2015’s Top 10 Blogs

Look back at some of the urban topics we’ve covered this year!

1. Reinventing Paris: Building the City from the Bottom Up
By Jean Louis Missika, Deputy Mayor of Paris

Deputy Mayor Jean Louis Missika shares his insights on the Reinventer Paris project, the innovative open call for urban design proposals for 23 sites across the city.

2. Building Cities of Changemakers
By Fernande Raine, Managing Director, Ashoka

Fernande Raine, Ashoka, highlights the importance of social entrepreneurs in making cities the best they can be by sharing key principles and patterns from urban innovations that offer practical solutions.

3. Why Paris is Building the World’s Biggest Participatory Budget
By Pauline Véron, Deputy Mayor of Paris

The question of citizen participation has always been central to Paris. This year, Pauline Véron, Deputy Mayor of Paris sat down with us to share more about the ambitious citywide participatory budget – NotreBudget.

4. Financing Urban Infrastructure: Q&A with Dr. Julie Kim, Senior Fellow at NewCities
Q&A with Dr. Julie Kim, Senior Fellow at NewCities

In this Q&A session, NCF Senior Fellow Julie Kim explores her research on innovative financing models for infrastructure in rapidly urbanizing cities around the world.

5. Fostering Local Creativity To Revitalize Struggling Cities
By Marcus Westbury, Founding Director, Renew Newcastle

The future of cities – particularly small to medium sized ones – is global and interconnected. For many, it is about finding ways of making small things work with dynamic local initiatives, creativity and entrepreneurship. To illustrate this, Marcus Westbury gives an account of the Renew Newcastle project he started in his hometown in Australia.

6. How Will Smart Lighting Impact the Future City?
By Harry Verhaar, Head of Global Public & Government Affairs, Philips Lighting

Lighting accounts for 19 per cent of the world’s total electricity consumption. Discover how innovations in lighting will lower the energy demands of cities whilst also shaping our urban spaces in future years.

7. Rethinking Urban Planning in a Changing Climate: Case study on Flood-Prone Jakarta
By Sarine Arslanian, Sarine Arslanian, Center for Public Policy Transformation (Transformasi), Jakarta

What are the consequences of rising waters on low-lying urban communities in Jakarta? Solutions, will increasingly need to include a technical dimension whilst also focusing on community participation in urban spatial planning.

8. Transforming transport by building ecosystems, not ego-systems
By Jenny Lindqvist, Head of Intelligent Transport Systems, Business Unit Global Services, Ericsson

Today, connectivity is being embedded throughout transport infrastructure. By gathering, analyzing and sharing data in real-time throughout the traffic ecosystem, we can completely reshape the transport experience for people and its impact on communities.

9. Why the Commons is the Way to Shake Up Transport of Tomorrow
By Bruno Marzloff, Director, Groupe Chronos

When it comes to building better transport, we need to be cautious of short-term fixes. For Bruno Marzloff, director of Groupe Chronos, what we need today are truly radical innovations. He believes these will be found in the sharing economy – or more specifically in the commons.

10. The Mighty Metropolis
By Mathieu Lefevre, Executive Director, NewCities

Cities are growing in prominence on the world stage. We are increasingly interconnected through technology and cheaper travel, and as strict national borders start to fade, cities will shape the future.