Dortmund and the Ghanaian municipality of Kumasi used a dialogue event organised by Connective Cities in September 2019 to reactivate their climate partnership, which began in 2011. They focus on the climate-adapted development of their cities and on the greening of school grounds in Kumasi.
Category: City and biodiversity
Voices from Connective Cities – Muncipality of Ras el-Matn
The Mayor of Ras el-Matn municipality talks about how the municipality serves as the lungs of the capital Beirut in Lebanon, mainly due to its distigiushed eco-tourism projects. He also describes the municipality’s partnership with the private sector partner ‘Green Mount Recycling -GMR’ for sustainable waste management. The general director of GMR commended Ras el-Matn municiplaity and elaborates on their partnership project to promote sorting from source, particularly on how gender considerations were integrated into the planning and implementation of the project’s activities. Moreover, the Mayor also describes how the municipality developed a geospatial database with Connective Cities to promote waste sorting. Both speakers confirmed how this project will ultimately have environmental benefits and contribute to climate change mitigation. They also confirmed the benefits of joining Connective Cities network and peer learning particularly on the topic of waste management, as they learned about procedures that other companies are following in different countries such as the Philippines and Brazil using PPP.
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Bending the Linear Economy On Urban Metabolism
“In the Rome Declaration of 2021, the G20 Leaders stressed the link between sustainable urbanization and the development of circular economy to preserve resources and deliver on climate and biodiversity global goals. […] To meet ambitious but necessary net zero targets, waste, water and energy provision have to change dramatically and at a large scale. This includes new technologies, transformations in governance and regulatory systems, the implementation of just-transition financial mechanisms and strengthened international cooperation, combined with enhanced technical cooperation and joint capacity building among emerging and developing markets.”
INTERSECTING is distributed by the Global Solutions Initiative. It is geared towards think tanks, civil organizations, international institutions, in particular the G20/T20.
Living alongside water instead of fearing it
Bangkok’s first significant piece of green infrastructure, Chulalongkorn Centenary Park (CCP), aims to lessen the risk of flooding in the city and other ecological issues. The Park can store up to one million gallons of water during periods of heavy rainfall. The Park is an example of alternative landscape strategies for reducing urban flooding and, a reminder of the city’s ability to live alongside water rather than fear it in the face of climate change.
Menjez: A model-municipality in northern Lebanon rural area
The city of Menjez is considered a model of how a recently established small municipality can advocate for the conservation of nature and biodiversity, improve infrastructure and ultimately achieve many SDGs.
Connective Cities interviewed Dr. Georges Youssef, Mayor of Menjez, to learn how the municipality in the northern Lebanon rural area managed to turn its ecosystem into a priority.
– English and Arabic subtitles available –
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Envisaging the Future of Cities
Urbanization is intertwined with several existential global challenges: Cities do not exist in isolation from global challenges. The emergence of urbanization as a global megatrend is intertwined with the existential challenges that the world has faced in the last 50 years, including climate change, rising inequality and the rise in zoonotic viruses with the latest being the novel coronavirus pandemic, which triggered the worst public health crisis in a century and the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. These challenges will in different ways, leave their imprints on the future of cities.
In UN-Habitat’s new World Cities Report 2022 – Envisaging the Future of Cities, three scenarios, or three paths were identified, that the world’s cities could take at this critical juncture.
- In the worst-case or “high damage” scenario, we assume that policy-making and governance will become even weaker and more ineffective. The destructive effects of the pandemic, climate change, inequality, poverty, and long-running conflicts, if not adequately addressed, will have disastrous consequences for cities in both developed and developing countries, though the latter would suffer most because of existing vulnerabilities. If 80 per cent of the economic damage inflicted by COVID-19 persists for a decade, then the number of people living in poverty could increase by more than 200 million by 2050.
- The middling, or “pessimistic scenario”, foresees a reversion to the status quo before the pandemic. This business-as-usual approach would be characterised by exploitation and exclusion of informal sector workers, systemic discrimination of the urban poor, unimaginative policies and poor implementation on the climate crisis, public transport, or urban regeneration programmes and renewal. Cities could be locked into cycles of poverty, poor productivity, unhealthy living conditions and become inequality traps for decades.
- The report, however, also envisages an optimistic future. Governments and donors would invest in urban development sufficiently to create just, resilient, healthy, and prosperous cities everywhere. By 2050, there could be 260 million people lifted out of poverty compared to the pre-COVID baseline. National governments would embrace peace and diplomacy to resolve their differences rather than pursuing military action, avoiding drastic global economic consequences such as those inflicted on the supply of food and energy by the war in Ukraine. Governments would manage the remainder of the COVID-19 pandemic competently, balancing health outcomes and economic recovery, and thus smoothing out global supply chains. They would also prepare adequately for the next pandemic.
Urban gardens of Amman
The pandemic and its associated lockdowns have uncovered an acute need for food security in urban areas. To address this need, Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) in Jordan has embarked on several projects to foster urban gardening in the capital Amman, in coordination with various associations, funding agencies, and the local community.
Green Urban Development: learning from inspiring examples of implementation
How do we promote climate neutral urban development?
The world must drastically reduce its CO2 emissions by 2050 to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Globally, we are seeing an influx into cities over the past 30 years and, cities are one of the main spaces where CO2 emissions are directly caused. Emissions in urban areas stem from construction projects, traffic flows, increasing energy consumption from a growing population, production of waste and other factors. “However, the urban space is also the solution space for the climate change,” said one of the participants in the working groups on Green Urban Development. This sentiment was also reflected in a study conducted by the German Advisory Council on Global Change, among other studies carried out globally.
