Sustainable cities in an uncertain future

SUMMARY
On Wednesday the 19th March, over 240 people came to an evening event at the Science Festival co-hosted the Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and the Environment, Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) and the Energy@Cambridge Initiative where panel of speakers both from the Forum and expert witnesses gave their vision of a sustainable city. While they were talking, the audience were asked to write their answers to two questions:
1) If you were planning a sustainable city, what would you include in it?
2) What do you think are the most important ingredients in a sustainable city?
A broad variety of ideas were put forward, ranging from more places for nature within cities to designing the streets and suburbs we live in to improve our health and wellbeing. This is the transcript of the event.

This event was co-hosted by:
Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and the Environment
Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP)
Energy@Cambridge Initiative

PANEL
Dr Moira Faul from the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP) chaired the discussion and the speakers were (in speaking order):
Professor Doug Crawford-Brown Director, Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR), Department of Land Economy
Professor Larry Sherman Director of the Institute of Criminology
Dr Britt Baillie Affiliated Lecturer: Department of Archaeology and Research Member, Centre for Urban Conflicts Research,
Mark Kleinman Director of Economic and Business Policy at the Greater London Authority

Initials of the speakers
Duration: 0:57:00
Initials Name
RA Dr Rosamunde Almond
MVF Dr Moira Faul
DC-B Professor Doug Crawford- Brown
LS Professor Larry Sherman
BB Dr Britt Baillie
MK Mark Kleinman
SD Dr Sumi David
Q Questions from the audience

TRANSCRIPT

RA: So good evening everybody and thank you very much for coming to this Science Festival event on sustainable cities in an uncertain future. Of course all the future is uncertain but we've got four fantastic panellists and a Chair to be able to talk us through some ideas around sustainable cities. What are the ingredients of sustainable cities are some of the questions on the cards in front of you. What visions of sustainable cities do we have?

And to bring this together there are three groups and centres from across the University who are co-hosting this, so before we start I'll just give you a bit of a picture of who they are. So my name is Rosamunde Almond, I'm from the Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and the Environment. That's a new forum in the University founded last year that aims to stimulate cross disciplinary conversations about sustainability and the environment and some of the research that will help us prepare for the big global challenges that face us in the future. The overarching theme for this year which is where the title came from is sustainability in an uncertain future and we're focusing on cities at the moment which is why we were really interested in hosting this.

Then we've got the Energy at Cambridge Initiative, that brings together activities of 250 academics across the University who are all working in energy-related research in some way. There are technology focused areas on the supply of energy, the conversion, the demand is where the cities come into the energy initiative itself and then crosscutting themes including energy efficiency, policy, economics and risk and Sumi David will be telling you a little bit more about that when she wraps up at the end.

And then the third initiative centre that is part of this is the Centre for Science and Policy. And so that's another bridge, all three organisations are bridges but this one helps the sciences and technology to serve society by promoting engagement between researchers and policy professionals and one of their new programmes which
Moira will tell you a little bit about is a policy challenges programme. And what that does is it brings decision-makers together with researchers on five challenges, again cities is one of those and we're working with them on the components of sustainable cities and the policies needed to support them.

And so as I said at the beginning when you came in you've got little cards with some questions on and we'd really like you to write down your thoughts, things that strike you as the speakers are talking and these will feed into the outputs that we are producing, helping to pick up the key ideas that you're most interested in. And if you want to hear more about energy sustainability, about policy, please add your name and your e-mail to the card and we’ll contact you about other events in the future.

So without further ado Moira Faul is going to be chairing this evening so I'll introduce her. She is originally from Zimbabwe, she recently completed a PhD in global policy networks. Prior to this she was Head of Youth Policy at Oxfam and held senior managerial positions in the private sector in Spain and in China. So Moira thank you very much.

MVF: Thank you Roz. So I'm chairing the very distinguished speakers that we have tonight. So first what I'm going to do is introduce our four exciting speakers that we are very fortunate to have with us tonight, before getting into the meat of their presentations and then once that is finished we’ll be able to take questions from the floor.

So first of all we have Professor Larry Sherman who is third from your left, thank you Larry, who is the Director of the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University. He spent four decades doing field experiments, crime analysis and training with big city police forces from New York to London, from Mumbai to Sydney, relentlessly using science to try to make cities safer and also more sustainable.

Next to Larry we have Dr Britt Baillie who is a founding member of the Centre for Urban Conflicts Research and an Affiliated Lecturer in Archaeology here at Cambridge too. Last year she co-edited a book called Locating Urban Conflicts with Wendy Pullan which has been nominated for a prestigious award for best urban sociology book of last year. Mark Kleinman is Director of the Economic and Business Policy for the Greater London Authority and he is the senior official supporting the Mayor of London and his team on the jobs and growth agenda for London, including the Smart London plan and a targeted 250,000 apprenticeships to start in London over four years.

