Jul 06, 2017
New, greenfield cities present a vast opportunity to build intelligent and connected communities from the onset. In his recent book Smart Cities, Digital Nations, Caspar Herzberg argues we must get these new cities right and learn lessons from past experience. John Rossant, Chairman, NewCities and Herzberg, President of Middle East and Africa Region, Schneider Electric,…
Jun 21, 2017
As Head of the Novartis Foundation, I have been lucky enough to travel around the world to cities as energetic as Rio de Janeiro, as vibrant as Cape Town and as striking as Hanoi. I’ve met hundreds of motivated individuals and organizations working for a better world. But it’s not an easy task. People living…
Jun 19, 2017
When I go to work every morning, I always take the bike. I love the fresh air when I drive through the city. And I love that I can both get exercise and get to my job faster than if I had taken the car. The city of Copenhagen is designed so that taking the…
Jun 16, 2017
Northeast Asia has a new smart and green city at its crossroads: Songdo, South Korea. At the heart of Songdo is its International Business District, globally recognized as the world’s foremost sustainable city-scale development and the host of the NewCities Summit 2017. Songdo has become the first city in the world to receive pre-certification from…
Jun 15, 2017
To truly thrive, cities must increasingly become ecosystems of health and wellbeing, where each part works towards one goal: improving people’s quality of life. Old cities are being refashioned and recast as havens of wellbeing, while new cities are more and more placing people’s wellbeing at their heart from the earliest stages of the planning…
Jun 14, 2017
NewCities, in partnership with Living Lab Montréal and Made in Montréal, hosted a series of roundtable discussions featuring a cross-section of Montréal’s leading actors and creative minds. The third roundtable in this series took place at Sid Lee’s 8 rue Queen on May 3, 2017 on the subject Montréal: City as a Laboratory. Imagine stepping…
Jun 09, 2017
The heart of a thriving city is its people. The health, wellbeing, and happiness of the global citizen were the core of day one at the 2017 NewCities Summit, which launched a series of dynamic conversations on urban wellbeing and its vital role in the success of cities. “To thrive #cities must become ecosystems of…
Jun 08, 2017
(EBRD)Cities face many environmental issues: from local air quality concerns to traffic congestion, or from the challenges associated with municipal solid waste management to and climate change. The scale of investments needed to green our cities is enormous. The Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance (CCFLA) estimated that US$ 4.1 to US$ 4.3 trillion annually will…
Jun 02, 2017
I was born and raised in Hong Kong and lived there until my family moved to New York in 2001. Work brought me back to Hong Kong in 2014 and I am always trying to resolve social issues here via research, projects, volunteering and teaching. One of the biggest problems we have in Hong Kong…
May 19, 2017
Congestion is made of people. Today nearly every medium-sized to large city in the United States is facing a traffic crisis. People are moving into city centers in droves. The number of people who live in cities is projected to rise to nearly six billion by 2050, up from the current 3.5 billion people (or…
May 17, 2017
“There are easier ways to make money,” a friend once commented about my chosen profession. At the time, I was knee-deep in redeveloping a stunning, historic commercial building with a hole in the roof big enough for a small plane to fly through. When it rained, it rained in the basement seven floors below. The…
May 16, 2017
Across the world, the accelerating wave of urbanisation is contributing to greater, more complex challenges for cities that require an urgent response. Air pollution, to take one example, is choking cities and citizens, a growing problem across the developing world and in burgeoning cities in developed nations. The World Health Organization warns pollution is causing…
