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Green Metropolis Shaping Climate-Smart Cities
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00:02Hello. Hello, everyone, and welcome. My name is Daphne. I'm a tech reporter with Sifted.
00:11Sifted is an English-speaking media publication based in London that covers European startups.
00:18I cover French tech. I'm based in Paris. And I'm here today to talk about the green metropolis.
00:24I'll start with a stat that most of you probably know or won't be surprised with, and that's that
00:30about three-quarters of global emissions are caused by cities. So it's a no-brainer that we need to build
00:36greener cities. It's not just about reducing cities' carbon footprint. It's obviously also about
00:42preparing them for the future. It's about risk mitigation. So there are many different ways
00:48into creating these greener metropolis. We've got a representative for New York City here.
00:54New York City in itself is about, well, over 8 million residents, about 800 square meters,
01:00something like that. And I'm using these statistics just to give you an idea of how much of a task
01:06it
01:07is to revamp our cities and make them greener. Cities are huge, living, breathing things.
01:14And I think another important aspect to keep in mind is that New York City might be one profile,
01:19but there are many different cities in the world, obviously, different population densities,
01:24different risk profiles, different budgets, different priorities. So obviously creating
01:29greener cities across the globe is a huge, huge task. Luckily, one could argue that huge tasks
01:35is exactly what tech likes to help with. And this brings me to the key theme of this panel,
01:40which is how can tech support urban planning for greener cities. So during this panel,
01:47we'll be looking at what technologies are necessary for urban planning and for creating these greener
01:52cities. We'll be looking at how we can deploy them, what they need to be deployed
01:58today and in the future. And then lastly, but definitely not least, we'll be looking at how
02:03these technologies can be deployed in a fair and inclusive way, which I think is a big topic for
02:08this panel. How to make sure that technology serves all the citizens within a city equally,
02:16but also all the citizens across different cities across the world equally. So we've got panelists who
02:22are all working on building solutions for greener cities. They're all working really cool stuff,
02:27so I'm going to let them introduce themselves and explain a little bit more about what they do,
02:32starting with Jacques next to me. Sure. Thank you, Daphne, and thanks for having me in this panel.
02:38So my name is Jacques Beltran. I work for Dassault System. Dassault System is a software company that
02:43many of you may know from our aeronautical automotive background, but it happens that we do indeed also
02:50work for cities, trying to help cities understand, design their future, do urban planning. I actually have
02:56a small video, an example of what we do. If we can launch the video, please. There it goes. So
03:05I'm
03:05not going to detail what it is, but it's just so you have an idea. This is a virtual twin
03:10of a city,
03:11city of Lyon in France, where we did a airflow and heat island simulation. This is exactly what we do
03:19to
03:19start answering your question, Daphne. A virtual twin of a city is a 100% accurate replica, science-based
03:27replica of the city to help make better decisions. Very nice. Thanks. Cecilia, would you like to tell
03:34us a few words about what you do? Sure. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Cecilia Kushner.
03:40I'm the chief strategy officer at the Economic Development Corporation. We're the economic development
03:45and arm of the city of New York. We have a very important plan that the mayor put out together
03:52just a few months ago. And if you can launch the slide, please. It is called the Green Economy Action
03:58Plan. We have 60 free actions that are based on three or four really important priorities. Building
04:06decarbonization, because buildings are the first source of carbon dioxide in New York City. Green energy,
04:12we are our city of Ireland, so we're really looking at offshore wind, battery storage, and solar,
04:19innovation, and then green transportation, and really the transition to EV. As part of this engagement,
04:26we are spending a hundred million dollars to seek a climate operator to build a climate innovation hub in
04:33the heart of Brooklyn in Sunset Park, which has turned out to be really where tech innovation and climate
04:39change thinking are coming together. Thanks, Cecilia. Cohen, would you like to tell us a few words?
04:45Yeah, sure. My name is Coen Oltwies from Waterstudio. Our technology is floating buildings. We do that
04:53already for 20 years. Not the ones you see in Amsterdam, so small houseboats, but what we make, and I
05:00have
05:00some images from that, are larger structures like floating apartment buildings, floating theaters,
05:08floating parks, and you see a big example of that. And these buildings are flexible, so you can bring
05:15them to your city and you can relocate them. We design programmable city, what, where, when, for how long,
05:23and with that we try to upgrade the performance of cities. This is an example of Lyon. I hope it's
05:30already in your model. It's in the city of Lyon in the water, and it's the theater. Thanks, Cohen. And
05:36Hélène, would you like to introduce yourself very quickly as well? Yes, thank you very much. I'm Hélène Chartier.
