Sustainable urban infrastructure promotes resilience in cities by mitigating climate change and adapting to its impacts. Many solutions based on nature can help cities make these gains, including turning cement and tarmac built areas into green, absorbent zones that prevent flooding.
As well as supporting green initiatives, sustainable infrastructure must also promote multiple transportation systems. For example, road networks that promote sustainability should feature pathways for pedestrians and cyclists as well as lanes dedicated to electric and other forms of mass sustainable public transit systems.
Water
Water resources are at the heart of sustainable urban infrastructure, providing freshwater for consumption and ecosystem regulation, while helping mitigate climate change by decreasing evaporation and flood risk mitigation.
Water systems are highly complex systems. They are exposed to numerous natural and man-made risks and interact with multiple external systems; any change to their internal balances may require new priorities and result in different sustainability trajectories.
Urban design can play an essential role in creating more resilient water-based infrastructure in cities. Unfortunately, many residents remain disconnected from the environmental systems around them; therefore it’s vital that we connect them more closely to their environments.
It requires shifting our thinking from “robust” to “resilient”. While robust systems aim to mitigate failure by strengthening individual components, resilient ones can quickly restore functionality after interruptions by adopting flexible approaches and diversifying functional dependencies.
Energy
Urban infrastructure services support daily lives for its inhabitants by providing water and electricity supplies, sewage systems, roads, data grids and telecommunication networks – not to mention firefighting equipment, preparedness plans for disasters like fires or floods as well as communication networks and data grids for data communications networks. They also assist in disaster prevention such as fires or droughts occurring. Ideally sustainable urban infrastructure aims to meet the needs of both the city itself and its citizens while simultaneously minimising environmental impacts.
These initiatives range from turning cement and tarmac into green, absorbent areas to reduce urban flooding to creating multifunctional urban parks that address multiple issues at the same time. Such efforts often cost less and add greater value than conventional grey infrastructure solutions while aiding climate adaptation efforts.
Staten Island Bluebelt in New York, for instance, provides both economic and social benefits to society while at the same time mitigating carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. Urban nature also plays an integral part in improving air quality, sequestering carbon, increasing biodiversity, providing recreation space and offering space for playback.
Transportation
Urban infrastructures such as water and energy utilities, roads and data grids account for an enormous share of global depletion, environmental harm and greenhouse gas emissions. To reduce their negative effects, sustainable solutions on a metropolitan scale aim to reconfigure systems to lessen their footprints and decrease negative effects.
Green infrastructure projects such as green roofs, street trees and urban gardens use vegetation to promote biodiversity while offering ecological services such as water conservation, energy efficiency and climate resilience. Furthermore, these features also help mitigate urban heat island effects while improving air quality.
New sustainable urban developments or re-developments may offer a mix of commercial, residential and community uses of various sizes and prices – walkable neighborhoods accessible by transit are ideal examples – while education and outreach initiatives about sustainability can raise awareness about its benefits like renewable energy generation, water conservation efficiency measures, smart city building projects and climate change mitigation – which help create resilient cities and communities.
Waste
Waste can pose one of the greatest obstacles to sustainable urban development, as improper disposal can become a vector for disease transmission, source of water and air pollution, financial strain and major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Effective waste management systems can mitigate all these risks while simultaneously decreasing operational costs and increasing material resources’ value.
Cities that focus on waste management often employ tools such as recycling centres and curbside collection to collect biodegradable and recyclable materials more frequently; people are then encouraged to separate their garbage more carefully. Some cities, like Helsingborg in Sweden, also run information campaigns to encourage reduction.
Cities can improve waste management by employing green infrastructure solutions, which include urban spaces that capture and store rainwater for filtering into soil, returning it through evapotranspiration or saving it for future use. Such an approach helps mitigate stormwater runoff which contributes heavily to pollution of urban waterways and lakes.