To what extent can cities be used as ‘anthropogenic material stocks’? How can international cooperation contribute? In the following interview, Professor Liselotte Schebek from Darmstadt’s Technical University and Uwe Becker, who manages a GIZ-run project in India, share their views on these issues.
In recent years there have been great advancements in solid waste management and people are becoming more and more aware of its importance. However especially in developing countries there is still a need for more sustainable solutions. We spoke to Jiao Tang and Luis Marinheiro about the current situation in waste management and what still needs to be done to make it more sustainable and innovative.
Bangladeshi cities do not only have to face difficult climate conditions, but also increasing waves of urban migration and the problems associated with that. URBANET spoke to ANM Safiqul Alam, managing director of the software and planning company Geomark, about how Bangladesh is facing these challenges and why he is hopeful for the future of the country.
In a four-part series, URBANET takes a closer look at specific projects that contribute to making cities more liveable. This second part describes how the coastal city of Beira in Mozambique mitigates floods and other climate change-related natural disasters, which usually effect the poorest communities the most severely. By rehabilitating the Chiveve River, the situation has improved significantly.
The German government pushes for a New Urban Agenda oriented towards the vision of the “lebenswerte Stadt”, i.e. a city worth to live in, but is mostly translated with “liveable city”. But how do we define “liveable”? Our authors Alexandra Linden, Astrid Ley and Alexander Jachnow contend that it goes beyond “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want” as proposed by the UN. Liveability, construed as Quality of life shouldn’t just be determined by indicator models, but within a specific local context and in conjunction with international standards.
Three weeks after the Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador, the 22nd Conference of the Parties (COP 22) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is currently taking place in Marrakesh, Morocco. Sarah Schneider and Lisa Lebershausen look at the the international climate change conference through an urban lense.
Rapid urbanisation comes with growing volumes of traffic and air pollution, which creates an urgent need for sustainable and integrated urban mobility solutions. To find such solutions is one of the key goals that the German Development Cooperation wants to achieve in the Habitat III process. A newly published brochure lays out the ideas of how to get there.
If cities are to live up to their responsibility to protect the climate, they need to invest in sustainable mobility. How Ukrainian-German cooperation is already successfully tackling the challenge of supporting CO2-neutral traffic, you can read about here!
