Transcription
For a long time, urban growth knew no bounds. 200 years ago, scarcely 2% of the people living on Earth were city dwellers. Today, more than half the world's population lives in an urban area. We live in a world filled with immense, vibrant, noisy, overpopulated cities, cities where we create, manufacture, trade, and consume, where fabulous wealth and extreme poverty exist side by side.
Our urban model now seems to have reached its limits. However, new aspirations are emerging. In a world of global warming and increasingly scarce fossil fuels, a new vision of the city is taking route. We're seeing the first signs of slow but far-reaching and irreversible change. Little by little, a new model for our cities is developing. We call it the Eco City.
The goal of an Eco City is to reduce the city's impact on the environment. It's an immense undertaking. The growth of large population centers, energy consumption, recycling, the new urban landscape, and even social diversity, all these issues are a part of the Eco City agenda. In order to kickstart this movement, three major challenges need to be addressed. We must transform the buildings we live in, radically change our modes of transport, and implement new ways of supplying electricity.
Buildings in the Eco City put energy efficiency first. They are better insulated, and they even generate energy themselves. They rely heavily on renewable sources of energy. Today's buildings can do more with less. They are no longer energy consumers but energy producers, requiring 40 to 60% less energy than buildings from a decade ago. We call them positive energy buildings. And if a building produces more energy than it needs, it shares the surplus with its neighbor. We call that peer-to-peer energy. It's revolutionary, both economically and socially.
With regard to transport, the change is just as remarkable. In Eco Cities, transportation is electric and, whenever possible, public. A multimodal model is in place. Residents use a variety of interconnected transport networks to get around, with tramways at the heart of the urban landscape. This two-fold change in housing and transport gives rise to a third: new networks for supplying power to the city. That's the third cornerstone of our Eco City.
The question is, how do we power the new electrical infrastructure so as to drive the growth in Eco Cities? The answer lies in new networks for distributing electricity. We call them smart grids. Smart because they use computer technology to centralize and redistribute power more effectively throughout the city. Smart because they also regulate energy exchanges between residential buildings through peer-to-peer trading.
So, in summary: energy that's consumed, produced, and shared by all of us more intelligently than ever before; a multimodal approach to transport, consisting primarily of electric and public transportation; the emergence of a new smart grid for supplying cities with electricity. With all this, this revolutionary new Eco City is happening now, and on every level.