Website use for Sustainability:
Notes for Discussion with website managers in
Changsha, China,
October 2010
Ton Dietz
Professor, Human Geography
Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden,
The Netherlands
Purposes of a Website of a Region in a
foreign language
• Inform foreign visitors/tourists
• Inform business people (investors, traders)
• Enable local people to contact foreigners
(enable contacts, friendship)
• Showcase the special characteristics of the
region: in Hunan/Changsaa: search for
sustainability/sustainable city
Sustainable Cities: THE Challenge of
the 21st Century
• A combination of challenges:
– How to reduce the use of energy, mainly in
buildings and transport?
– How to make cities climate neutral?
– How to re-use urban waste?
– How to keep water and air clean and healthy?
– How to make cities green and biodiverse, and how
to connect this to human well-being?
– How to diminish the city’s negative footprint on
area and people elsewhere?
Sustainable city movement
• Global attempt to make cities more
sustainable, even if national
governments are not ‘green’ (or
even anti-green).
• Alliances between local municipal
governments + local universities
and think tanks + civil society + local
business organisations
• Important role for education:
lecturers and teachers + teacher
trainers
• Develop a ‘rainbow approach
Red Sustainability in Cities
• Develop smart transport systems
• energy-poor mobility, virtual traveling, telework, mobility-poor communication, smart
linkages home-work-shop-leisure
• ‘compact city’, public transport, bicycles, ‘
smart’ spatial organization, ‘ smart’ parking
arrangements
• avoid noise pollution, and create silent spots
in the cities
Orange Sustainability in Cities
-
zero-energy buildings
cities as energy producers
‘smart’ architectural design
Low-carbon architectural design
climate-proof buildings
Disaster-proof buildings
Integrate buildings and water
Yellow Sustainability in Cities
•
•
•
•
•
low-carbon city
climate neutrality
use of wasted heat and cold
GHG mitigation, adaptation, compensation
urban vulnerability and resilience (climate-shock
proof)
• energy security
• smart grids
• alternative energy
Green Sustainability in Cities
• Green Urban landscape planning with
attention for parks, public and private
gardens, green buffer zones, greening the
streets and rooftops, urban eco-diversity, recreation of urban nature, greening waste
dumps, cleaning chemically polluted areas,
urban agriculture, leisure agriculture. Monitor
‘’ healthy urban nature’ (Lifewatch project;
see cordis.europa.eu).
Blue Sustainability in Cities
• Clean surface and ground water, clean water
transport, innovative water management (‘
smart water’), good water storage facilities
and calamity provisions for droughts and
floods, flood-alert planning, aquatic
biodiversity, urban fisheries for leisure and for
food security/quality. Attention for the water
footprint (see virtualwater.eu).
Indigo Sustainability in Cities
• Solid waste management
• separating ‘ grey’ and ‘ black’ water (urban sewage
management)
• waste limitation
• re-use of waste (e.g., waste as bio-energy)
• emission-free cars
• clean air; avoid air pollution from industries,
heating/cooling systems, and transport
Violet Sustainability in Cities
• Reducing resource use, resource efficiency,
value-chain management, conscious
consumers and traders, sustainable and fair
companies (socially and environmentally
responsible business), slow food movement,
meat and fish-poor diets, organic lifestyles,
environmentally caring lifestyles, lower
ecological footprint elsewhere, consumers as
producers (‘prosumers’).
The use of (website) information to support the
movement for sustainable cities
• Report all local initiatives, and highlight the
alliances and innovations
• Show successes and failures (you can also learn
from failures: be transparent)
• Link with good examples from elsewhere and
support learning by comparison
• Stimulate local businesses and government
agencies to show their attempts to become more
sustainable
• Stimulate students and teachers/lecturers to
share their studies on sustainability.
Sustainable Universities
• Support universities to get a ‘green portal’ on
their websites: about the role of a university in
sustainability:
–
–
–
–
Role in teaching/curriculum development
Research activities
Outreach activities (alliances with others)
Sustainable management of the university as an
organisation.
– E.g. www.uva.nl (duurzaamheid)
Find a balance
• Avoid being only alarmist (only showing disasters
and suffering)
• But make use of images and information that can
shock people
– And make them prepared to change their way of
thinking
– And their way of acting/way of life
• And also show that there are (many) alternatives
to non-green or anti-green lifestyles