More and more people are living in cities as time goes on, and it appears that this trend will endure on into the future. Accordingly, these urban metropolises that people are both moving and being born into must undergo continual development in order to keep up with their growing populations. Here we face a dilemma. Space is limited in cities and the collective actions of thousands to millions of people are producing increasingly pronounced levels of pollution and waste. Cities’ current operations—from the local government down to the individual citizens—cannot proceed as they have been unchecked. Otherwise, we may irreversibly damage the environment and hurt the health and lives of countless people who make their homes in urban locations. Bearing all this in mind, examine these ways to build more sustainable cities and consider applying or advocating for these options in your area.
Find Places to Integrate Plants
You’ve probably heard of the urban heat island effect in passing somewhere. To briefly explain, an urban heat island describes a city or part of a city that experiences much higher temperatures than other more rural locations nearby. This can disrupt local ecosystems, especially those found in bodies of water, when animals and other organisms cannot adapt to the change fast enough. It can also cause people to use up more energy for indoor cooling.
Urban heat islands are created when most surfaces are dominated by building materials like concrete and when plants are largely absent. For sustainable urban development, a city can mitigate its effects by setting aside land for trees and vegetation in parks, as well as designing buildings to include plants on their rooftops or walls. Those plants will shade the ground and other surfaces and will cool the city as they release water through transpiration. In the process, people will also have nice spots to spend leisure moments amidst greenery.
Plants can also play a big part in bettering air quality by absorbing air pollutants including nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide. Due to their photosynthesis, plants also take in carbon dioxide, which many cities have an excess of, and release clean oxygen.
Retrofit Old Buildings
Old buildings may be serviceable for a variety of uses but are often not the most energy efficient for sustainable cities and communities. Since their inner systems are outdated, the people who occupy them may be using up more energy and resources than necessary. Property owners should work to carry out updates on old buildings’ components such as the HVAC system, windows, lighting, and water fixtures.
Paying attention to the first two allows for greater efficiency in that a building expends less gas and electricity on climate control. Newer HVAC systems can be designed with energy efficiency in mind, using less to achieve the same results as older equivalents. Better windows insulate the interior from the outside with multiple glass panels between which argon gas is injected to slow the rate of heat transfer through them.
Changing old incandescent or fluorescent lights to LEDs is another way to retrofit old buildings and develop sustainable cities. LED lights can save energy because they require less electricity to sustain and last significantly longer than their counterparts. As for water fixtures like sink faucets and toilets, there are modern models available that give off and use less water while still performing exceptionally.
Change City Government Policy
Making changes in city government policy can drive the shift from talks of sustainability to palpable action. This can cover a broad range of actions, however, so let’s look at some specific examples. For one, a city might create a recycling initiative to reduce its contribution to landfills. The government can set up bins for residents of a building to sort out and deposit their trash responsibly so that recyclable materials may be reutilized. Along with the bins, the policy would need to put in place dedicated workers who collect the recyclables and transport them to the correct facility.
Another illustration might be to target the city’s carbon dioxide emissions. The local government might lower speed limits in both residential and larger streets in order to promote less aggressive driving. As people accelerate less abruptly and travel at lower speeds in their vehicles, they will emit less exhaust fumes. Even small reductions can have a large impact when you think about just how many vehicles are on the road at any given time in a densely populated city. Furthermore, pedestrians and other drivers will be safer when drivers are going slower.
Share Spare Capacity
There are so many spaces in a city that could be better made use of. To start, companies and businesses may share buildings when they don’t need to take up all the space within. This is a practice that is already carried out in many places, but which can still be applied more frequently to combine more businesses together. It can benefit the work environment as well. Say, for instance, that multiple companies want access to a cafeteria and gym for their employees. One alone might not be able to afford it, but by sharing a building with other companies, they can take advantage of such facilities that are maintained by the contributions that they all make to the property owner. This is great because it contributes to sustainable urban development. A newer version of this is a co-working space where freelancers and other people who work individually can gather to share equipment and various office services without needing to find a dedicated space of their own.
Sharing spare capacity can also extend to vehicles in the form of carpooling. Groups of people who are traveling to the same location may all ride together in one car instead of driving by themselves. This saves space on the road and in parking areas. It also reduces the carbon footprint of each person who carpools.
Implement Mechanical Parking Systems
We can also change how we craft space utilization in the first place as a way to build more sustainable cities. With so many automobiles within urban areas, people often have difficulty finding parking spots once they reach their destination. In the end, they may need to park a long walk away from where they want to go or they may give up entirely and drive somewhere else. A city can make better use of its available space by implementing mechanical parking systems that reorganize typical approaches to constructing parking spaces.
There are different types of mechanical parking systems to choose from to cater to the unique requirements of a particular plot of land or those of the business or organization for which the system is being built. A semi-automatic parking system can be added to an already existing parking garage, for example, in order to add movable parking platforms above the floor. Normally, one level in a garage would only have cars parked on the ground. However, a semi-automatic system can double, triple or more the number of parking spaces by firmly suspending parking spots on top, or below the first set of cars parked on the ground. A semi-automated parking system will allow independent access to each vehicle.
A business or organization may also have a fully automatic parking system constructed to best use the small amount of horizontal land available. This kind of system can come in the form of vertically-built shelves in which an automatically-moving platform can store and retrieve multitudes of vehicles close together. This type of system saves space because the driver does not need to maneuver, enter, or exit the car while parking it. Rather, the system takes care of arranging the vehicles efficiently.
