Using a Connective Cities learning process, the municipality of Mitrovica in Kosovo drew up a roadmap to establish an umbrella organisation for the roughly 300 informal waste pickers in the city. This is designed to enable the waste pickers to improve their socio-economic situation and access to health care.
Category: Solid waste management and recycling
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.
Voices from Connective Cities – Madaba Municipality
The representatives of Madaba municipality in Jordan talk about the vital role of the Local Development Unit in forging partnerships as well as the municipality’s achievements in the field of digitalisation. The head of the Local Development Unit, Mr. Mohammed Abou Gaoud, confirms that the work done with Connective Cities in different thematic fields, for example crisis management, digitalisation and circular economy, will be reflected in Madaba’s local development strategy and will have a real impact.
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Voices from Connective Cities – Abasan Al-Kabira municipality
The representatives of Abasan Al-Kabira municipality in Palestine talk about how they are acting as Connective Cities’ Ambassador in Palestine, by organising several workshops for municipalities in Gaza to promote the regional network’s activities in different thematic areas such as crisis management, response to the Covid-19 pandemic, circular economy, local economic development and renewable energy. They also confirmed that working with Connective Cities on several projects and benefitting from knowledge exchange with their peers have enabled the municipality to progress in achieving its SDG-related targets and has resulted in developing capacities of the municipal employees.
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India Urban Data Exchange (IUDX)
To build cities of the future, which provide good quality of life, improved economic robustness, and harmony with nature, India needs unique solutions that are not only efficient but also offer services and benefits to all segments of society. It has chosen to leverage data in creating these solutions by facilitating the real-time sharing of data among stakeholders through an open, neutral, and secure platform, the India Urban Data Exchange (IUDX). IUDX is all about the use of data for public good and enabling data providers to create innovative services and generate value.
Partnerships for Circularity
Through strategic partnerships, Jerash municipality in Jordan was able to overcome impediments in solid waste management and embark on a path of circularity. By partnering with multiple stakeholders, the municipality succeeded in designing strategies for effective solid waste management and overcoming challenges related to insufficient operating budget, low collection coverage, waste dumping, and the associated environmental and public health concerns.
Voices from Connective Cities – Jerash municipality
Representatives from the Jordan municipality of Jerash tell how they have benefited from the exchange with other experts at the events and workshops organised by Connective Cities. They were able to take away many ideas for their own projects in the areas of gender-sensitive local economic development, waste management and plastic recycling, which aim at a zero-waste municipality.
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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)
First planning steps for a pilot composting plant
Waste management experts from the Ecuadorian capital Quito and Hamburg (Germany) designed a first pilot composting plant for organic waste. It intends to serve the city of Quito as an introduction to sustainable waste recycling.