FedEx and WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities are working together to catalyze sustainable urban transport solutions to improve the quality of life for people around the world. The Mobility and Accessibility Program (MAP) leverages FedEx’s expertise in vehicle patterns, transport technology, and driver safety and WRI Ross Center's solution-driven approach to help cities build a better tomorrow.
Maps & Data
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Alain Bertaud is a senior research scholar at the NYU Stern Urbanization Project. His main area of research is the impact of markets, transportation, and regulations on urban form.
Urban productivity and creativity increases with the size of labor markets. However, the number of workers in an urban area indicate only the potential size of the labor market. Effective labor markets are defined by workers ability to reach any job in an urban area in less than one hour commute. Beyond this commuting time productivity decreases.
China's National Development and Reform Commission’ s National Plan on New Urbanization (2014-2020) has identified 11 existing urban clusters where investments in infrastructure will be concentrated. The size of the 5 larger clusters range from 60 to 110 million people. The current mode split between city buses, BRT, subway and suburban rail, individual cars and freight trucks will be unable to integrate such large labor markets. Is there a possibility that new transport technology could serve such large labor markets? Or does the maximum labor market size has already be reached in metropolitan areas like Tokyo and Mexico city?
Brian Arbogast is a Director of Global Development for Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He leads the foundation’s effort to bring groundbreaking innovations in sanitation technology and new ways to deliver sanitation products and services to people in the developing world. Arbogast was previously a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Corporation, leading an international portfolio of R&D projects. More recently, he concentrated in clean-tech and international development, driving market solutions to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges. He served as a Senior Advisor with The Boston Consulting Group and as a board member of the Northwest Energy Angels and of Water1st International. He is a founding board member of Progress Alliance of Washington and an advisor to Upaya Social Ventures.
Reliable sanitation is an essential element of any thriving city, a required precursor to economic development and reduction of disease. The traditional approach has been to invest in sewer networks and wastewater treatment plants, even though they require huge commitment of capital to install, and significant ongoing investments - in highly trained staff to maintain and operate, replacement parts, electricity, and water - to keep them functioning.
Between now and 2030, the cities of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia will see faster growth than any other region. Many of these cities are already experiencing water stresses, and as populations increase and climates change, these stresses will only grow. Such cities will simply not have the capacities to provide reliable sanitation via traditional water-borne systems.
To address this growing crisis, we need transformative innovation in our sanitation systems, from how services are organized, at the city level, to the new technologies that we will rely on. Catalyzing this system-wide innovation is the focus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene program, and in this talk the program's director, Brian Arbogast, will share why solving the sanitation challenge is central to making developing cities healthy, livable, and more equal, and reveal the progress being made by the program's partners that gives him confidence that the necessary transformation is achievable.
The number of people in South Asia’s cities rose by 130 million between 2000 and 2011—more than the entire population of Japan. This was linked with an improvement in productivity and a reduction in the incidence of extreme poverty. But the region’s cities have struggled to cope with the pressure of population growth on land, housing, infrastructure, basic services, and the environment. As a result, urbanization in South Asia remains underleveraged in its ability to deliver widespread improvements in both prosperity and livability. The World Bank’s recently launched Flagship report Leveraging Urbanization in South Asia is about the state of South Asia’s urbanization and the market and policy failures that have taken the region’s urban areas to where they are today—and the hard policy actions needed if the region’s cities are to leverage urbanization better. It provides original empirical and diagnostic analysis of urbanization and related economic trends in the region. It also discusses in detail the key policy areas—the most fundamental being urban governance and finance—where actions must be taken to make cities more prosperous and livable.
One of the most exciting developments in urban sustainability research and policy in recent years has been the emergence of ‘ecohacking’. Beginning around 5 years ago, we’ve witnessed the emergence of a swathe of innovations applying the latest data science and web technology to drive sustainable behaviors and the uptake of efficient appliances, renewables and other technologies. This seminar will provide a snapshot of recent work emerging from Australia.
Key subjects will include: 1) processes and tools for integrating, analyzing and visualizing urban environmental performance data including web-based data platforms and browser-based interactive visualization tools 2) analyses and tools for simulating and forecasting the energy and water requirements of buildings, precincts and cities including end use modelling, building and appliance stock modelling and building services modelling 3) analyses and tools for assessing alternative energy and water servicing opportunities including efficiency measures (e.g. efficient appliances), distributed resource measures (solar PV, rainwater harvesting) and network infrastructure measures (e.g. network augmentations)
The seminar will attempt to draw links with recent work in the US, with a view to identify collaboration opportunities between Australia and the US.
Mathis Wackernagel, Ph.D., is co-creator of the Ecological Footprint and CEO of Global Footprint Network (www.footprintnetwork.org), an international sustainability think-tank. The think-tank focuses on bringing about a sustainable human economy in which all can live well, within the means of one planet. It proposes the Ecological Footprint, which measures how much nature we use, how much nature we have, as a tool for bringing ecological limits to the center of decision-making everywhere. Mathis has worked on sustainability on six continents and lectured at more than a hundred universities. From 2011to 2014 Mathis was also a visiting professor at Cornell University. His awards include the 2015 IAIA Global Environment Award, the 2013 Prix Nature Swisscanto, the 2012 Blue Planet Prize, the 2012 Binding-Prize for Nature Conservation, the 2012 Kenneth E. Boulding Memorial Award of the International Society for Ecological Economics, the 2011 Zayed International Prize for the Environment, an honorary doctorate from the University of Berne in 2007, a 2007 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, a 2006 WWF Award for Conservation Merit and the 2005 Herman Daly Award of the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics.
By 2050 the world population is expected to reach 10 billion people, with 70-80% living in urban areas. At the same time, the availability of natural capital is becoming a limiting factor for sustaining economic activity. Therefore, cities that want to be able to secure thriving lives for all their residents need to find ways to advance wellbeing, within the resource budget of nature. How can cities secure the required physical resources without depleting natural capital? How can they thrive on a limited resource budget? What is the role of cities, both to avoid risks and seize opportunities? If we do not measure what we treasure, we will not be able to manage cities successfully. Cities need better decision tools that take resource availability into account. This presentation explores how cities can track their overarching performance in a world increasingly defined by climate change and resource constraints. It identifies key metrics for understanding risks and for turning every budget decision into an opportunity for advancing lasting well-being. Ultimately, the rapid urbanization trends can become a force for lasting poverty eradication, if managed well.
Given that 40-70% of cities have people working and living in informality the inability of existing instruments to address their needs aspirations and impact of their invisibility of their lives and that of the city they live in are barely touched in the SDG and Climate change discourse.
Emerging networks and social movements of the urban poor have begun to create simple powerful and unique ways to equip themselves with knowledge, with proposition and emerging voice and actions at local national and global forums.
While Slum Dwellers International ( SDI) and other such movements are being observed studies invited to events, the inability of formal institutional arrangements to take advantage of such organized and articulate representation is timid, fearful and demonstrates an inability of mainstream development organizations to overcome their aversion, phobia or even non recognition about urbanization which is dumping more and more poor into informality.
What are the real development challenges? When will development interventionist acknowledge that the solution will not come out of business as usual and both climate linked challenges and SDGs need new scalable solution which require new audacious solutions new partnerships and new explorations. What are the implications? Who will pay this price for denial? What are some emerging indications of the extent of violence this will bring into cities in the near future.