steep hills to the city centre.
An important focus of the strategy was on education. The local government created public facilities including libraries and schools across all neighbourhoods and invested in a “Medellín, the most educated” programme – especially for early childhood and primary education – as a powerful way of reducing poverty and improving society.
More recently, the adoption of open government policies, accessibility of data and public information, investments in ICT, free internet access zones, social co-creation practices, and other programmes are contributing to the creation of a smart, inclusive Medellín. It’s a shining example of how cities can em