Blue Green UK
Promoting the use of Best Technical Knowledge to support Blue-Greening in our cities
SAT07: How can we innovate for the city of the future?
Peter Madden, CEO, Future Cities Catapult gave the CIBSE Annual Lecture 2013 "Innovating for the City of the Future" on 31st October. Click here for Webcast (lecture location 8-32min). Issues discussed included:
- Short-termism dominates in politics, media and business
- "Horizon scanning" is a useful technique for spotting the future that is coming
- Trending is extremely important such as, recognising the future of mankind is urban, London population will increase by 1.2M people in next 10-15 years
- Three key impacts of urbanisation, resource crunches and climate change - the latter a particularly vulnerability for low lying cities by rivers - but humans are good innovators
- Need to become system thinkers (not silo thinkers) focussing on whole city systems
- Need for multi-facted approaches such as design buildings to capture water, generate power and become live/work spaces through collaboration and systemic thinking
- Complexity can paralyse but new tools with "big data" gives information base which, with data analytics, can provide intelligence facilitating management of complexity and usage of resources more efficiently
Comments
We can now BG our cities using current technologies and build upon the successes demonstrated by some cities in other parts of the world. We have the invention and skills in the UK to apply techniques with increased efficiencies, width and depth of understanding in multi-benefits generating increased added values. We can then export world-leading services back to the rest of the world.