And our first speaker on the extreme left is Professor Doug Crawford-Brown. He is the Director of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research within the Land Economy Department and facilitator of the communitywide Cambridge Retrofit Programme. He will start us off by addressing how the Cambridge Retrofit Programme is coping with uncertainty in choosing what to retrofit, how and on what schedule to make Cambridge more sustainable.

DC-B: Right, so five minutes for Cambridge Retrofit, that's about all that is going to be needed. Cambridge Retrofit, just so you know, is an attempt to retrofit let's say 65,000 buildings in the city of Cambridge. Actually that's a bit of a lie, 5,000 of them nobody would even think about touching, 10,000 of them probably need to be just knocked down and rebuilt, but that still leaves plenty of buildings to deal with through retrofit.

So I'm just very quickly going to give you a sort of core idea about how Cambridge Retrofit is working which may be a bit orthogonal to where you thought I was going to go with this. I've given the Cambridge Retrofit talk too many times, I'm not doing it again, I'm taking a different angle on this one.
Cities like Cambridge contain a lot of structures, buildings, infrastructure and so forth but the one I'm going to speak about now is the economy and the economy of the city of Cambridge and I don't mean this because of a red box and George Osborne today. I mean it because we tend to think of an economy of Cambridge as being money passing through hands, and it is that but it really can be equally thought of and I think more fruitfully thought of as a way of extracting material and energy out of the earth, transforming it into human needs here in Cambridge, putting it back out in terms of services in Cambridge, but also putting it out in terms of waste and therefore perturbing the environment, perturbing the health of people in Cambridge.

So a sustainable city, and certainly the way in which Cambridge Retrofit thinks of a sustainable city is one that supports an economy, okay? I'm not saying a free market, it supports an economy, that meets justified human needs and so we're all about meeting those needs, while extracting energy and material resources, sending it out as waste. In the case of Cambridge Retrofit it’s waste that has to do with carbon dioxide, but sending it out at rates that can be replaced or assimilated in the external environment which means that there is a sort of natural limit to the amount that this economy is able to pull out of the earth, stick back into the atmosphere in some way.
In order to do that, in order to reach sustainability in a place like Cambridge we've got to and Cambridge Retrofit is geared towards reducing material use, closing material cycles and greatly increasing the energy efficiency of our buildings, our infrastructure and so on. However, that is not so much a problem of technology as we are finding with Cambridge Retrofit, it's a problem of behaviour and governance and therefore Cambridge Retrofit focuses a lot on behaviour and governance.

Now when you throw behaviour into the mix, the behaviour of you when you go home, when you live in your buildings and so forth, you have the problem that behaviour and government is in many ways almost impossible to predict. I mean every time we think we understand what a technology is going to do, for example we bring in a retrofit, your building is now much more energy efficient and you drive down your energy use, well no you don't, you drive up the interior temperature of your home. And it's almost impossible, I would argue in many ways it is impossible, to predict how this behaviour is going to occur so that causes a lot of uncertainty.

Now what do you do when you're faced with uncertainty? In the case of Cambridge Retrofit what we've decided is that we cannot hyper-plan the city of Cambridge, we cannot hyper-plan or hyper-engineer any of our cities for sustainability because this uncertainty will be an inherent limitation and as a result what we need in a sustainable city like Cambridge, and Cambridge Retrofit is designed to do this, is a mechanism to place a monitoring system in the city of Cambridge and use the city of Cambridge as an experiment and test whether the various things we're doing are working or not working over the course of decades.

I’ll end by saying that in order for that to work a city can't be afraid to experiment. There will be failures in Cambridge Retrofit. Clean deal, okay? There will be not complete failure but it's teetering on the edge and we run the same threat with Cambridge Retrofit so we must be able to adjust as we get information flowing in and that's going to require politicians for example who are willing to say we tried an experiment, it didn't work, we're going to change the rules slightly. It requires businesses willing to do that, it requires citizens who are willing to say that well it's okay that Cambridge Retrofit tried the following things, those things didn't work but these things may work within Cambridge Retrofit. So I'm making a pitch here at the end for a recognition, a formal recognition of uncertainty which is dealt with by monitoring what happens in Cambridge over the next 30 years as these retrofit projects go forward and using our governance structures to change our direction and not fool ourselves into thinking we can plan right now in 2014 what Cambridge is going to look like and be sustainable in the year 2050. So that's all I’m going to say. Did I get anywhere close to seven minutes?

MVF: Thank you very much Doug for the insightful comments. Larry Sherman will now give a few examples of how evidence-based policing has had some initial successes in improving urban life.

LS: Evidence-based policing is simply the idea of using experiments to get better public safety and better justice. You have counter examples of that: Detroit is an experiment in what happens if the police shoot people when there is no justification, when they systematically discriminate against one race in favour of another and in the summer of 1967 that led to an explosion that is known as the Detroit Riot, over 40 people died, massive amounts of property was burned and the result is today that Detroit is not only bankrupt but it's just about disappearing. Large parts of it are turning back into prairie grass. So if we want to know what a sustainable city is we might want to start with the definition of what it is not and Detroit does a very good job, Camden New Jersey across the river from Philadelphia has the same pattern.

