Cities in the ecological age: Mark Watts opens the Arup Talks at DAC

The focus was on sustainable cities when Mark Watts of Arup last Wednesday gave the first of the three Arup Talks, the Danish Architecture Center have lined up in June. Mark Watts is Director of Arups Energy & Climate Change Consulting Team. He had just returned from Sao Paolo in Brazil to share his knowledge and experience from many years of work with cities in the whole world. I had the pleasure of moderating the event.

Mark is responsible for Arups work for the so-called C40 group of cities. The C40 cities are home to 297 million citizens. They contribute with 10% of the global CO2 emissions, and with 18% of the global GDP, Mark Watts told the audience. In this light it is evident that the battle to achieve reductions in the global CO2 emissions will take place in the cities.

But the mayors of the C40 cities also on some of the key areas have the power to introduce new measures. Both when it comes to retrofitting of existing municipal buildings, public transportation, waste and water management and the overall land use planning the cities have regulations and responsibilities that allow the mayors to work towards greater sustainability. But even so it still requires determination and the will to take action.

In his talk Mark presented some of the projects the C40 cities are introducing just now. Car-share-car systems in Poland, congestion charges in London and elsewhere, Bus Rapid Transit systems in South America were some of the examples. Mark told the audience that the results of introducing car-share systems can be very remarkable. In some systems the result of one additional car-share car introduced, would bring up to 20 privately owned cars of off the streets.

In his concluding remarks Mark pointed to some of the areas that he and Arup judge will become increasingly important in the years to come. Food and food security will be one key area. Already now the production of food on a global level is decreasing and has been for some years already. This decrease is projected to continue and will raise grave difficulties in the face of a growing global population. Eco cities of the future will have to consider urban agriculture as an important element.

But also Smart City technologies hold great promises for the future. In San Francisco a parking system has been introduced where car drivers through their smart phones can locate the nearest empty parking space. This dramatically reduces the traffic resulting from cars cruising to find empty parking spaces.

The final major challenge of the future Mark Watts pointed to is to achieve a better alignment between the need for more sustainable solutions and then the citizen’s aspirations in general. Getting citizens involved in the development and implementation of sustainable solutions on a much larger scale than is the case today, will be a challenge shared by planners, architects, engineers and politicians.

The next talk in the series of three Arup Talks is on June 14, and features Jan Wurm, Arup Materials, on the topic: Steering building technology into the future.

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