Girardet 2010 regenerative cities

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File Link: Girardet 2010 regenerative cities.pdf

Girardet, H. 2010. Regenerative cities. Produced for World Future Council, and HafenCity University Hamburg. 20 pp.

Notes[edit]

Describes transition from "Agropolis", or cities dependent on an adjancent land base, to a "Petropolis" where cities have become dependent on petroleum-based transport, while proposing an "Ecopolis" which repositions the city within a regional and global metabolism, and explores how cities can support ecological regeneration.
Asserts urban consumption and waste disposal has impacts beyond the city boundary, and are driving the global ecological polycrisis.
Defines a target of city operations that restore and enhance ecological functions outside cities. This is different than initiatives that focus on ecological conditions inside cities.
Suggests that such a target requires strategic choices and long-term planning rather than short-term compromise and patchwork efforts.
Cities currently occupy 3-4% of the earths surface while consuming 80% of resources, while primarily producing industrial goods.
While solid wastes are tracked, liquid and gaseous waste is less trackable. "Ecological footprint" is incomprehensible to most urban citizens.
"feed-in" tariffs in Germany empower local energy producers to sell energy at a higher price than power stations, resulting in rapid solar power implementation, and later states that "feed-in tariffs for renewable energy in Denmark and Germany came out of vigorous public demand that was turned into national policy which was then implemented primarily at the local level."
Identifies the 2000 watt society concept of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (1998), of using technology and design to limit energy consumption to 2000 watts per day per person and one ton of CO² emissions without lowering standard of living. Three Swiss cities are exploring the concept: Basel, Zurich, and Geneva. See also this article in The New Republic (which asserts: "Since the so-called “gray energy” used to manufacture imported goods doesn’t count toward Switzerland’s energy balance sheet, energy consumption appears to drop as more goods are imported. (With gray energy included, Switzerland’s energy consumption was more than 10,000 watts per person in 2011.)"
Identifies the central role of circular material metabolic functions. With a need to reform disposable and planned obsolescence economies.
Food production is currently labor efficient but calorically inefficient.
Points to Living City Block Projects in Washington DC and Denver.
"One of the primary tasks at the start of the 21st century is to try and map out what is necessary in order to try and expand the boundaries of what becomes politically possible. The challenge is to find ways of making cities function differently from the way they do today without increasing the costs to financially challenged city administrations."
"It is often said by urban analysts that cities should be seen as the places where solutions to the world’s environmental and climate problems can most easily be implemented because as places where most people live closely together they have the potential to make efficient use of resources. It is also in cities where people interact most strongly and where key decisions, and particularly financial decisions, are being made all the time."
"Could the creating of resource efficient cities, largely powered by renewable energy, help rebuild urban economies and bring jobs back to our cities?"
Points to Climate Alliance of European Cities and policy transfer strategies.