What role does urban design play in the food-water-energy nexus? How will the liveable and healthy city be achieved in the new decade- and post the Covid-19 pandemic? Even though there are no “one size fits all”-answers to urban dilemmas around land-use, health and infrastructures, this webinar will explore some lessons learned. Listen to the recording on our YouTube channel!
Point of Departure…
Public spaces in cities are ideally attractive to all and spaces for wellbeing and health (for example stimulating people to move). Cities and urban areas in general attract people and create positive effects out of agglomeration, density, and diverse and intersecting infrastructures and facilities. There are risks involved and increasingly wicked problems around congestion and accessibility, loss of identity or demand/waste of natural resources. Urban areas may succumb to conflict and clashes between powers, mismanagement of transportation flows and existing tensions. Increased spatial and social inequalities between different types of urban areas may be caused by increasing economic polarisation, segregation and gentrification dynamics, suburban sprawl, and shrinking cities (SRIA 2.0, p. 24).
The interactions between food, water and energy are of great interest to policy, science and the society at large, today and even more so in the upcoming decades. Challenges connected with population increase and food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources needs solutions. Health and welfare can be supported through well-conceived and managed urban built environments and communities. To safeguard this, these kinds of infrastructures, many times urban commons, require robust co-design with multi-stakeholder approaches and long-term provision of technical expertise. A growth of urban frugal innovation might support such developments (SRIA 2.0, p. 22).
Discussion Questions
– What role does urban design play in the food-water-energy nexus?
– How will the liveable and healthy city be achieved in the new decade- and post Covid-19?
– Will the health benefits of open spaces, outdoor exercise and access to fresh air become more valued by local governments after the Covid-19 pandemic?
Program (CEST/Stockholm time)
12.30 Warm-up project presentation by the M-NEX project (see below), chat opens
13.00 The Urban Lunch Talk starts
14.00 The Urban Lunch Talk ends
14.15 Chat closes
Meet…
Anna Grichting: Anna is the Lead Resesarch Consultant at Qatar University with the M-NEX project, active in Doha, Belfast, Detroit, Sydney, Tokyo and Amsterdam. M-NEX focuses on urban design practice and sees urban agriculture as a key facilitator of the food-water-energy-nexus, as it needs water and energy to become productive. Working directly with living labs in some of the most vulnerable communities in the partner cities, the team co-designs new food futures with stakeholders that can help make stakeholder less vulnerable to forces disturbing the nexus.
Cristina Clotet Ollé: Cristina is an Architect at the Institut Català del Sòl (INCASÒL), member of the Urban Agenda Partnership on Sustainable Use of Land and Nature-Based Solutions. Cristina’s work involves around managing under-used land, sustainable & circular reuse of spaces and buildings, and adaptive re-use of the built heritage for a greener Europe. You can read the brochure of the Sustainable Use of Land and nature-based solution partnership here. You find the Handbook on Sustainable and Circular re-use of spaces and buildings, developed by SUL&NBS and Circular Economy partnerships, here.
Marc Sansom: Marc is the Managing Director at SALUS Global Knowledge Exchange and works with the Healthy City Design initative which provides an interdisciplinary forum for policy advisors, researchers and practitioners around the globe. This years topic is “Designing resilient communities: Recovery, renewal and renaissance”- see the Call for Papers here. Marc has previously been the chief operations officer for the International Academy for Design & Health and founding editor of World Health Design magazine.
Simon Bell: Simon works with Landscape Architecture at the Estonian University of Life Sciences and will reflect on results of the BlueHealth initative in relation to planning and designing urban blue spaces for human health and well-being. BlueHealth is a pan-European research initiative investigating the links between environment, climate and health and focuses on water-based environments in towns and cities. It is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, read more here.
Ali Hainoun: Ali works as senior scientist and energy systems analyst at the Austrian Institute of Technology. He is involved in numerous research activities and international projects on sustainable development, mitigation and decarbonisation of urban energy systems. Ali is the coordinator of SUNEX project which operates in four case study cities (Berlin, Bristol, Doha, Vienna), each with different socio-economic and climate characteristics and consumption patterns. The project aims to provide a policy guideline to support urban governance in designing sustainable FWE-strategies.
SUNEX and M-NEX are part of the Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative (SUGI)/Food-Water-Energy Nexus call: jointly established by the Belmont Forum and JPI Urban Europe to bring together fragmented research and expertise across the globe for innovative solutions to the Food-Water-Energy Nexus challenge.
Host: Caroline Wrangsten, Assistant Project Manager, JPI Urban Europe
Chat host: Johannes Riegler, Stakeholder Involvement Officer, JPI Urban Europe