On September 18th, 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.
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