05:41I'm the director of urban planning and urban design at C40. Just in a nutshell, C40 is a global network,
05:48an NGO,
05:49of Myers and cities who are accelerating their climate action, collaborating, developing joint
05:54programs to accelerate their climate action. New York is part of the network. And I'm leading all of the
06:01work around urban planning, urban design. We know that urban planning is not an emission sector, per se.
06:08It's a cross-cutting enabler of emission reduction and also on improving climate resilience. But we know
06:15that the way cities have been planned, especially since the post-World War II period, has been a
06:21catastrophe. And it has really led to most of the challenges that the cities are facing today. And
06:27I'm going to explain why, how we can fix that, how cities are trying to fix that, and how we
06:32can collaborate
06:33with people like you to accelerate this agenda. Great. Thanks very much, everyone, for introducing
06:40yourselves. I'll get started with questions. I think the first thing we want to look at is
06:44have a quick overview of what tech is necessary today for urban planning for greener cities,
06:50without going into the detail, obviously, of each technology independently. I think one of the big
06:56questions around that is, to what extent would you say that we know what we are planning for? And if
07:03not,
07:04what, how do you plan, how do you prepare tech and how do you work with tech in order to
07:09prepare
07:09for a future that's still, to an extent, unknown? Yeah, Jacques, go for it. Sure. Quick answer,
07:18I think, is that most cities don't actually really know what they're planning for. That urban planning
07:24remains, to a large extent, intuition-based more than science-based. And so, what we try to do is bring
07:31more science, more objective thinking into urban planning. I'll give you two examples. We have a
07:39very nice and very emblematic project ongoing in Ukraine. As you know, many cities in Ukraine have
07:45been severely hit by the war, partially destroyed. And they had the city of Chernihiv, which is located
07:51200 kilometers north of Kiev, a city of 200,000 people, has asked us to provide our technology in
07:573D modeling simulation to do two things. First is consolidate all the data about the destructions,
08:04because they know that certain buildings have been destroyed or infrastructure, but they need
08:09one single platform where all that data can be collected to start prioritizing. So, we leverage
08:15satellite imagery with automatic change detection, immediately qualifies if it's a building, a bridge,
08:21an underground infrastructure. That helps them in their first decision. And second thing they're doing
08:26with our technology, and we're doing that with our partner Aegis, which is a leading urban engineering
08:30company. They are advising Chernihiv authorities on how to, in a virtual twin, start planning the future
08:38of the city. But that is a science-based urban planning, because it's based on 3D modeling rules and
08:44simulation. That's the first example. A second one is, for those of you living in Paris, you might,
08:50of course, you're aware we are welcoming Olympic Games very soon. And there's a typical French,
08:57I would say, Parisian debate about this, around the decision of reserving one lane of the Paris
09:02Peripherique, the Paris Ring Road, for car sharing. Typical French debate where people are against it,
09:08or they are in favor, and they don't actually really know why they are for or against. Again,
09:13it's intuition-based, it's not science-based. So, we decided to do a simulation on one quarter of the
09:19Peripherique, which is, I think, the only first time a triple simulation of traffic,
09:24noise, and pollution altogether in one single digital twin has been done. What's interesting
09:29is that that triple simulation is completely changing the debate. Instead of saying it is
09:34a good or a bad decision, thanks to that triple simulation, we are capable of telling the public
09:40authorities which are the conditions under which that decision is going to have a favorable effect
09:47instead of a negative impact. That is science-based public decision, and that's what digital twin
09:53technology can provide. Okay, so huge importance of data and analytics for that. Cohen, I'd be
10:00interested to know what you think, because obviously you're building a solution that
10:03is a very specific solution, but it's also very flexible. It allows to, you know, plan for very
10:09different scenarios for different scenarios in different cities. Could you tell us a bit more
10:13about, on that solutions angle, how what you're providing today has that baked-in flexibility to
10:21plan for an unknown future? Yeah. Well, cities are quite stupid, they are quite static. You build something,
10:28it stays there for 30, 50, 70 years, and meanwhile you can't adjust it that much. And we live in
10:35a world
10:35where we have this toxic mix of climate change and urbanization, and both they have a
10:43demand for space. So we think that the best recipe would be to have an extra ingredient,
10:50and that's the water. Because on water, nothing is static, everything is flexible. And that flexibility,
10:56and only is it like 2% or 3% of your city, if you can place these functions on
11:01water,
11:01and you can start moving them around, then you can upgrade the performance of the city. So if you
11:06talk about Lyon, you talk about New York, Paris, Miami, Shanghai, Tokyo, they all have the water in
11:12front of them, and we start using that to upgrade the city itself. And Cecilia, as someone who's working
11:22directly, you know, in the field and making these decisions for a city,
11:28what is the decision making behind what technologies you want to use to enable the greening of New York
11:34City essentially? What are your priorities? Does that speak to your experience of making these decisions?
