Connected Urban Development

The third Connected Urban Development global conference is forthcoming in Seoul, South Korea on May 21-22 May. Barely half a year after the successful CUD Global Conference in Amsterdam, preparations for the next edition of the world summit are in full swing. The main theme of this edition of the CUD Conference will be ‘Connecting Cities for Sustainable Living: An Urban Revolution’. The theme is an important one for the host city: Seoul is leading the world in developing high-end broadband deployment for all, households, schools, businesses and public sector included.Among others, the conference serves to examine whether and how such a pervasive broadband environment will prove a fundamental ingredient to intelligent approaches in redirecting our urban society towards a more sustainable way of living, working, learning and transporting. One of the highlights of the conference will be Seoul’s mobility revolution, and the progress the city has made in advancing technology integration through its participation in the CUD program’s proof of concept pilots.The conference will focus in-depth on all CUD program areas, including Connected and Sustainable Work, Mobility, Smart Living, Energy Solutions and the Socio-Economic imperatives. For a full overview of the agenda please visit the event website.

Under the umbrella of the Sustainable Energy Europe Campaign (SEE), the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy and Transport, the European Institutions and major stakeholders concerned with sustainable energy are organizing the third edition of the EU Sustainable Energy Week (EUSEW).

The forum will take place in Brussels, Belgium, and in other cities across Europe from Monday 9 to Friday 13 February 2009.

The EUSEW is the key annual reference point for sustainable energy issues in Europe. The events organised during EUSEW cover key topics that highlight the multi-sectoral nature of sustainable energy development and stress the need for everyone to work together towards a common goal.

The Connected Urban Development initiative has been chosen as a Benchmark of Excellence by the EU Covenant of Mayors consortium. As part of this recognition, the Connected Urban Development partners have been invited to participate in the Sustainable Energy Week.

The cities of Amsterdam, Birmingham, Hamburg, Lisbon and Madrid as well as Cisco are pleased to invite interested parties to a Connected Urban Development session within the Sustainable Energy Week in Brussels, on February 11th 2009.

The Connected Urban Development half day session will be focused on the approaches and proof of concept models implemented by the Connected Urban Development partner cities, as well as the technology architectures which will enable a connected and sustainable urban future.

Connected Urban Development - sustainable urban technology solutions

February 11th, 2009

Agenda:

• 14,15 - 14,45: Connected Urban Development overview by Nicola Villa, Cisco
• 14,45 - 15,45: Panel one on transportation and smart work (cities of Amsterdam and Hamburg leading): Brief demos followed by Q&As
• 15,45 - 16,15: Coffee Break
• 16,15 - 17,00: Panel two on smart buildings and energy (cities of Birmingham, Madrid and Lisbon leading): Brief demos followed by Q&As
• 17,00 - 17,30: Final Keynote on the Connected and Sustainable City of the Future: Arup’s Chris Luebkeman
• 17,30: Close

Location:

EACI Agency - Madou Tower, Brussels

Registration to the overall EUSEW program and to the Connected Urban Development session is managed through the following website; www.eusew.eu. All attendees are required to register for the week itself. In addition, registration is required for this Connected Urban Development session on the 11th February.

Please refer to www.eusew.eu for further information about the EU Sustainable Energy Week.

Shane Mitchell

As we move from a phase of educating people about climate change to the phase of taking actions to mitigate climate impacts, cities - and government in general - are more than ever tasked to act. Cities are facing challenges not only on the development of effective policy actions, but also on the development of eco- efficient operations within their organizations.

We see in our CUD engagements that the areas where we have faster progress are those where business organizations are driving the program. The Connected Bus in San Francisco, the Smart Work Center in Amsterdam, and the Smart Pricing program in Seoul are examples.