Now if you remember the London riots of 2011 you might think that it was a test of the resilience of London that such a terrible riot could happen, probably the worst one since World War II, that the city didn't really suffer in its economic trajectory and its rapid growth you'll hear more about from Mark Kleinman. And yet if you just do another thought experiment about the London riots, suppose they had that one week and then two weeks later they had another one, two weeks later they had another one, and at what point in the dosage response curve would you find people not wanting to live in London or even visit London. In fact in Paris they would say well people don't really want to visit London as much as they want to visit Paris. And the people who went to Paris today ran into yet another experiment, the experiment was that because the air pollution was so bad only people with odd numbered licence plates could drive into the city, and so the police started stopping people who had licence plates ending in zero and the drivers said “I thought zero was an odd number”. But what could have happened was the police could have started shooting people and in fact when they did that in 2005 in one of the satellite cities which is an ethnic ghetto, 10,000 cars were set on fire in the next week and so the cities around Paris are not sustainable in part because of police practice.

Which brings us back to London and what's going on in London since the 2011 riot is a series of experiments with police wearing cameras on their collars. And these cameras, as a Cambridge University experiment demonstrated in a medium-sized city in California called Rialto, these cameras where they were randomly assigned to some shifts and not others managed to reduce complaints against the police by 90% and to reduce the use of force by police in citizen encounters by 60%. The theory is that it finally creates a witness to situations that historically have only had two people and a ‘he said, he said’ situation can't be resolved in terms of justice or follow up. There are now seven replications of that California-Cambridge experiment that are now becoming Cambridge experiments around Britain, including one here in Cambridgeshire that is about to be launched and we are hopeful that we will see improvements in police legitimacy, in the sense of justice and fairness, in the accountability of the police because of the video record.

If you recall what triggered the London riots in 2011, somebody carrying a gun according to police intelligence named Mark Duggan, either did or didn't point a gun at a police officer who then shot him and killed him, the gun wasn’t found right next to his body so it raised all these difficult issues. I think there are consistent explanations with the gun being someplace else at the end of the entire encounter, but not enough to satisfy a lot of people who don't believe it and think the police were lying and that the police murdered Mark Duggan. Had there been a camera, as many people including officials in government point out, there might have been, not with any certainty, but certainly better chance that there would have been a clear resolution. In fact if the videotape had been released a few hours after the event there might not have been even protest demonstrations, let alone a riot. Or even better, based on our Rialto experiment, maybe the police wouldn't have had to shoot, maybe there would have been a complete agreement of what's going to happen next without having a conflict.

These are some of the things you can find out when you start doing enough experiments to provide a basis for police policy decisions. We've had lots of new technologies that have been rolled out in the past without proper testing that may have been a huge waste of money. When we got around to testing CCTV cameras for example in public spaces to see whether they reduce violence in cities the accumulated weight of over 70 tests now suggest that they don't, that in fact a lot of people like to commit murder and wave at the camera while they’re shooting somebody. It's pretty grisly to see how a camera can provoke exactly the kind of defiance of the law that you would have hoped it was going to deter.

But it's not only cameras, it's not only technologies, there's also analytics that are being used in policing, predictive analytics that then lead to the identification of the highest crime places, the highest crime times and the highest crime offenders that are identified in police records. The big data approach to mapping crime in time and space for example finds that over half of all the crime occurs in just less than 5% of the land space in a city. Historically since 1829 the police were told to patrol everywhere. But with the modern use of transportation and other things that concentrate people in certain places and not other places what we found is that the police can get far greater crime prevention by concentrating their own patrols where and when crime is most likely to occur.
Now 25 experiments have been done on that policy, quite a few of them now in the UK, and they're all finding consistently that it’s not only preventing crime in those hotspots, it's also not having the problem of pushing the crime someplace else like a balloon. Because as a very elegant study by my colleague Per-Olof Wikström in Peterborough shows, even high crime offenders tend to concentrate their crimes in high crime locations. You will be reassured to know that we've even tested this in the tube in London where crime is very low to begin with but there were a few platforms that had high rates of crime and so the idea of patrolling those platforms was introduced and now crime is down even more across the system. It's so safe to go on the metro in London that you'd be better off living there than up on the streets. Thank you very much.

MVF: Thank you Larry from those fascinating insights into how evidence has enabled the police to sustain a good living. Next Britt Baillie will talk to us about the lessons for the future from historic cities, particularly on issues such as urban conflict and cultural sustainability.

BB: Well I'm very glad that we just had this talk about criminality because we can see from recent UN report that violence in cities outside of warfare are actually having death tolls which are exceeding cities which are in states of war. So the urban violence question is a very big one.