11:43Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing we did in developing the Green Economy Action Plan was look
11:48at data. We wanted to understand what was the biggest sources of climate change in New York City,
11:53which for us is building more than transportation or anything else. And then we wanted to understand
11:59what are the industries that are part of the supply chain of the building construction and demolition
12:05business, and which ones are actually driver of the most significant impact as well. So we did an entire
12:12industrial landscape. We looked at 21 industries that actually make up the energy composition of New York City,
12:19and decided to focus on specific themes because we knew that by making changes in this specific industry,
12:26we actually could have a really large impact. And then I think we are really of the belief that part
12:32of
12:33finding the right solution is having space to innovate and space to make mistakes. And so long as you make
12:39them fast, that's the priority. And so we fund a lot of incubators and accelerators that are focused on specific
12:46technology change that we think can have a big impact at scale. So on building construction, we work a lot
12:51on
12:52the building demolition, actually, which is how do you demolish and recycle building material,
12:57because a lot of wastes come from building material in New York City. We're looking at mass timber
13:03as well. On the energy side, because we will need to electrify a tremendous number of buildings in New York
13:09City,
13:10we're looking at battery storage and chemical composition of battery storage as one specific
13:15way of trying to resolve our problem. We're very invested in offshore winds because we have the
13:20opportunity of being right at the harbor and being able to do that as well. And so we are really
13:26funding
13:27innovation and a huge part of what the city is helping to do with its real estate is pilot it.
13:34A lot of climate
13:35tech can be very thoughtful in a lab, but up until you try it and operationalize it in an actual
13:43urban
13:43environment and against buildings, you do not know if it can work at scale and if it's something that as
13:48a product can be viable for urban residents. And so we've opened for the last year all of our real
13:56estate
13:56for piloting for climate tech, which has been incredibly successful. And so we're seeing, for example,
14:02companies EV charging companies now coming with technologies that use the energy from the buildings
14:08themselves to charge the cars rather than tapping into the grid. So we really think that we need to
14:14basically allow this process of trial and error over a long period of time along a really wide range of
14:22different industries to be able to find the solutions that work at scale for us.
14:27How do you read through the noise? Because obviously climate tech is, and for very good reasons and
14:33in a good way, is one of the industries that's growing fast and where we're seeing news come up
14:40all the time, every week. I'm imagining that's also a lot of noise. So as a decision maker,
14:46especially as someone who's responsible for taxpayer money, how do you read through that noise?
14:51So what we try to do is we don't want to be the decider of what is the right innovation,
14:58because we don't think as government we actually are the best position to do so.
15:03So we facilitate partnership with corporations and with academia. We think it's really important
15:10once the technology is being used that you go back to the question of was it actually successful
15:17and you go back to the data. So we really try to have the entire chain of finding solution and
15:26being
15:26able to completely complete them, if you will, with the right level of data analytics at the end of the
15:32day. And then we really let the market decide. I think like the startups that we think are successful,
15:37we just support them and we promote them and then they have to enter the VC environment,
15:42the normal financial environment, or be bought out as a corporate solution. The market has to decide
15:50that this is important enough and that there is a purchaser on the other side to do so. So these
15:55are
15:56not innovations for us. What we're doing is trying to make sure that the regulations are not in the way
16:00and that we open the door for these innovations to take place at scale.
16:05Hélène, I'd imagine collaboration is also quite an important part of it. Can you tell us a bit more
16:11about that? I'd imagine there's a degree of sharing best practice between different cities. So yeah,
16:16I'd be interested to know what you think. Yeah, maybe if you may, I just would like to start by
16:21saying where we want to go in terms of urban planning. Because I think today we are building
16:27the equivalent of one city like New York every month in the world. So we know that the way we
16:34built,
16:34but also where we will place this building and how they are connected to the infrastructure and everything,
16:39is going to shape the way we are going to face this climate crisis.
