Future Perfect

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Innovating to develop sustainable

environments on an urban scale

Steve Lewis, Chief Executive Officer, Living PlanIT

very civilization has contended with powerful trends

that have shaped how and where human settlements are

built. Each has built its cities and expansions of those

cities, with the best technology, materials and skills available

at the time.

Today however, rapid population growth, increasing urbanization,

environmental pollution and resource depletion are some of the

megatrends that will challenge urban dwellers for many years to

come. But when cities for the future are built today most, if not all,

these problems can be alleviated by the best technology available

now. This includes technologies for designing and operating the

urban environment to produce smart sustainable eco-cities run on

clean energy, or ‘living cities’.

Living Cities incorporates key concepts we believe are integral to

successfully envisioning, retrofitting, building and managing cities

in the 21st century including: recognition of the need for contin-

ual evolution, the importance of clear metrics and analytics, the

increased connection between urban dwellers and the buildings

in which they live and work, a sense of possibility and openness,

increased efficiency, generative structures that learn,

agile infrastructures that serve multiple functions and

respond to environmental and other changes, and resil-

ient systems able to recover without breaking down and

resist obsolescence. We see Living Cities as generative,

inclusive, agile, dynamically evolving and resilient.

While both governments and industry acknowledge

that sustainable development is driving innovation, they

are uncertain of how this can be properly structured,

financed and profitably managed, beyond existing prod-

ucts or services. Using the full range of new software,

networking and sensors needed to run a smart city is

enormously complex and beyond the scope of even

sophisticated and well-established industries, partly

because many and diverse technologies and practices

are involved. But it is also because a smart community

can only become cost-effective through efficiencies

created in its planning, design, financing, commis-

sioning, construction and operation. And it can only

be sustainable if built to be economically, socially and

ustainable

cities

The O2 Centre and the Greenwich Peninsula. Canary Wharf is directly north, opposite the peninsula

Image: Quintain Estates and Development 2012