Sir David King, formerly chief scientific adviser to the UK government, and director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University and senior science adviser to UBS, comes to a similar conclusion. In his recent article for the Observer in London “Big business shows politicians how the planet can be saved”, he sees private enterprises forging ahead. In his view, governments are lagging behind both public and business opinion. Coming examples of good corporate behavior are everywhere. Once derided as ’socially responsible’, measures to run cleaner businesses are leading to improved profit margins. Sir David King shared dinner with some of the most powerful chairmen and CEOs of major European and global companies, all there to discuss the greatest challenge facing civilisation - climate change. Almost as one, they spoke of the need for governments to take action to reverse global warming and for the carbon to be taken out of the world economy.

Wolfgang Wagener

The idea of Connected Urban Development (CUD) was first discussed at a dinner in Washington, DC, in June 2006, when representatives from Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group met with an advisor to President Bill Clinton. At that time, several cities in Europe were launching broadband programs aimed at providing citizens and businesses access to a next generation digital infrastructure which would give rise to dramatic improvements in their quality of life and economic development. A similar trend was unfolding in North America, where an impressive number of local governments were about to launch wireless city initiatives. Most of the focus at the time, however, was on providing connectivity to city constituencies (citizens, business, and the government) and ideas on what services would be enabled by the availability of those infrastructures were still in their infancy.

But 2006 was also the year when, according to author Thomas Friedman, global warming and sustainable development assumed a prominent position on the public stage, and when corporations began to conceive of sustainable development as a significant business opportunity. The convergence between corporate social responsibility and business opportunity quickly made “green” a key issue at the board level for many companies. Convergence between technology infrastructure and global warming policy and operations was beginning to take root.

At the dinner table in Washington we began discussions on how pervasive connectivity could enable a concept by which information could be brought to people, rather than requiring people to travel to reach sources of information. The parties decided to continue those discussions and this eventually led to a four-way commitment from Cisco CEO John Chambers, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, Mayor Job Cohen of Amsterdam, and Mayor Oh-se Hoon of Seoul, in September 2006 at the Clinton Global Initiative global forum in New York. In partnership with the three mayors, John Chambers committed Cisco to invest $15 million over a five-year period to develop innovative ICT and broadband-based solutions to reduce CO2 emissions in large metropolitan areas. The Connected Urban Development (CUD) program was born.

Eighteen months on, we are celebrating the success of our first CUD Global Conference, held in San Francisco on February 20th and 21st. At our event, we witnessed the development of the first CUD proofs of concepts – the Connected Bus, the Personal Travel Assistant, and the Smart Work Center – which will soon transition into operational programs, providing a measurable impact on carbon reduction, citizen inclusion, and economic development for the three founding CUD cities. Moreover, we were thrilled to welcome Birmingham, Hamburg, Lisbon, and Madrid as four new partner cities and we look forward to exploring jointly how technology can foster a more sustainable urban environment for all.

The story of the program since the initial announcement in New York is one of personal commitment, innovative thinking, and passion to create lasting change on the part of all those – in both the public and private sectors – who have been involved in the program so far, across the globe.

During the course of the last twelve months, four basic principles have emerged from our work to date:

These programs are becoming foundational to the work brought forward within the program. At the first Connected Urban Development Global Conference, a community of more than 200 thought leaders from all over the world carefully examined those principles and their impacts. As noted by Senior Vice President Gary Bridge of Cisco in his final closing remarks, CUD embodies the essential kind of partnership needed to conceive and implement the required solutions to global warming and sustainable development. CUD explicitly acknowledges there can be no solutions without a meaningful partnership between public, private, academic, and NGO leaders. ICT is a common denominator in solutions, and holds enormous potential to reduce global warming by providing information when and where it is needed in order to make informed consumption and resource decisions, but it is also part of the problem. Industry must respond by making energy efficiency a key goal.

In this context, we are introducing the first incarnation of the Connected Urban Development portal. We sincerely hope that collaboration between a growing number of thought leaders and cities will be supported by this technology platform and that the discussions initiated at the San Francisco conference will continue online, until the community meets again in Amsterdam on September 23rd and 24th for the second edition of the Connected Urban Development Global Conference. Cisco is here to act as a broker of new relationships and as an enabler of those interactions that will spur more innovative thinking on sustainable cities.

Nicola Villa
Global Director, Connected Urban Development
Cisco - Internet Business Solutions Group