16:44The IPCC report, which is a bible of the climate expert, are saying that today adopting a good urban
16:51planning could reduce 25% of the GHG emission. Because it's reduced transport emission, smaller
16:58housing units, shared walls, it means smaller building emission, preserving land resources,
17:05stopping urban sprawl is increasing sequestration. So we need to fix the problem. We have started
17:12one, almost 100 years ago, with the Charter of Athen, Le Corbusier model of urban planning, which is,
17:19it has been created through a new innovation, the introduction of cars in cities. We had cars,
17:25and basically, it totally destructured our city. We were thinking that we didn't need these
17:31proximities, these compact cities anymore, because we could jump on our individual cars to go to
17:36commercial areas. So not only it has spread urban sprawl, but it has also created this form of
17:42segregated cities with residential areas, separated from commercial districts, business districts,
17:48and all of them connected by big infrastructure for cars. So we need to reverse this model,
17:54and this is absolutely urgent. And for this, we need the technology to help us to do so in a
18:02way that is
18:03not creating a new revolution. Car was a form of technology revolution for this time. But to
18:09basically serve what the objective and the action that we have identified and everything. From a climate
18:14adaptation perspective, we also know that 90% of the urban expansion that's happening in global south is
18:23happening in climate hazard area or very close to it. So we need to help, and I think the few
18:29examples you
18:30provide, we need to help the city to really understand when they are revising their urban planning, long use
18:37reform, to understand where they need to expand, where they need to regenerate, how they should do it, and
18:47everything. So in that sense, a good urban planner is probably the best climate activist today. And this
18:54is very important that we have it right with the technology and the business, because it could be a
19:00fantastic help. It could also create, I would say, to be honest, some problem. There is some project
19:07actually today that presents themselves, if I'm, and I'm not going to say, if you look at the line, if
19:13you
19:13look at the NEOM project today, they are presenting at the new urban planning. This is so far from what
19:19the
19:19climate experts are saying, and what are the good urban planning practices that we need to apply. So
19:24yes, for technology, to provide data, to help the planner to do the right decision, but not a
19:31technology that introduces a new revolution that we think it's presented to going to help, but it's going
19:38to destructure the action and objectives that have been well identified already. Another important
19:46element for a city, we have at C40, we have been helping all of our cities to develop a climate
19:53action plan based on the objective of the Paris Agreement. So the cities, they know what they need
19:59to do, to be honest. They know the inventory is done, they know what are the action. Now the objective,
20:05a friend of mine say one day, climate action plan is great, but it's a slide deck. It's objective,
20:10how we mainstream, how we take these objectives, these actions, and to transpose them into legally
20:16binding policies, legally binding documents, and a form of generalization of this work. And in that
20:24sense, urban planning document policies are probably the most powerful document for cities to do it. So
20:31we need the cities to really work on this, how I take my objective and I transpose it into land
20:37use
20:37policies, urban planning, regulation, and everything. That's the work we are doing today with quite a
20:43lot of the cities of our network, Chennai, Seattle, and many others, Paris, recently, to do this work,
20:51both in terms of mitigation and climate adaptation. Great, thank you for that. We'll definitely come back
20:56to the idea of equality in the technological revolution for green cities. But before that,
21:06so you explained what for you is the most important way forward, its policy.
21:18How do we bring this policy into reality? How can cities collaborate, and who do they need to
21:24collaborate with in order to bring forward what are policy documents really into realities for their citizens?
21:38So, New York City has been part of the C40 since inception. So, we really appreciate, I think,
21:45what's really important in this collaboration, especially, is that it's a collaboration between cities.
21:50There's a very different proposition to fight climate change in a hyper-urban, congested environment
21:56than it is in a very different context. And so, that's the first part. It's like this alliance of
22:03learning and cities. For us, it's really important on the regulatory side. A lot of innovation, at the
22:10end of the day, when you're trying to execute it, gets stymied by building regulation, fire code
22:16regulation, how the streets are actually operated by the Department of Transportation, by sanitation,
22:23it's a fight for space. And so, really being able to show that in other places in the world,
22:31they've been able to integrate a different way of using public space for climate change, or a different
22:38approach to regulation, and showing that it hasn't caused harm, or that there is data behind it,
22:43is a very powerful tool that we use in New York all the time. So, that's the first part of
22:50the
22:50collaboration that's really important. The second one is the tech itself, and a lot of the companies
22:56that we see and invite in New York City, they come from all over the world. So, it's really a
23:01global
23:01community of innovators that are beginning to look at these solutions, and the data is becoming more and
23:09more open as well. And so, they're able to really learn about what they've tried in a different city,
23:16and bring it back to New York. And so, having these types of global partnerships, especially for us with
23:23Europe, or some Asian countries like Korea and Japan, were like quite advanced in their use of
23:29technology in the built environment, has been quite remarkable. And so, it's really useful to both have a
23:36hyper-local view, but also a very global approach to these issues. And you really need those two
23:42levels to ping-pong with each other all the time, in order to kind of calibrate your response.