But I want to think more about warfare itself and its impact on urban sustainability. If we think about the 20th Century this city has not only become a target during warfare, we can think of the aerial bombardment of the Second World War, but it's also become a place from which conflict emerges and we can see that particularly in the Arab Spring and the conflicts of the last decade. And urban conflict has a massive environmental impact, if we think about the rubble that is created by thousands of buildings that are being destroyed in Syria right now and then the carbon footprint that is involved in reconstructing all of those buildings. We can also think about the environmental impact when putting together types of infrastructure like sewage infrastructure are damaged during urban conflicts. So in Baghdad for example a sewage plant was hit by a US missile and it's now pumping hundreds of tonnes of sewage into the river every single day. So these episodes of war, even though they may be quite short term in terms of when the conflict is actually occurring, can have very long term implications running into the tens of years and into massive carbon emissions when we're thinking about the reconstruction process.

Now I want to change my hat a little bit and speak as an archaeologist, because I think there's some really valuable lessons that we can learn from historic cities which apply to our ideas about urban sustainability today. So if we look at some of the tests that have been done on stalacmites in Mexico we can see that the great Mayan cities that were planned there, they were planned for a time of plenty, they were planned to have a certain amount of agriculture that would be brought into the cities to be able to sustain the population in those cities. However the stalacmites tell us that there was a 200 year drought, something that the Mayans hadn't planned for and something which led to the demise or was one of the factors that led to the demise of those cities.

Another city, Angkor in Southeast Asia, we can see there it was the largest pre-industrial city in the world with a population of over a million and overuse of the forest around the city led to siltation of the water resources which in turn meant that they couldn't sustain the population within the city, so leading to depopulation again.
So we can see that cities that are planned for a time of plenty without thinking what might happen when those resources aren't as readily available can mean the demise of cities.

And finally I want to think about the notion of cultural sustainability. Most of the urban sustainability debates that we have centre on the sort of more scientific carbon aspects or the energy use, reducing energy use, there's retrofitting etc, but what I would like to argue is that a truly sustainable city is a place that we actually want to live in. It has to be a place that has a desirable environment and in part the historic environment we can see in some places that offers many people, like here in Cambridge for example, it's one of the desirable places to live because of that historical environment. So even if the carbon emissions are high here because of the older structures they draw in people and help retain people. But one of the things that we see is that in the process of retrofitting and in regeneration of urban quarters where you actually end up happening sometimes is what we call renovictions. So basically what happens is that the prices for the structures in which people live go up, the rents go up so much that the population can no longer afford to live there and therefore we get dispersal from those areas and gentrification.
So while we need to think about carbon sustainability we also need to think about our historic environment as a finite resource which is not going to be…we can't reproduce a historic building, we can make a copy of it but it will never be that authentic building, so we need to treat our historic environment as a scarce and finite resource as well. Thank you.

MVF: Very insightful Britt, thank you. And finally we have a policy practitioner in addition to our researchers here to pull together some of these ideas. Mark Kleinman from the Greater London Authority will speak about the role of city leaders in promoting more sustainable cities and a smarter approach to urban growth in the city.

MK: Okay, thank you. As Moira said I'm speaking to you as a practitioner, I used to be an academic and one of the things that I think has changed a lot between the time I was an academic and now that I actually work in city policy is that city leaders and national governments now get it about cities. So when I was working in academe we kept trying to tell people that cities were the future, that the majority of the population worldwide was going to be living in cities and at that point there was very little traction. That's changed a lot and policymakers both at a national and a city level are very aware of the fact that most of the sustainability challenges that you've heard a little bit about already, if they're going to be solved they're going to be solved within cities.

From a London perspective I'm talking to you as an official for a city which is growing at around 100,000 people every year, about half of that is from natural increase, that is a young population who are having families and about half of that is from migration, about 30,000 to 35,000 jobs per year. This is an enormous rate of growth for the UK. It's roughly equivalent to a new London borough, so there are 32 boroughs in London, there's a new one mushrooming out of the ground every three years, it's a city the size of Birmingham every decade. That is a rate of growth which we haven't seen in London or in Britain really since the early to mid-19th Century. If we're going to continue to live in a city which is sustainable we have to accommodate and support that growth in a very different way than we have done over the last 200 years. We have to think in a different way about where we live, where we work, how we get between where we live and where we work, how we use energy, how we use water, how we deal with waste. And exactly the kind of cycle which Doug talked about at the beginning in relation to Cambridge exactly applies to London and two other megacities of an order of magnitude greater again around the world.

So for us quality of life and the liveability of the city is key. It's key obviously to individual citizens and households and how they experience daily life, it's also for me as the lead official on economic policy it's key to investment. We live in a world where capital and where skilled labour is ever more free to locate wherever it wants. If your city doesn't offer a good quality of life, and that’s everything from air quality through to provision of health services, through to schools, through to feeling safe on the street as Larry was talking to you about, or in the tube - I like that line Larry, in fact the Mayor could well have written that line for you I think. But that's an absolutely key ingredient to attracting people and jobs to the city. And finally I think it's also very important because in the end politicians and bureaucrats such as me are able to do things because we have the consent of voters and if we lose that consent then our legitimacy has vanished. What are we doing? We are trying to look at this in a systematic way and I think understanding the city as a system rather than a series of separate issues is quite new for city leaders and that is where we are looking for the best knowledge and the best research worldwide. So understanding the city as a system, making use of new technologies, the fact that there are smart chips embodied in just about everything, in a way which enables us to support that growth in a better way is very important.