Urban solutions include, for example, the use of new mobility formats such as traffic-calmed urban spaces, roll-out of innovative of e-mobility and bike lane solutions, the reduction of pollution from resource intensive economic sectors, more sustainable building and renovation practices based on circularity, development of urban spaces to promote local economic cycles and community activities and, decentralized energy supply and waste concepts.
Aim of the working groups on Green Urban Development
The COVID-19 program “Green Urban Development” was implemented in cooperation with the consulting company Mesopartner and the Wuppertal Institute. The program included three working groups, each with 3 to 4 cities and their representatives, mostly partners from local city governments or local research institutions. The objective was to promote the implementation of concrete projects that promote climate neutral city efforts
The three working groups had the following focus areas:
- Working Group 1: Mobility solutions in cities
- Working group 2: The transformation of urban spaces and reuse of “urban space” through new community formats and mobility solutions
- Working Group 3: A mixed group linking urban energy, mobility and spatial approaches
From the formation of the working groups, it became clear that solution approaches often overlap or, that different solutions can approaches create synergies. This also enabled an exchange of experiences between the working groups. The participating cities in the program were Bhuj/Ahmedabad, Belo Horizonte, Kochi, Lalitpur, Dortmund, Buenos Aires, Quito, Montevideo, Hamburg, Kigali, Kisumu and Bremen.
First, second and third process steps: From ideas to concrete project proposals
In a first step, project ideas were developed in the respective working group:
- Creation of a bicycle traffic concept using the example of the bicycle paths in Lalitpur
- Creation of a child-friendly environmental zone in the neighborhood and the design of speed-reduced recreation areas
- Greening of roofs to create a sustainable and green urban environment and combining it with renewable energy solutions and urban gardening activities
- Municipal bio-waste management at the neighborhood level in collaboration with local citizens
- Promotion of traffic-calming zones in Kigali
- Increasing green, retention and infiltration areas in cities.
- Application of sensor technologies to analyze neighborhoods and places with high Co2 emissions.
- Planning pop-up bike lanes and building safe bike lanes.
- Last-mile connectivity solutions and electro-based logistics solutions in the center of cities.
In bilateral meetings the topics of interest were explored, and the cities exchange on their experiences.
In a second step of the project, larger network meetings were organized in each working group. Here, the cities in the respective working group exchanged their experiences and presented inspiring implementation approaches. A variety of solution approaches and experience reports were exchanged here, including the creation of a pollution mapping and the e-mobility concept of Kigali, first last mile connectivity approaches in Buenos Aires, the development of the e-mobility hub in Quito, pop-up lanes in Berlin, environmental zones and bike lanes approaches in Belo Horizonte, the development of first bike lanes and app sharing concepts in Lalitpur, etc.
Based on this concrete exchange across the working groups, further bilateral experience exchange meetings were initiated to further develop initial ideas of prototypes. The prototypes included:
- Delivery/unloading areas and electronic transport via hubs in the old city of Buenos Aires
- Child-friendly and traffic-calming spaces in Bhuj
- Scaling up bicycle infrastructure projects and app-sharing solutions in Lalitpur.
Based on these prototypes, concrete project proposals were developed with the objective to start fund raising for the implementation of the initiatives. In the Urban Space working group, Bhuj will implement the project “Safe access to schools for children through child-friendly and traffic-calmed zones.” The mobility-urban space-energy working group developed a project for Belo Horizonte, the establishment of an urban ecology laboratory. The exchanges in the Mobility Working Group eventually led to the project “Applied Technology for Loading and Unloading Public Zones in Buenos Aires”.
Implementation of Green City Pioneer of Change Events
In addition to the internal network exchange in the working groups, other stakeholders from cities around the world were involved in the reflection process for new climate-neutral city solutions. For this purpose, two large “Green City Pioneer of Change” workshops were organized, where in each of them more than 50 international participants were presented. The events had the objective to share good practices as well as to reflect jointly on key success factors and challenges.
Detailed information
A variety of input speeches, video presentations, presentations, workshop results and good practices can be found on the Connective Cities website from various documented events:
Connective Cities Lab- Expert Input
with Climate City Expert Prof. Oliver Lah (Wuppertal Institut), 11. November 2021: https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/968
Participation of the three working groups in Design Thinking Workshops (15-17.11 2021):
https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/959
https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/960
https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/961
Working group meeting with exchange of good practices in the working group „Mobility“
https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/1102
Working group meeting with exchange of good practices in the working group Urban Space, Mobility, Energy (03.12.21)
https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/1095
First large Green City Pioneers of Change Event (19.01.2022)
https://community.connective-cities.net/en/node/1111
Second Green City Pioneers of Change Event (25.02.22)
Seeds for the Future
To address environmental challenges related to the loss of native species as well as the increasing CO2 emissions due to urbanisation, Karak municipality in Jordan constructed a nursery that aims at growing trees from native species. Besides demonstrating environmental protection and the transition into renewable energy sources, the project will have an economic impact resulting from the savings in the municipal budget as well as job creation for the local community.
Municipal Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic – MENA region
In the wake of the Pandemic, municipalities in the MENA region in both urban and rural areas need to rethink their modes of operation and accelerate their shift towards building resilience during the recovery process. In an effort to support municipalities that are members of the Connective Cities network in the MENA region, four thematic working groups were established as part of Connective Cities program ‘Municipal Recovery from the Pandemic.’ Objectives of this working group include promoting practice–oriented knowledge exchange between municipal and urban practitioners, facilitating peer learning on sustainable and innovative approaches to build resilience in cities through biodiversity and environmental protection, digitalisation of municipal services, and promoting social entrepreneurship for circularity. The program has resulted in the development of concrete urban solutions. Another outcome was the creation of partnerships between municipalities as well as with private sector actors to articulate the proposed solutions and scale up the impact. This report summarizes the main achievements until February 2022.