23:49It's also good to make the difference between existing cities, and policies, and new cities.
23:56We are lucky in the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, we're building a new city for 30,000 people.
24:02But that's just on an empty sheet, it's just on the water. And there we could change all the rules,
24:10or make no meal rules. Where to build, how to work with the environment, where you take your energy,
24:18how you can move your houses through that city, where you can build in other crown trees, bring it to
24:23the
24:23city. So, it's almost like a playing field, a tryout zone. And with the things we find out there,
24:31then we can bring it to maybe the real cities, existing cities, and see how they can benefit from
24:36that. But you need some almost innovative playing fields to try out innovations, and the policies
24:44are coming with that. So, as a startup, and also as a corporate who, so you're on the other side
24:51of the
24:52purchase, if that makes sense. What do you, I guess what we're saying is, you know, we're talking about
24:58a collaboration between cities and tech providers, essentially. As the tech providers, what more do you
25:04need from the cities, or even from the governments, in order to be able to thrive and develop that
25:12technology? I think what's common to all cities is that we basically need two fundamental pillars
25:21to start a digital twin project. The first one is data, of course. And the major hurdle we find when
25:26we're talking with cities sometimes is that the data is not ready, it's scattered all over the place.
25:30So, we need to regroup that data. Otherwise, there's no digital twin. You don't have a data.
25:34That's right. It's pretty obvious. But the second one is we need a strong political will.
25:38If there's not a strong political leadership to implement a digital twin and to convince
25:44the different users' categories within the city administration, in the ecosystem,
25:48to do this digital transformation, it's going to be a long journey. So, these, I think,
25:52are the two fundamentals. But I would like to add to this two ideas, which goes to your question
25:58and introduction about inclusiveness and how citizens and all cities can be involved in this
26:05digital revolution. The first one is that I think there's a sort of misconceived idea that digital
26:11twins are only for the very, very big cities in the world. We worked in the past with Singapore,
26:17we've done work with Jaipur, with Hong Kong, big cities that seem to have the budget and the
26:21resources to develop digital twin. I think that's over now. Yesterday, I cannot disclose which city,
26:28but there's a very small city in the area of Paris region, 20,000 inhabitants that's interested in
26:34our solutions. Why? Because simulations like the one I showed in introduction of Lyon,
26:39the cost of a heat island simulation like that is 30,000 euros. 30,000 euros is available for any
26:46city in the world. So, it's another way of entering the digital twin world. It's not building a digital
26:52twin from scratch and with everything inside, but it's identifying the challenges,
26:57the pain points of a city and addressing those pain points with digital twin solutions,
27:02more on a service-based approach at a very low entry cost. So, that answers part of your question
27:08about inclusiveness is for cities. And my second point about inclusiveness is that a digital twin,
27:15as I explained, is very useful to make science-based decisions, right? Public policy based on science,
27:21it's fine. That speaks to political authorities and to urban planners. But that same digital twin,
27:27once it has been designed, it has been built, is extremely powerful to create citizen consensus.
27:34If you want to explain to citizens why you are creating vegetation in this square in the city,
27:41or building this kind of shape of building instead of this one to facilitate air flow in the city,
27:48you can do a speech about it. You can show PowerPoint nice slides, or you can show a 3D digital
27:53twin
27:54that speaks to everybody. Showing science in a 3D digital twin is extremely convincing. It's a very
28:00powerful communication tool that helps build consensus among citizens.
28:05I'm glad you talked about citizens and advocacy. Could you give us an idea, maybe starting with Hélène,
28:14of the extent to which citizens should be included in these decisions about green cities and how
28:21much of a priority really is for cities today in the real terms? Is it enough of a priority?
