Sustainable urban infrastructure refers to equipment and systems designed with all-round sustainability principles in mind, such as economic, social, environmental (including climate resilience) and institutional considerations in mind during its lifetime.
Infrastructure development aims to ensure its benefits are accessible and equitable for all residents, particularly marginalized populations who often experience and perceive infrastructure decisions differently than others.
Green Infrastructure
Many cities around the world are adopting green infrastructure on an ever-larger scale, from Paris’ “Paris Respires” initiative converting car lanes into parklets to New York City’s High Line, an abandoned railway line turned popular greenway; plants provide environmental services more frequently.
Green infrastructure practices like vegetated rooftops, rain gardens and roadside plantings are designed to assist in stormwater management. By collecting and filtering rainfall, these technologies prevent flooding while decreasing polluted runoff into sewers, rivers, lakes and oceans, as well as improving local water supplies.
Living walls, which use specially-designed structures to support vertical plant arrangements, offer aesthetic and cultural benefits in urban settings. Living walls improve air quality, absorb noise, enhance aesthetics, and contribute to noise abatement – as well as being great options for high-rise buildings as they don’t require as much maintenance than traditional landscaping solutions.
Smart Cities
With more people living in urban areas, the need for sustainable city infrastructure has never been greater. How can we design cities that are simultaneously environmentally, economically and socially sustainable?
Smart cities use electronic data to systematically utilize urban resources and enhance services, including automatically metered electricity and water usage; digital waste monitoring; traffic directing through video consultations with doctors; as well as sensors that measure air quality or optimise energy use.
Though many smart technologies are already helping us achieve sustainability goals, more comprehensive approaches must be found that include nature. Building with nature can reduce climate change mitigation costs as well as offer significant co-benefits such as air pollution reduction and biodiversity support; hence it should be integrated into all types of urban infrastructure plans.
Resilient Cities
Urban resilience refers to the capacity of cities to respond effectively and swiftly to shocks or stresses caused by natural disasters or economic downturns, while still meeting basic services such as water provision and sanitation, power generation, and food distribution.
Cities can become resilient by investing in infrastructure capable of withstanding natural disasters and long-term stressors like climate change or decrepit public buildings, while also investing in social infrastructure that strengthens community ties and advances sustainable practices.
Emerging tools offer city leaders a way to assess and enhance their resilience, such as the CityStrength Diagnostic. Some focus on understanding vulnerability to climate change risk and building adaptive capacity while others assess health vulnerability and urban space design to collaborate on addressing larger systemic risks. Innovative financing mechanisms may also unlock additional capital necessary for resilience building.
Healthy Cities
A healthy city is defined as one that provides its citizens with amenities to support public health such as jogging and bike paths, workout equipment, safe shopping and dining areas, as well as numerous other public amenities that help promote wellbeing – such as jogging trails and bike lanes, workout equipment, safe shopping areas and dining spots, workout classes for youth as well as providing recreational facilities that help prevent drug abuse and violence in youth populations. Local authorities can play an essential role in making their cities healthier through measures such as zoning regulations that reduce industrial pollution or through initiatives that combat road congestion or through initiatives that combat pollution issues like curbing smoking public spaces – as well as more ambitious initiatives such as curbing smoking public spaces by local authorities; farsighted local authorities may help improve urban habitation through measures that tackle industrial and road pollution via zoning regulations that alleviate pollution as well as through other initiatives including curbing smoking public spaces, developing recreational facilities to reduce drug abuse among youth etc.
Development of healthy cities requires an integrative systems approach involving community members and city leaders in formulating a common vision. This is essential as urban policies often come with unintended side-effects or trade-offs – for instance increased activity levels can lead to more road accidents (Heikkinen et al. 2019).