The mechanics of smart sustainable cities

As part of London Climate Action Week, Energy Futures Lab host a talk from Dr Konstantinos Zavitsas and Dr  Aruna Sivakumar on the future of our urban environments.

Abstract

Cities facilitate more than half of the Earth’s population, and although they thrive as economic powerhouses, they fail to meet air quality and emissions standards. Recent efforts towards urban smart sustainable living attempt to shift this balance. Throughout the endeavour to deliver resource efficiency without hindering economic productivity, there are challenges of conceptual, practical/ technological, legislative and (to the bone) human nature.

Questions that arise are:

• What is smart sustainability and how can it be introduced in the city context?
• Which technologies are considered smart and what are the implementation prerequisites?
• What dangers lie ahead and how to see the challenge through?

In the talk work from Sharing Cities project will presented, with a focus on the urban logistics challenge.

The Sharing Cities program is a five-year EC-funded initiative that aims to achieve a wide scale deployment of smart cities solutions. The team are working to shift the thinking to decarbonised and local renewables and to make the active engagement of citizens a reality. They are working on creating a number of demonstrations in areas such as building retrofit, shared e-mobility, smart lampposts and sustainable energy management system.

Biographies

Dr Konstantinos Zavitsas is a Research Associate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering his research interests are in the technical, operational and managerial improvement of the efficiency, sustainability and safety of transport networks and supply chains.

Kostas joined Imperial as staff in 2013 having earned his MEng and PhD. He is also a visiting lecturer at City University and the Univeirsty of East London

Dr Aruna Sivakumar is a Senior Lecture in specialising in transport modelling and activity modelling for urban resource demands.

She holds an ESRC Fellowship for knowledge transfer secondment to the UK Department for Transport, is a member of the Transportation Research Board committee on Travel Behaviour and Values and led the transport work-stream in the BP funded Urban Energy Systems project at Imperial.

Venue

The talk will be held in room 611 in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (building 16 on the campus map).

If you are entering the building from Dalby Court/through the building’s main entrance take the lift to the sixth floor, turn right through the double doors and it is near the end on your left hand side.