POCACITO - Governance

Smart City Project Graz - District management

clf — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 13:31:04 +0000

To guarantee the broad participation of stakeholders and citizens in the Smart City urban area of Waagner Biro in Graz, a Smart City district management was established in 2013. It is run by StadtLABOR Graz and serves as an information hub between citizens, local companies, the City of Graz and the other twelve consortia members of the project. The development of this urban area, into a low-emission and energy-autonomous district with attractive housing and office buildings, good local supply and recreational leisure activities, is based on the implementation of some innovative energy demonstration technologies that guarantee the sustainable use of energy and resources. StadtLABOR Graz is responsible for the conception, coordination and implementation of the informal planning process and supports also the formal urban planning processes (e.g. the legally binding land-use plan). Work started in 2013 and the process is currently in the middle of the planning period. Initial activities have fostered the increased engagement of local actors, identified realisable projects in the neighbourhood, and stimulated input into the formal planning processes and competitions. For the urban planning competition, on the brownfield in middle and north of the Waagner Biro area the winning concept has been already selected. The district management has developed a very efficient and successful planning approach, which is fostering on communication processes for the implementation of sustainable and attractive energy solutions, living and working places, public and green spaces. As a consequence the same district management approach will be used in other urban development processes, and has started in the Smart City area of Reininghaus.

Superblocks

clf — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 10:18:59 +0000

The Superblocks project, designed by the Municipality of Barcelona in collaboration with the Urban Ecology Agency, represents an innovative planning approach for addressing urban challenges such as mobility, public space, biodiversity and social cohesion. Superblocks are territorial units imagined as bigger than one block of the dense Barcelona´s urban matrix with strict grid pattern, but still smaller than a whole neighbourhood. The aim of creating such superblocks is to recover space for the general public, to preserve biodiversity in the city, to improve sustainable mobility as well as to encourage social cohesion and collaboration. The Superblocks is open projects, so that any proposed action undergoes a participatory process involving local residents and organisations. The duration of the pilot program is four years, starting in 2014. The vision of the city council in implementing the pilot program, as stated in the Public Commitment for Sustainability 2012-2022, is to promote five superblocks and to create a city that works in a more mixed, compact, efficient and diverse way.

ecoBUDGET Bologna

clf — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 14:37:18 +0000

ecoBUDGET, an environmental management tool designed specifically for local authorities, has been adopted by the City of Bologna in 2001 as a part of a larger European project. Through the use of ecoBUDGET, the traditional financial budgeting system of the city has been complemented by an environmental budget, which measures natural resources instead of money. ecoBUDGET provides a set of indicators together with short and long-term targets for planning, monitoring and reporting on the consumption of environmental resources within the area of the city. The main aim of ecoBUDGET is to keep the use of environmental resources within set limits.

GHG Inventory 2012

Website Administrator — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 20:33:18 +0000

One of the central projects of Rio de Janeiro´s City Government is the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the city. With the Rio 2012 and 2016 Strategic Plan, the Municipal Climate Change and Sustainable Development Law (no. 5248/2011) and the Rio Low Carbon City Development Program (LCCDP), a set of coordinated planning tools has been developed for defining sustainable and low-carbon goals and implementing concrete mitigation actions within the city. Within these strategies, Rio has also prepared a detailed GHG inventory, and developed a basic tool to calculate GHG emissions of a city in a consistent way and to identify the most effective GHG mitigation actions. Rio already has much experience in performing GHG inventories: In 2013 the city finalized its third GHG inventory (2012) by applying and testing the new global inventory standard of the Global Protocol for Community-Scale GHG Inventories (GPC). The Protocol was developed by the World Resource Institute (WRI), the C40 Cities network and ICLEI. Thus Rio de Janeiro has become a pioneer in applying one of the newest GHG inventory schemes currently available.