Ten Years of SE² #6: Bright Lights, Big Cities

Looking back over a ten year period, it becomes easier to see the big trends that have been developing over time. One of those trends is the discussion of sustainability in cities.

It seems a long time ago (OK, it’s seven years) that we were mapping the landscape for sustainable skills in London for the then Mayor. Since then, we have worked directly with the eight Core Cities in England through the Low Carbon Cities Programme, helping them develop internal capacity and engage wider stakeholders with citywide sustainable energy initiatives, and helped the same cities develop spectacular public events to showcase pathways to sustainability as part of a project with CABE. Going full circle, we have worked with the current Mayor and the GLA to develop pan-London responses to new policies like ECO and the Green Deal.

What we’ve learned: some things really do benefit from a citywide approach. The geographical distinctions between neighbourhoods and boroughs are important, but they can sometimes make us miss the shared opportunities that cross official boundaries. District heating schemes are a case in point: it took joint working over at least a decade between Southwark and Lewisham Councils to deliver heat from SELCHP (in Lewisham) to homes in Southwark. Our own work developing the London Fuel Poverty Hub aims to address the same sort of barrier: the Hub provides information about fuel poverty services across all the London Boroughs. Health and charity workers were struggling to find information which would help their client groups: the Hub puts all that information in one place.

Cities present many challenges, often interconnected: the great demographic wave of expansion; aging infrastructure; the need to move people and things ever faster and in greater quantities; inequalities in health and wealth; lack of local resources meaning that everything has to come from somewhere and everything has to go somewhere in the end.

But cities obviously provide an opportunity. They can be healthier, safer, more energy efficient. Models for future living are emerging in our cities that those in developing economies can imitate; there’s the chance for those new cities to leapfrog developed cities by learning from our mistakes and skipping the unsustainable steps.

The opportunity seems most manageable in a city of a certain size: Bristol, maybe, or Freiburg or Ghent. Beyond a certain size, perhaps things spiral out of control – or they are harder to constrain. This leads to a discussion about the extent to which you can or even should centrally plan cities, rather than allowing them to develop organically and based on local need.

SE² is best known for its work related to energy, but we have advised clients on sustainable transport, procurement, waste, education, social justice and public health. One thing that is very clear when you think about cities is that you can’t think about any of these challenges in isolation. If you’re thinking about energy, you also need to be thinking about travel, waste, water, land use, green spaces, housing quality, commercial and industrial space, air quality, to name but a few. And that requires a different kind of thinking. Some of the work emerging from the new Future Cities Catapult is very exciting, and the move towards “smart cities” in general appears very positive. Our note of caution, perhaps, is that technology cannot solve every problem. Cities are made up of people, and people don’t always behave the way that we expect. If people are at the heart of the climate change debate, then citizens should very much be at the heart of how their cities develop.

What do you think the future holds for our cities? Can a city ever be sustainable? Let us know your views, by emailing liz.warren@se-2.co.uk or contacting us on Twitter: @se2limited.