#urbanimse

[retrogeographie]

Mondeville, agglomération de Caen.

[ega-talks]

Thomas Sichelkow , The sustainable city adapted to the local context

Thomas Sichelkow is senior is project manager at Climate-KIC in Copenhagen, Denmark. A European knowledge and innovation community, working to accelerate the transition to a zero-carbon economy

FILMED IN COPENHAGEN, DENMARK, 2018

EGA-TALKS is produced by Erik Giudice Architects: interviews with experts in the field of architecture, urbanism and related areas. EGA Talks is part of EGAs ongoing cross disciplinary research aiming to envision a sustainable future.

For me there’s two key elements to the sustainable city.

There is people. It’s all about people living together in cities if that doesn’t work then the cities won’t work so you need to be creating good livable cities for people

Secondly you have to create sustainable cities whatever that means in the local context. You can’t say that one solution that will work in Denmark will work in Rio de Janeiro, Budapest, Cape Town etc. You have to find a solution for each local context.

You can then take what works in one city and adapt it to another city and that’s what we do here at Climate-KIC where I work. We are an EU-funded organization to help reach the two degrees of warming.

We’ve said that cities are the key to this. This is where a lot of the activity is happening and a lot of energy use is happening. So how do we then help and go in to make sure that what’s happening in Madrid can become an interesting solution for Cape Town or San Francisco?

How do we get that knowledge spreading quickly because if we just let the markets do this, things will go too slowly. This is where the cities have a very important role, the national governments and the private sector. This is where we go in and help to coordinate. For us a key to sustainable cities is to show off a well-functioning solution and go out and inspire people on a lot of different levels.

It inspires me when we make a difference. When you can see people being happy and people taking ownership of their areas. Going out and wanting to make a difference themselves.

I think some of the best examples are when you find a big energy system. To be honest people don’t care about it, they just want their house to be warm. But when they can go in and find out. What is my role of this? What is the company’s role in this? What is the city role in this? When you see these things happening and you actually see that change happening, much quicker. That is incredibly interesting.

Quite often we see it’s easy to do the technical side of things. The technical solutions are there. We have brilliant architects who can do beautiful houses where people can live. We have urban planners doing beautiful cities with good energy systems.

But it’s when you get to the next levels, asking yourself, how do you implement this? This is where it becomes becomes technical, that’s where I find it very inspirational. To say: Okay we can actually make this work.

If we put these people in the room and set the context right and then help to support them afterwards. Then all of a sudden you will have not only the mayor making a visionary statement, but also the people at the ground level going in and supporting this and getting all the elements working together.

I think that’s critical because without that it just becomes either a vision from the top which is difficult to implement. Or small projects which don’t have an impact.

I think it’s very important to have that balance. Between people having a good city and a sustainable city. Because if you go out and make the perfect sustainable city. It’s not necessarily going to be a success. Or if you make the perfect city for people. It might end up having five degrees of global warming because it’s a terrible city. We need to get that balance right.

Very often we get the question. This is great it works over here, but it’s never going to work in our local context. Why should I be making a difference when it’s not gonna happen? So this is why we focus very often on how it makes an impact locally.

Then we can leave the big climate change discussion and focus on how can we make your local environment better?  So  that you will be getting a better better district or a better neighborhood and at the same time making sure that those climate change and the co2 reduction become elements in that.

Taking point of departure in people’s everyday lives or companies organizations. How do we help improve that? To get the bigger goal.

One of the best examples I think is water. It’s very tangible. It’s very important at the moment. Some cities don’t have enough of it and some have too much. When we see the way a lot of our systems are set up, it’s just plain stupid. That we put everything in pipes and then we mix it with with  sewage water and then we clean that. We spend a lot of energy doing that that. It makes no sense. But there are systems where you can divide these things up. Technically it makes sense. It’s still just pipes in the ground.

What we have worked with is how do you keep the water in an area? Water is an attractive quality. So instead of just saying okay this is a technical thing, that we have to hide away. How do we create lakes and wetlands systems which create value for the local area? If you create an identity and at the same time work with utility companies.

We have to make sure that water is clean enough so that when it goes into the streams it doesn’t pollute. Getting all those technical things working. But when people see the system they still see a beautiful wetland system.

When I presented this for the local area we worked with. Their focus was not on if we could help with water and do the aqua filter levels. They asked if they could kayak up and down the system. Fist I said ”That’s not the point” But after a while we realized that taking a kayak in the water, was important for people. That connection, then meant that people starting focusing on the water quality? Can I go fishing? Can I go swimming in this?

That means that people were focusing on reducing water use and making better solutions. That project worked very well and people still post pictures of that that area out there. Even when they go ice skating on it, in the winter. So it’s was a big success. Changing something technical into something which is a quality for people, without them having to go out and reduce their water use every day or make all sorts of complicated solutions.