The key sort of issues which flow from that: housing, which is probably the number one issue in London, how do we accommodate a growing population in a way which has a much lower carbon footprint than we've done in the past? How do we invest in a sustainable way in transport? The largest engineering project in Europe is the Crossrail Tunnel which is currently being dug under London west-east. We are in the planning stages of a north-south Crossrail 2, and it looks like we're going to need a Crossrail 3 and a Crossrail 4 as well. How do we do this in a sustainable way and how do we fund this kind of huge infrastructure? We're relying on the investment which our Victorian forefathers made, Bazalgette, wonderful sewer built in the 1850s across London, funnily enough after 150 years it's beginning to show its age and you can multiply that across the power distribution networks, the waste networks and so on.

We're looking at encouraging and supporting ultra low emission vehicles, whether it's electric or hydrogen or hybrid and we're looking in particular at demonstration projects, so we're hoping to do some imaginative things in places like Stratford in what was the Olympic Park which is currently being transformed into a new neighbourhood for London and in other places like Greenwich Peninsula.

Three just quick points to leave you with really. In terms of how we go about this and coming back to the theme of this being Cambridge Science Week or Cambridge Science Fortnight, we need to have a lot more scientific knowledge and expertise I think in policymaking.

I don't have a scientific background, most of the people who work for me don't either and I think that's generally true in policy teams not just at the city level but in national government as well, that has to change and has to change very rapidly and programmes like CSaP are one way of trying to address that.

Secondly and using a word which several of the other speakers have used, I think resilience and adaptability are the key watchwords. If I can give a personal view I absolutely hate the phrase ‘future proofing’. Who wants to be proof against the future? We want to embrace the future, we want to encourage it and rush out towards it, but we have to do that in a way which again, as some of the other speakers have mentioned, we just don't know what our city or country is going to look like in 2050, but what we can do is plan for a variety of different scenarios and have systems which are adaptable to that change.

And finally, just to repeat a point I made earlier, this has very much got to be done with and through the consent of people. So it's about dialogue and it's about accountability as much as about technological fixes. Thank you.

MVF: Well thank you very much for that Mark, and thanks to all four of our speakers. In a moment we're going to turn to you for some questions. While you're gathering your thoughts I'll say a few words and also gather in your questions I hope. I'll say a few words about what we've just heard and it's impossible to summarise the four very interesting and distinct takes on sustainable cities in an uncertain future that we've just heard. But I'd like to pull out a few key points that struck me as you’re pulling out the key points that struck you and phrasing them as questions for us.

The first one was talking about economy and the economy serving human needs in the way that cities do that in terms of both services, but also then having to then deal with the waste that is produced in the technologies and behaviours, human behaviours and governance all working together in very complex ways but in that uncertainty needing this feedback mechanism and adjustment that Doug was talking about. Equally Larry talking about the technologies and the analytics that we have to target the ways in which technologies and human behaviours are in complex interaction with each other.

The fact that we have had non-deliberate experimentation in the future that we can learn from and hopefully also deliberate experiments that we can learn from with drawing on some of the experiments coming out of Cambridge and being used in cities all over the world, and really very much looking at the better use of public money in those deliberate experiments. Britt talking to us about the environmental effects of conflict but also alerting us to the fact that we also need to be planning cities for lean times, not only in times of plenty.

And the ways in which the historical aspects of cities very much enrich the cultural aspects of quality of life in cities, but also with the word of warning about renoviction, one of my favourite phrases of the evening I think, one of my new ones anyway. And then the historical side of things also in the infrastructure that Mark was talking about, infrastructure that is now beginning to show its age and how do we then work with that.

And a really interesting point about the sustainability challenges that we are facing need to be dealt with and solved within cities, not only because the populations are increasingly there, but also they are the spaces and places in which so many of these issues are being both performed and dealt with.
And in small cities, medium cities, large and larger cities, and even larger cities, and understanding the city as a system which brings us back to Doug and Larry’s point about feedback mechanisms and actually understanding what's happening and being able to respond to that.

And the absolute critical point of the reason that people stay in cities is to do with the quality of life that they can have in the city and governance is through the consent of the people who live there.

And fundamentally the rapid growth of urban populations, both numerically and as a proportion of the world's population as a whole generates urban…generates challenges and opportunities both for urban populations themselves and also for policymakers and leaves us with a series of questions that we need to answer.
And also then to ask you in this public forum organised as part of the Science Festival what are the questions that either you came here with tonight or that listening to our panellists they made you consider. We'll take two or three at a time. If anyone wants to put up their hand? Yes?

Q1: Well Britt said something I think about Cambridge has a very high CO2 emission rate despite the fact we've got the highest bicycle rate in the country. So the emission rate from the buildings, inefficiently warmed or decaying rock?