28:29I think, and also this is built on your previous question also about the equity. I think there is
28:36no, there is not a good urban planning without an equity perspective. There is not a good climate
28:42action without an equity perspective. If you take, for example, last week I was in Vancouver with cities
28:48from the North American context, like chief planner of the North American cities to discuss about how we can
28:54develop more climate-responsive urban planning. They say, without the equity component, no way. And it's very,
29:01very important. So it's very important because the cities as the bad urban planning has also created a
29:07lot of segregation from different race, for different social background. The good urban planning,
29:14it's happened in wealthy central part of the city, it's not happening elsewhere. So it's very important that
29:23the urban planning vision approach principle policies are shaped by the policy and leaders with the
29:32community and with the help of the technology and not the technology shaping. I think it's very important.
29:38So this type of solution that you are presenting about providing the right data to the citizen,
29:43to the cities to make this type of informed decision, this is positive. But it's not the technology
29:49that you drive things. Another element, and I think it's important, is also technology help us to do and
29:57especially to create financially viable solutions for things we need to do and we are struggling to do. I will
30:05give a very concrete example. Today, we know that one of the challenges is the conversion of existing building.
30:11This is, you know, in Paris, here, we have 8.5% of empty housing. At the same time, we
30:21need housing, housing crisis, every big...
30:24And we struggle. Why we struggle? It's not just a policy or thing. It's also because it's so expensive. It's
30:30much more expensive to
30:31convert an existing building to something else than to create a new building. We need new technology to help us
30:39on this,
30:40for example. We need to increase what we call infill policy. We stop urban sprawl. That means that to face
30:46housing crisis,
30:47we still need to produce housing. So we need to develop this type of small project for infill policy,
30:53transforming a residential area with like four, five units, this type of thing. This type of project today,
31:00to do it in a nice design, quality housing and replicable, we still need to find the technologies
31:08that make that financially viable. And this is where we need this type of prefabrication, you know,
31:15material and everything, thinking to develop this type of idea that we could quickly replicate in the city.
31:22Yeah, I just want to add, like in New York, we're very sensitive to what we call the environmental justice
31:28issue.
31:29Climate change is not hurting everyone the same. And there are communities, generally communities of
31:35colors, low-income communities that have been, they're leaving really close to enormous source of emissions,
31:41highways or really large energy transmission centers, for example. And so it's really important that
31:48these communities benefit the most from this policy and that it doesn't just become like a,
31:53the tech sector taking over climate change, which, and the tech sector being on diverse as it is,
32:00and that we just kind of continue to create economic issues down the line. And so what we're really
32:06trying to do is to center geographically these communities into the investments that we're making,
32:13but also making sure that fighting climate change is an enormous economic opportunity. Hundreds of
32:20thousands of jobs will be created through all of the investments that need to be made in the built
32:24environment to actually electrify buildings, change the grid, find different sources of energy.
32:29And so part of our Green Economy Action Plan is also a workforce plan, which is how do we make
32:35sure that New
32:36Yorkers that live in communities that have been affected the most by climate change over the last 50
32:42years in pollution are actually the first one in line to benefit from the ability to get these jobs.
32:48And so I think it really has to be seen as economic policy and not just environmental policy.
32:53Otherwise, I think we're losing the picture of how to help this community
32:59like economically benefit from the huge transformation and the flow of money
33:04that will actually accompany this transition.
33:08Could you give us like examples of how you engage with these communities to hear their voice?
33:13Because obviously that it's a thing to plan for them and to do that in a top-down way,
33:17but how do you make sure that in the decisions that are made for urban planning, specifically when
33:22it comes to technology, their voices are heard?
33:25Yeah, so I can give you a specific example. So we own 64 million square feet of assets at EDC
33:31that
33:31we manage on behalf of the city of New York, many of which are old industrial maritime assets that for
33:39a really long time the city didn't quite know what to do and now are extremely well positioned for the
33:44offshore wind transformation. And so one of the really large asset that we own on the Brooklyn waterfront
33:50in Sunset Park is a partnership with Equinor, the Norwegian offshore wind company, and they're building
33:56the first port in New York and they're just going to ground brink next week on this. And in Sunset
34:02Park is
34:02a very large environmental justice community. So right from the beginning of redeveloping these sites,
34:08we created a council that had both offshore wind specialists and technical experts of the offshore
34:16wind business and head of the advocacy, the environmental justice advocacy organizations that had been part of
34:23of this neighborhood for decades, kind of fighting for the green change before it was even, you know,
34:28cool for anyone to talk about it. And they really are co-creating the project. And so a lot of
34:34it is a negotiation
34:35around workforce investments, investment in jobs, investment in industrial companies of their neighborhood
34:43that could have a part, a small but really meaningful part of the supply chain of actually building the project.
