Mitigation Strategies: Road To Sustainable Cities?

Mitigation strategies: road to sustainable cities?

Introduction
Society is still growing and rapidly aging, one person wants mobility, the other wants a green park in front of his house. More people, means more traffic density, more pollution, increasing energy consumption, less natural habitats, sinking water resources and land shortage for housing. These are some of the problems we, as a society, have nowadays. By 2050 66% of the world’s population will be urban (Powell, 2016). A strategic approach will be required to achieve a sustainable city to ensure that it functions efficiently as a whole. So there is a big question for us as planners: How will the quality of life be conserved in future cities? This is an essay about some of the solutions
More people have a car nowadays, which means more space is needed for roads. How can we prevent our future cities to become highways? More cars means more pollution, more pollution means a bigger chance for people getting sick. This immediately affects the quality of life in the city. The first problem for future cities mentioned in the paragraph above is the growing traffic density. The mitigation strategy for this problem is efficient public transport. For example, take New York City. New York City is a city with 8.4 million people (United States Census bureau, 2013). The image from the streets of New York City is known worldwide, streets packed with cars, yellow cabs and buses. What happens beneath the streets of New York is the most important part for future cities. New York’s subway are the veins of the city’s mobility. ‘The subways were crucially important to the growth and geographic expansion of New York City’ (Lee, 2012). Today the population of New York could be smaller by millions of people if not for the ambitious subway building projects undertaken a century ago (Lee, 2012). To make sure our future cities don’t silt up with cars we need an efficient public transport network like New York
Warning images of melting ice caps or even the warm weather in September are proof of global warming. Related to the global warming and not so well known is urban warming. City surfaces are prone to release large quantities of heat; this is also known as urban warming or the urban heat island effect. Urban warming is indirectly related to climate change due their contribution to the greenhouse effect. (Arrau, 2015) Fortunately, there is a solution. There is big contrast between the city and the farmland on a hot day. In the city it can be up to 34⁰C compared to 29⁰C in the farmland as seen in the image below. The difference is the surface, while the city is packed with buildings of stone, metal and glass, the surface of the farmland mainly exists out of nature. So the solution for urban warming really is a simple one. We need less stone, metal and glass and we need more trees and parks. These will reflect less warmth and the problem will reduce. Also painting buildings white is a simple solution, white reflects less warmth. Painting buildings also helps against the greenhouse effect because energy can be saved for cooling down a big building. Another strategy, which currently runs in Vancouver, is white