MVF: So we have a question there about the emissions, the CO2 emissions in Cambridge given the fact that we are a very bicycling city. There was another question, we'll just take two or three at a time. Yes?

Q2: Yeah, I'm a public health doctor and one theme I think I'm hearing tonight is health, it doesn't get…seriously at how we travel around and what that means for our physical aspects and air pollution etc. So I suppose my question is really:
How do we ensure people are thinking about health when we're planning the cities in the future, because I think that's a very important dimension of future cities.

MVF: Thank you. One more for this round or we'll go with those two. Sorry, yes, thank you.

Q3: I just wanted to ask what we…what I expected from this to get tonight was what we can do, each of us as a person to help the cities to be more sustainable and how can we help the environment.

MVF: Great. So a question there about what are the individual actions that people can take in order to make cities more sustainable.
Marvellous. Thank you.

BB: Yes, I’ll start. I wasn't thinking about specifically here but more about buildings are a part of a historic environment. Because they often have single glazed windows for example, they emit a lot of heat, they don't have proper insulation to the standards that we'd have in a modern build and therefore they’re often a candidate for destruction. Because it is felt that by putting in a new building which was built to modern standards that it would be more energy efficient. However I think that there are problems with that because if you look at the entire carbon emission lifespan, if you take into account the demolition phase and then the carbon emission that comes with the reconstruction and then the long life of the building, actually I think it can be cheaper to retrofit rather than to demolish and go… But it depends on the individual building and how valuable we think that particular building might be. Do you want to add to that Doug?

DC-B: I'm going to combine a couple of them here. In Cambridge we are 6.8 tonnes of CO2 per person per year. That's right about the national average. Only 10% of that is coming from transport whereas in most cities it’s about 30%. It is because we have older buildings here, it's because we have Colleges and University buildings that are at 22° all throughout the winter time. But the dirty little secret is it's not actually 6.8 tonnes, in the same way that the UK has not actually reduced its CO2 emissions, we've simply sent them off to China. So if you take into account the emissions that are produced in China for the goods that we then buy in Cambridge we're up over 11 tonnes of CO2 per person per year. So on the strategies then it's whatever is causing us to do that, stop it!
The example I always use is 7.05am, 7th March 2008, my carbon dioxide went down by 60%. Any takers? And I have a Visa to show it. I migrated from the United States to here. I will put my life in Cambridge up against my life in Chapel Hill any day of the week. But it’s done at 60% reduced carbon because I live in a smaller building, my temperature is kept much lower, I have my bike, I don’t have a car - well I'm too old to be driving and my doctor has said I don't have good enough eyes. So if you see me behind the wheel…

MK: Can I take the health one because I think this is really important and I think the scope is now there to really make a big leap forward in terms of thinking about healthy cities. But a key part of this to use a cliché is that people don't at peace and it's actually about getting people to measure things and using that information and this is a very sensitive subject and we've seen this over the last two or three weeks where the NHS is not handling very well the whole dialogue with people about making your own personal data available. But there is a huge opportunity for actually understanding better how to plan cities, how to run cities, how to live in cities in a way which supports good health rather than poor health. In terms of how we pay for all this, which is always the question that comes up, again this is an issue which has to be negotiated but this creates huge market opportunities. So cities whether they are the size of London or they are the size of Cambridge are actually living laboratories for developing new products and new technologies and also new ways of promoting health and that creates an economic advantage for firms that are in that kind of business and Cambridge is very well placed to serve that.

MVF: Great, thank you. Any more inspired questions given those inspiring questions and answers?

Q4: Should we be building new zero carbon cities on greenfield sites?

MVF: Okay, a question, should we be building new zero carbon cities on greenfield sites? Okay, there’s one.

Q5: How can our improved technologies for retrofitting and of sustainable building of cities be taken up in Asia and Africa in the future years where the majority of the growth of the population is still going to be.

MVF: Right, so how can the technologies that we are developing for retrofitting be applied in Asia and Africa in future years where the majority of urban population is. Did I see another question? Yes, hello, thank you.

Q6: I'd like to ask about the HSR2 rail project. As a layman I think that it's going to feed London rather than feed the cities in the north and it’s an enormous amount of money, I wonder if you could comment on that?

MVF: So a question about the high speed rail link, who is feeding whom? Okay thank you.

DC-B: Why don’t I take the non-controversial HSR…?

MK: I’ll second you!

DC-B: Yeah, HSR2. I don't know how many people saw Evan Davis’ programmes on London and the other cities but I thought they were a pretty good way of explaining some quite abstruse arguments about agglomeration economies in a way that is palatable to a 9pm BBC audience when we are all half asleep. But I thought one of the points that came out very strongly there was in terms of the economic imbalance in the cities it's not so much that London is too big, but that we don't have large enough second tier cities unlike most other countries around the world.
Now if that's correct what that suggests is connectivity between the other cities, particularly in the north of England, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, is probably more important than a faster connection between London and the other cities. And exactly the point you're making, if you build a faster connection, just in the same way as if you build a new road or a bridge between two places, it's indeterminate exante who is going to benefit most from that. So while better connections between London and the rest of the urban system in England is important, I think it's just as important to get those other cities better connected with each other.

