Ongoing innovations : the city of tomorrow as a solution to the fight against climate chanege

  Calors Moreno is a professor and scientific councelor of Cofely Ineo's president. He showed that cities are a strong means to introduce eco-innovations in our lives and to fight against climate change. Indeed, as they are responsible for a large part of greenhouse effect emissions, creating “smart cities” is now necessary.
  This subjet is relevant for the conference theme because it implies that professionals of cities, as urbanists, architects, politicians, the construction industry... will have to adapt to this new situation and to do research efforts.
  We are in a changing world, which implies new issues, the most important one is the fight against climate change as a it is a survival one. The world population has kept growing and and it is toppling over the southeast axis, making appear new cultural, economic and climatic paradigms.
This human concentration is transforming its environment as human activity is one of the main cause of global warming. The rate of urbanization is going up, especially in this area. Cities power continues to rise, showing how attractive they are and they are more and more acting out of the State logic, but they also are competing to be the most attrative. This lead Carlos Moreno to define
  The 21th as the “Century of the city”, after the “century of Nations” (20th) and the “century of empires (19th). But the 21th also is very connected, and instantaneous, what Moreno calls the “matrix 0 of neighbourhood”. It exists a very high correlation between ubiquitous and urban flows. Nevertheless, those cities are subject to serious metabolic problems. Pollution is a global matter. Since cities are where economic and scientific activities take place, if they stop being attractive, there is no evolution anymore. They also experience water stress. City centers are very vulnerable to extreme situation, because of the lack of biodiversity, the pollution... and this is not going to improve in the coming years.
  According to C. Moreno, the solution would lie in the creation of an “alterity approach” imvolving citizens, and in the development of an “emotionnal intelligence” in citizenship. In order to achieve to that “our cities and our lifes have to be reinvented”, by the creation of “socially inclusive” housing”, which means housing which include social connections. There is no tecnologic solution which can, in its own, adress the climate challenge. In order to allow social changing, it is necessary to combine social, tecnologic and urban innovations, and only a global action can give us the vision we need to do so.