Conscious Cities Festival 2020: To Shape and be Shaped will take place at venues worldwide and online from 18th to 24th of October 2020. Through a 15+ event series, participants and experts will have the opportunity to discuss on Conscious Design and the empowerment of local communities. This event invites leading practitioners, activists, scientists and the general public from around the globe to explore the dialogue between people and place. Continue reading
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In the book “Democratizing our Data: A Manifesto” Julia Lane discusses the topic of data democratisation in the context of the US, legislations that could support it and successful paradigms that can be followed. The book is a call to rethink the way that US collects and analyzes public data, in order to improve privacy, equity and the implementation of policy initiatives. Continue reading
SolarShare is Singapore’ s first peer to peer (P2P) energy trading platform. It is a pilot project that allows consumers to purchase renewable electricity produced by private solar panel owners, via an online marketplace from across the city. Prosumers with solar panels installed on their rooftops can sell their excess green energy. Consumers can use SolarShare to convert to green energy at competitive prices, supporting their local community. Continue reading
The Participatory Incremental Urban Planning (PIUP) Toolbox by UN-Habitat is a step-by-step methodology to assess, design, operationalize and implement urban planning processes. A roadmap is proposed to facilitate the understanding and the accomplishment of all the steps. Continue reading
According to the author, the 2020 collapse of the global economy due to Covid-19 pandemic has enabled us to think about long term trends and what the future could hold for our cities and regions, especially due to the climate agenda. Having as a starting point the current pandemic, this paper sets out the historical precedents for economic transitions after collapses that unleash new technologically based innovation waves. These are shown to be associated with different energy and infrastructure priorities and their transport and resulting urban forms. Continue reading
REFLOW is an EU H2020 project, from 2019 to 2022, that seeks to understand and transform urban material flows and to co-create and test circular and regenerative solutions in urban and peri-urban areas across Europe. The vision of REFLOW is to develop circular and regenerative cities through the re-localisation of production and the reconfiguration of material flows at different scales, leveraging Fab Labs and makerspaces as catalysts for wide-scale collaboration and co-creation conducive to systemic, sustainable change. The project operates at the international level, mobilising existing networks and movements that are working towards a new productive model for cities such as Circular Cities, C40 Cities and Fab City Global Initiative. Continue reading
This paper is following the EU target of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Near Zero Energy and Positive Energy communities are expected to play a significant part of the strategy that will be followed. Within this context, the authors aim to investigate the feasibility of a new-built positive energy neighborhood and the retrofit of an existing neighborhood to near zero energy performance in the city of Alexandroupolis, Greece. The study may act as a roadmap for the uptake and development of positive energy and near-zero energy communities in Greek Cities, similar to Alexandroupolis. Furthermore, it can be used as a decision support tool for policy makers, when assessing alternative options towards the path of decarbonization of EU economy by 2050. Continue reading