BB: Can I take your question? I think it's less of a question of exporting our model, our vision of modernity than it is about creating a new vision of modernity for Africa and for Asia. And what I mean by that is if we look at the capital of Bhutan, Thimphu for example, it is expanding at a massive rate at the moment and most of the construction is using workers coming from India to build in concrete and that's replacing a previous building culture which was predominantly made out of earth. And earthen structures are very heat efficient, they are incredibly sustainable because they're using locally sourced materials and recycled timber actually and once they fall into disuse it simply melts back into the soil around us.
So the problem there is that the Bhutanese people, and you can see similar patterns in Mali actually, that they think modernity is what they see on television, they see the white tiles, they see these kind of visions of high consumption being the ideal future. And what I'd like to see happen instead and what we've seen happening in Mali in recent weeks actually after the destruction that happened by the Islamisist groups is that the community has come together and rebuilt some of their own structures because they have the know-how themselves. So I think what we need to do is…and we also have to get beyond this idea that it's a backwards place with backwards technologies, those technologies are ideal for that situation and importing carbon expensive products from other places, who is that really benefiting?

LS: Well let me address the premise which is that people live in structures because there are large parts of Asia and Latin America where rapid migration in from the country to the city means that people are essentially sleeping by the roadside and they are cooking in the morning and in the evening on open fires that are made from trash wood or trash cardboard. When you fly into Delhi in a very modern new airport you get into a car and you drive through thick clouds of smoke that are coming from cooking fires which are at least one liable hypothesis for why the snowcap in the Himalayas is melting with the effects of all of the carbon coming out from all of these, shall we say, cooking utensil free homes. The majority of people in India prepare their food without electricity. There's more poverty in India then there is in all of Africa and this is a place that is supposed to have [inaudible 0:44:53] economic miracles and still has a better growth rate than the UK.
But the larger question that we've got to face as a world, as a human race is how do we deal with these transition periods where you can survive in villages in very energy efficient structures in a way, not modern but certainly the kinds of places where because they have lower density there appear to have been some advantages. Actually in terms of safety, in terms of vulnerability of women, the countryside is a really horrible place and it has been for about five million years. Cities are actually historically islands of civility and safety, in part because it makes the creation of rules more possible that's one of the reasons people go to cities. They've got the jobs, they've got the other things, they can thrive on that kind of predictability, but with a million people in a favela overlooking Caracas with the Brazilians bulldozing the places that people had built up out of shacks. I think to confuse cities with built environment is to miss this huge distinction for many of the people or many of the most recent arrivals in those cities.

DC-B: I think I'm left with the greenfield zero carbon cities. So I'll approach this from a couple of angles. There are no zero carbon cities, it's a chimera to begin with and the phrase that’s always used is ‘we will not build our way out of climate change’. Anything that we build is sitting on top of whatever it is that currently we have in our economy, we simply have more buildings, they are [inaudible 0:46:47] but more buildings. Whether they are built on greenfields or not almost worries me a little bit less.
Greenfields were a wonderful idea but they have a little bit of the St Bernard Hell filled with good intentions and desires characteristic to them because of course because of greenfields prices go up, you know the story, and then people live in Hardwick and so forth. Our son lives in Hardwick because he can't possibly afford to live here. So building on greenfields here? I'm really torn on that issue. The greenfields had their place at one point in time as the beltways did. I'd hate to see it happen, I'd hate to think that Grantchester Meadows was suddenly gone and covered over with stuff, but the fact is if we want more places they will be built on greenfields. But zero carbon cities, I'm just not sold on that idea, I've never seen a zero carbon city, I've never seen a zero carbon home, I hope we can eventually get to that point but they're not here yet.

MVF: Thank you. One last quick round. Yes?

Q7: You all talked about doing experiments in cities, I wonder if any of you have any comments on the experience in New York with Michael Bloomberg, do things quickly and do them cheaply. I'm particularly interested if the GLA are looking into it.
I should probably declare an interest as being one of those politicians you keep mentioning.

MVF: Okay, we have a question from a politician asking for the New York experience doing things quick and cheap.

Q8: I can remember looking at programmes many years ago back in the 60s, if anybody can remember that far back, where they was blowing up a storey, a 12 storey block of flats in America because it had become unliveable because it had been designed to solve the housing problem, but it had been designed inadvertently as being a nice place for crime, drug taking, robberies etc, and it became unliveable. You know the police lived there. I can also remember them building a quadrangle of maisonette flats, in that case the criminality was at zero. We don't seem to have learnt anything from that, we’re still sticking up blocks of flats.

MVF: Right, okay. So the question is have we learned anything from what has proved to be unliveable.

Q9: Can I ask two questions?

MVF: As long as they’re quick.

