Presentation on Sustainable Planning

On September 18^th, I attended a presentation on sustainability. Margaret Cederoth, who is an urban planner at the Parsons Brinckerhoff firm in Sacramento, California, gave the presentation. The presentation was about how cities can be sustainable. It was extremely interesting to hear an actual practicing urban planner talk about her work as well discuss how she implements the elements of sustainable processes into her planning.

One of the most interesting things about the presentation was Ms. Cederoth’s account on Masdar, the carbon-free city in the United Arab Emirates. During the presentation, she discussed how she was part of the team of people who were able to use their skills to create a sustainable city out of a huge empty area. There aren’t that many opportunities for urban planners to build a city from nothing, so it was quite fascinating to hear how this was done. I was also intrigued how Ms. Cederoth described that Masdar was built “with utilities in mind.” In other words, the team of people that worked on this project knew that human beings consume and use a lot of resources. With that in mind, they tried to implement environmentally friendly and efficient ways to collect energy for the city. Examples ranged from solar panels on nearly all of the buildings to a wind tower in the middle of the university. All in all, I was quite fascinated that such a project as a “carbon-free city” could actually be created in the real world.

Many of the topics that Ms. Cederoth discussed were related to the information we have learned from UP 199. Within the presentation, she discussed such phenomena as ecological footprints, the process of conserving and loading as well as many other elements on the foundations of sustainability. For example, Ms. Cederoth touched upon the reason why people in the United Arab Emirates wanted a carbon-free city. She mentioned that the “UAE has one of the highest ecological footprints per person in the world (11.9 global hectares per person).” This statement was directly related to one of our previous lectures where we discussed how there are many countries in the Middle East (these are countries that are extracting oil) have enormous ecological footprints per person. Ms. Cederoth also touched upon the topic of carbon emissions. She discussed how they tried to make the construction company use more sustainable methods in their building. For example, they wanted to limit the usage of cement in the city because “the manufacturing of cement is responsible for about 5% of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide.” This goes to show that people can build new infrastructures in ways that won’t harm the Earth in the future. Whatever the case, I really enjoyed this presentation and thought it was extremely cool to hear the things we have learned in class being implemented by real urban planners like Margaret Cederoth.