The sponge city p

Student:

Emanuel Hempel

Study:

The sponge city : An analysis of the positive externalities resulting from such city projects

Keywords:

city-scale, water

Due to impressive annual economic growth, transforming china in the last 3 decades, the government has been able to put increased focus on transforming cities, or even building new ones that focus on the future and make up for mistakes made in the past.

A prime example of such urban development is the city of Wuhan, which due to urbanization has lost 97 of its lakes since the 1980s. The city is built around the merging rivers of Yangtze and Han, which had made it prone to floods, that are especially apparent in during the monsoon season. A pivotal point of this city’s future came, when in 2016, after a week of heavy rainfall metro stations and roads where completely flooded.

The economic damages of 263 million dollars also came with a humanitarian disaster costing 14 lives. Belonging to one of Chinas 16 sponge cities, efforts to deal with the reoccurring issue with accelerated after the flooding of 2016. A total of 228 pilot projects in the districts of Qingshan and Sixin alone, saw changes being made to public spaces, schools and residential areas in the shape and form of sponge features. Roughly 38.5 km2 have been subject to landscaping costing 1.5 billion dollars.

A prime example of such a project is the Nanganqu park, which in 2018, was transformed into a sponge site. New additions include rain gardens, permeable pavements, grass swales, artificial ponds and wetlands. These features absorb excessive amounts of water through the process of soil infiltration, retaining in in under ground storage tanks and tunnels, until it can be discharged into the river. Wen Mei Dubbelaar, director of a water management firm, summarizes this concept beautifully stating that the aim is to ““give space back to the river ... [instead of] fighting the water“.

Aside from minimizing damages caused by excessive flooding, sponge cities and sites have a variety of additional benefits. First of all the successfully combat the urban heat island effect, reducing temperatures in Wuhan by 2-3 degrees in such areas as the Nanganqu park. Additionally they create better air quality,

mimic natural water cycles, sediment control,

reduced water treatment and equipment maintenance costs and water purification. On the other hand these projects require extensive urban remodeling, are very expensive and don’t generate immediate economic benefit making them hard for undeveloped communities to implement.

Student:

Ghali Laraqui

Study:

PowerWindows: The case of glass solar panels

Keywords:

energy, building-scale

Physee offers great opportunity for clean and sustainable energy production and consumption. With solar panel’s manufacturing cost process becoming rapidly cheaper and more efficient, large corporations and households should take into account building their own self-sustaining environment energetically.

Tall skyscraper offers a lot of surface space to build solar panels that can convert solar energy into electricity that would charge your smartphone and support light and electrical systems. The technology is indeed very tricky to develop, yet Physee has been able to create a feasible way to implement such innovation. The great advantage of Physee’s product, PowerWindow, is that such windows would be transparent, looking like a more traditional glass window, and produce energy. Such design places small solar panels on each window’s edge. This equipment would allow to produce small amount of power continuously, hence having, in the long term, strong impact, both as expense saving and as a model for clean energy production and efficiency. Yet, even if this amount might appear irrelevant, storage space in buildings are very important and so this technology can be implemented with strong return to scale. Nevertheless, this technology cannot supply power to an entire building yet. The product offers a range of other interesting, energy optimizing options, as they come equipped with sensors that detect exterior environment conditions and adapt the current energy consumption of the building’s light and air conditioning systems automatically.

The latest advancements on the installment of this technology shows that few companies have taken the leap so far. Notably, the Dutch bank Rabobank has installed PowerWindows over their300 square feet building.

In the Netherlands too, Physee has signed a myriad of contracts to install their PowerWindows over the next few years. There has already been an attempt by a building designed by Ron Bakker, “The Edge”, in Amsterdam, which includes several sensors that decreased energy consumption by environmental automatic adjustments. As well, it has solar panels on its roof and on solar windows on the South facing side of the building. It also uses heat energy stored deep in the Earth, and as a result the building uses 70% less electricity than comparable buildings.

Where a lot of sky scrapers are built, if such technology were to be implemented at such large scale along with a high available capacity to store energy, it would have definitely made the city more self- sufficient by cutting its overall energy consumption and reduce its greenhouse emission footprint.

Student:

Mikhail Frantsuzov

Study:

SeeClickFix & Songdo : Local Efficient Communication vs Smart City Master-Planning.

Keywords:

automation, city-scale

Our society is fully dependent on technology and information. From management to communication, from a national to an individual scale, we are all hooked on it. And sometimes the potential of the technology can be exploited for various goals aimed at profit or other gains with many people if not cities left confused and irritated as a result.

SeeClickFix (SCF) enabled citizens to communicated efficiently with local authorities and contrast it with an example of a promised Smart City development in South Korea -Songdo. Information and communication technologies created another layer in a web of city infrastructures, a vital and yet an invisible one. On paper, various ICT initiatives look promising and offer multiple benefits. Such is an example of a Smart City concept where the city systems and infrastructures are interconnected through ICT and thus deliver a more responsive environment, more optimized resource usage and else.

However, when implemented at once and globally, the smart city concept and its ICT technologies can be disappointing: “Smart city project tend to be utopian in nature and deal with urban problems in a techno-scientific manner. The premise of most of these corporate plans is based solely on smart technologies and data optimization, and they often neglect the role of spatial form or citizen agency in finding urban solutions.”. Such is the case with Songdo - “ecofriendly master-planned utopia” city built entirely on reclaimed land next to the highly congested capital

Seoul and promising a future built on self-sufficient living. “Living here should be paradise. Technology is ubiquitous. There are no trash trucks; rubbish is pneumatically “sucked out” of houses, recycled to generate electricity.” The reality though is a ghost town where people experiencea “Chernobyl-like emptiness” . In a quest for the ultimate techno-utopia and selfsufficiency, the builders of Songdo forgot about those factors that make residents happy.

Roughly at the same time but in the other part of the world, a smaller initiative was taken to be implemented quickly and solve a specific problem. “To reduce administrative workloads, improve response time for 311 requests, and promote efficiency in triaging available resources, the City of New Haven sought an innovative, front-end solution to connect with residents and improve communities.” SeeClickFix used ICT to

solve administrative communication issues related

to environment and infrastructure, allowing anyone to submit a claim regarding these spheres.

Essentially, the web-based (and now an app) service created a system where individuals act as nodes and input their data pieces to solve a specific larger problem - from a broken pavement to fluctuations in a state electricity grid. The data and agents get centralized and the problem is solved in the fastest possible time and with minimal resources.