Q9: The first one is can such an extreme growth as we've seen in London but also I would hope the economic system which is actually based on constant growth, can it be by any means sustainable? So can it grow but also be sustainable?
In a way that second question would be actually who wants sustainability because the [inaudible 0:49:42] by government and should it be left to private concerns? So for instance e-powered cars, I think we are struggling to get the number of e-powered cars up in the end so how much should authorities [inaudible 0:50:05]?

MVF: Right, okay, so we've got two questions there on can extreme city growth and economic growth be sustainable in itself and how do we get a balance between the centralised response and private sector response to these particular concerns? In four minutes precisely you have four questions.

LS: Well the last part actually goes back to the Bloomberg question because what I think characterised the Bloomberg administration was a very high level of control of the delivery of government services and monitoring the problems that they were targeted at, because Bloomberg had extensive experience with using big data analytics prior to coming into office. And I think there's both the up and the downside to that.

The upsides were clearly that he was able to encourage very rapid response to emerging issues all over the government who certainly supported the long term refinement of police strategy to be ever more and more precise about where and what they were doing. But the downside may be that he got way too far ahead of a lot of people about what was being done. Things like limiting the size of the soda bottles that you can buy in the city, banning trans fats, other things which may have been very good from a public health standpoint but from the standpoint of legitimacy and support by the people he certainly did well to have the city charter change so he could have a third term in office. Pretty high approval of a lot of the stuff he was doing.

But in the end he went out with a kind of campaign by all candidates against him primarily because of police stop and search which wasn't being done necessarily in the wrong places at the wrong time, but it was being done in a very rude and disrespectful way that was well documented in the New York Times and other places. And at that point his analytic mind got in the way of his emotional sensibility and he refused to listen to the criticism and so did his police commissioner and in a way they both went out disgraced because they were overly Spock and not enough whatever the heartfelt woman in Spock is.

MVF: Kirk.

DC-B: Spock’s mother.

MK: To answer just quickly I mean on the city leadership point, I think leadership is absolutely crucial and there's an interesting pattern going on at the moment where a lot of the action is now moving towards mayors and city authorities for a number of reasons, one of which that both in the US and to some extent in the UK you have gridlock at the national level and you can actually accomplish a lot more at the city level and it's beginning to feed through in terms of where people choose to do their careers. Do you want to become an MP or a congressman and basically have the same argument with the same person for 20 years or do you want to go and work for a mayor and at least have a go at something, it might work, it might not work, it gives you the opportunity for experiment. When we brought in the congestion charge my transport colleagues assured me it was all going to be fine. I was reading in the paper there was going to be gridlock, it was a disaster. They told us it was all going to be fine but I have to say everybody in the building held their breath until about 11 o'clock and we looked out the window and there were still cars moving so it was okay. But a mayor can do that, you can take a chance and Bloomberg has done a lot of that, I think the mayors in London have done some of that, other mayors around the world.
Just very quickly if I may on the GVA question, on the growth, that needs a whole session on its own. But I always worry about the ghost of Malthus over my shoulder you know sort of saying the population cannot possibly expand, we know it can, but there's definitely something about how we measure growth and the kind of crude GNP, GVA measure probably does need to give way to something which is a bit richer in trying to capture some of the things that we've been talking about this evening.

MVF: Right. So rapid growth of urban populations generating challenges and opportunities for those populations and also for policymakers and the private sector, particularly if we are to take steps to make cities work for people, us, in a way that is sustainable both in the short and the long term. So before handing over to Sumi for a final word I'd like to give a very, very sincere vote of thanks to the distinguished panel for their insightful contributions to the debate. Thank you.

SD: Thank you very much. I have a couple of things really. First of all as Roz mentioned you have cards in front of you, pencils to share, we thought we'd also encourage some discussion amongst you as well by making you share some pencils. But we’d very much like your ideas on what you think makes a sustainable city because it's feeding into current projects, both at CSaP and at the Forum for Sustainability and the Environment and we would really like to invite you to go and visit these websites as well, see what's been done across the University in these spaces and ways in which we want to engage…I think one of the things that was mentioned, open dialogue, a couple of times and there are so many ways of engaging in open dialogue, whether it’s the scientists with the policymakers or you with the policymakers or you with the scientists, please come and tell us your thoughts. We would like you and really welcome you to write your e-mail addresses there as well so that we can add you to our mailing list and hopefully invite you to future other similar events.
We have a photographer here today taking pictures and please do let us know, let either of us know or the photographer in person if you would rather not have your photo taken.

And finally I would like to add a couple more thanks. We've had four wonderful speakers. Mark talked about looking at things as a system and I hope you would agree with me we may not have touched every single aspect but I think we’ve touched so many different aspects: from the historical perspective, crime, conflict, policy, retrofit, energy, travel and there's so much more. But in addition to thanking our speakers I'd like to thank Moira and Roz and also all of you, it really wouldn't be possible without your questions sparking those discussions, so I think a round of applause for everyone.

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