34:50So it's all of these small incremental change on how the project is actually being built and where the
34:57money is being distributed in the neighborhood towards local workforce and economic development
35:02that is really kind of building a coalition for the project so that it is not seen as an offshore
35:08wind
35:09project coming from a Scandinavian country really far away that's extremely wealthy but actually like
35:15co-created by the Sunset Park community. That's like one example of how we do that which takes
35:20many years and a lot of difficult conversation but I think is really core to long-term success on these
35:27projects. Did you want to add something? Can I just because I think it's a very good question and I
35:34have two
35:34concrete examples, one that I think is bad and one that I think is good. I think we also need
35:41also to
35:41find this idea. There is a project, I'm not going to mention it, that happened in Toronto recently led by
35:49a big tech
35:50company with this idea of creating the cities of the future, the most climate tech and everything. A new
35:56neighborhood, it's failed because without the community on board it doesn't and the community want to be leading this
36:03transformation. They don't want to be led by the vision that has been set by you know the expert or
36:10the
36:10technology and and come after. This is one thing. On the opposite side we are working now with the city
36:16of
36:16Milan in Italy for example and now they work in a new structure of their urban planning, their master plan
36:22and they are developing what they call the neighborhood atlas and they work at the neighborhood scale which is of
36:29the
36:29community to identify with them how we transform the public space. They train the community what does
36:36that mean climate change, what is urban in Thailand, how we need to fight it, where we start, how we
36:42need
36:42to transport the mobility, where, what is the plan. So they develop this neighborhood atlas map, the
36:47opportunity, the risk and everything and they decide with the city neighborhood by neighborhood, they have
36:54approximately 90 neighborhoods where they will, how they will transform their land use policy but also
37:00where they will prioritize the action for this type. This is I think a very community-led urban planning
37:09and I think this is really the type of planning that we need now to to empower. Thanks, I'd love
37:16to speak more
37:16about this but before we open the the conversation to the audience I did want to touch on money. Who
37:23who pays for this tech and maybe I'll start with Cohen actually because as a startup that obviously needs
37:28funding to keep going I'd be curious to know what what things are like out there money-wise in climate
37:36tech and who you think should be paying increasing the budget if if that's what you think. I can only
37:44say
37:45for our business we see we always start with the high natural individuals it's always the guys who
37:51have too much money who want to have the the crazy buildings on water and then with that tech we
37:57sink
37:57down mostly to the more affordable solutions but one thing what I see in cities in general because we
38:05have the people who can analyze them we have to great ideas but in basic our cities are too slow
38:11if we
38:12have an idea it takes at least five or ten years before it is realized and see it for your
38:17own
38:18house if you want to have as an interior you want a new couch you have to order it it
38:23takes months before
38:24it's in your house then you go to IKEA and you can take it immediately to your house and that's
38:30also I
38:31think how we should change our cities and how it must be almost on demand it must be faster it
38:37must be
38:38realized within a half year after you have seen a certain request from a community and if you can
38:45find new tech and new policies to do that and if you then calibrate it with the models you have
38:51then we can get a much more efficient and much more higher performance cities and I hope we can
38:56can with all the tech here available create that. Staying on the tech provider side, Jacques what do you think?
39:04I mean I think it's pretty obvious it should be both public and private sector I think the role of
39:09the governments local governments or national governments is to provide the basic data infrastructure
39:14and possibly the 3d model accessible to everybody including to citizens very inclusive approach
39:20but then I think it's up to the private sector although companies that are working in the cities
39:25utilities companies for example to also invest and use that infrastructure and enrich the model with
39:31their own data of course there are data privacy issues there's sovereignty issues etc that has to be
39:37managed and our kind of solutions and other companies also can can manage that kind of of issues but
39:43I think a digital twin of a city has to be a mix of data coming from the public and
39:49private sector
39:50and therefore it has to be financed funded by by both sides and cities in the world that have been
39:56able to
39:56create a digital twin that's accessible to a larger ecosystem other cities where the digital wins twins
40:03are the most efficient in including in urban planning including for urban planning I'll give you just an
40:08example you know I mentioned to you this this simulation we did of traffic noise and pollution on the Paris
40:14periphery fine I got a call from a logistics company that was interested by that because they said we're
40:21thinking of establishing a logistical platform somewhere there where you where you build your
40:26digital twin and it would be an extremely interesting for us to be able to simulate the impact in traffic
40:33noise and pollution of our logistical rail road traffic activity so you see it's an infrastructure paid
40:40by public but with involvement of a private sector and on the city side on the public side
40:48what how are you thinking of this in terms of finances how much of a cost is tech um for
40:53urban
40:54planning at the moment and is there enough money to fund that transformation so the way we are we're
41:00looking at it is we're making kind of key investment that only we can make um and some of it
41:06is also
41:06trying to understand um the purchase power of the city and how by changing the standards of what we're
41:13asking for we can move the market and open the market to new technologies so we are a very large
41:19capital construction agency we have a nine billion dollar capital program over 10 years we did an
41:25entire study that showed us that a lot of like the demolition of buildings that we did prior to
41:31reconstruction was a huge issue in terms of carbon emission and waste and we realized that actually
41:37there were a lot of companies in New York City that could recycle that waste so we could slowly like
41:42instead of breaking down a building actually like deconstruct it and reuse a lot of that material
41:48so we came up with circular construction guidelines and now every single project that we do the general
41:54contractor has to show us how they're going to meet that standard and by doing this very change by the
41:59scale of um contract that we actually purchase we're allowing lots of companies the issue that we're
42:07saying is like the innovation exists but like the market is not tapping into it and so what we're
42:12really trying to do is to realize that we are market movers by just changing the standards that we're
42:17operating under and then it's easier for us as government to take that risk than it may be for a
42:22private company to do so and so i think just connecting the money to the ideas is uh in a
42:30way like a bigger
42:31problem than it is to just create new money right maybe a few last words yeah i think your example
42:38is is very interesting it is so so how the city define their need and how the market is responding
42:44to this need and that's exactly what what we need to do i just wanted also to add i think
42:50about your
42:50question about how the money come today at c40 we are receiving at least a lot of very nice proposition
42:58from pro bono pro bono work to help the city to develop this type of digital twin a problem we
43:05are having is the capacity from the city the problem is that the cities today you know they
43:10are overwhelmed they don't have the capacity they don't have the expertise to partner so we are trying
43:17in the middle to help this type of of work but this is also very important uh element how the
43:24private
43:25sector could also help to help the public sector to you know to understand to be able to discuss with
43:32them to be able to to to to do the best of this technology and and i think this is
43:38a problem we
43:39are facing today great i think we've got about 30 seconds left um i might be cheeky and just open
43:45it quickly and see if there are any questions uh at all yeah just one to the front maybe a
43:51quick question
43:52to wrap up i don't know if i was told we had mics yeah there's someone coming here
44:06hello thank you um i have a quick question what kind of technologies it's rather for the public sector
44:13closer to mike oh is it better yeah okay so what kind of technologies in the public sector do you
44:20rather
44:20uh were are rather used because we talked about um digital twins is there anything else
44:30we're looking a lot at ev and how do you actually do ev charging in a city where most people
44:37don't
44:37have their own parking space um and the amount of space that that takes into the public realm and how
44:43to uh work around it we're looking a lot of like chemicals for battery storage
44:48like the grid is going to become under a tremendous amount of pressure over the coming decades like
44:53we're going to electrify a lot more buildings and a lot more um pieces of infrastructure and so we need
45:01more energy and the grid in the us is not like um uh is is not cannot sustainably take that
45:08that amount
45:08of increase in energy in the amount of time that we're looking at so battery storage and and uh is
45:14a really
45:15important aspects of it and it's a very moving and changing um technology we're looking at a lot of new
45:21materials so we have a studio dedicated to mass timber we look looking a lot at circular construction
45:28as well is a huge part of it offshore wind has an array of new technologies that are like specific
45:34to
45:34this industry that are really important and specific to the geography of what the offshore wind farms are
45:41actually going to be located both for like maintenance as well as construction so it's an
45:46extremely wide range and i think we need to look at all of those because a lot of the right
45:51technology
45:52are actually at the intersection of software and hardware and really understanding how you operationalize
45:58an idea into a hyper urban environment and what is the market niche that you're trying to tap in
46:03that actually will allow people to want to use that technology or landlords to purchase that
46:09technology for their building so it's going to take millions of ideas before i think finding
46:15the few thousands that actually are going to make a difference thanks cecilia and with this i think
46:20we'll have to wrap up because we're out of time but please join me in a round of applause for
46:24our
46:24panelists thank you very much
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