51st World Congress: Future of cities

51st World Congress: “Future of cities: Impacts, Indicators, Implementations”; Student Congress and Ranko Radovik Competition

Four main topics were discussed in the parallel sessions:

The 2007 IFHP World congress also included the student congress and the Ranko Radovik Student Competition. All these events were attended by 700 participants, that also experienced several organized visits in Copenhagen like “Copenhagen on foot”, “Harbour tour: Copenhagen from the sea”, among others.

Copenhagen the hosting city ranks amongst the world’s 11 most livable cities (Mercer Human Resource Consulting; The Economist Intelligence Unit). With a population of 1.7 Million living in the Greater Copenhagen Area, the largest city in Scandinavia, 80% of the 5 million population of Denmark is classified as urban.

Impacts and Indicators

The first plenary session was about Impacts and Indicators and had as keynote speakers Richard Burdett (Centennial Professor, LSE) that addressed the audience with his point of view about “Global Cities in an Urban Age”, Reinier de Graaf (Director OMA/AMO) that talked about the “Impacts of Architecture” and Inga  (Deputy Executive Director, UN-HABITAT) with “Demographic Change from an UN HABITAT Perspective”. Ms. Björk-Klevby stressed the importance of the historical date of demographic change but the major concern is that 2007 is also the year in which the global number of slum dwellers (“the urbanization of poverty”) reached the 1 billion mark (Asia 60%; Sub-Saharan Africa 20%, Latin America 14%). Linking this issue to “climate change” and analyzing the possibilities of taking prevention actions, the United Nations estimated that one dollar invested in disaster reduction today can save up to seven dollars in relief and rehabilitation costs.

Implementations 

The afternoon session was about Implementations and Jan Gehl (Professor, Partner Gehl Architects) with the presentation: “Implementing Urban Quality” and Klaus Bondam (Mayor for the Technical and Environmental area in the City of Copenhagen) were its Keynote speakers.

Jan Gehl gave the audience his insights in the human dimension in city planning. Stressing that nowadays cities must be: Lively, Attractive, Safe, Sustainable and Healthy, he also remembered the audience that normally cities don’t have a department for traffic and public life, unlike they have it for traffic. At the end Jan gave some examples of reconquered cities (Bogota, Barcelona, etc), their path to defeat car invasion and their common aspects.

Ritt Bjerregaard (Lord Mayor of the City of Copenhagen) showed the case of Copenhagen (“Implementations: Case Copenhagen”) and Omar Maani (Lord Mayor of the City of Amman, Jordan) referred the dynamic Amman (“Implementations: Case Amman”). Jens Kvorning (Professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts) closed the session.

The third round of the implementations plenary theme was conducted by Peter Newman (Professor of city policy and director of the Institute for Sustainability and technology Policy at Murdoch University) - “Implementing Sustainable Cities” and Ken Yeang (Director of Design at Llewelyn Davies Yeang) - “Implementing Green Design and Master Planning”.

In the final session the future perspectives were discussed with the introductory speech of Niels Østergård (Deputy Director General of the Danish Ministry of the Environment). He started to refer the climate change effects on temperature and precipitation by the end of the 21st century. The world is beginning to understand that is not longer sufficient to be aware of climate change and its effects but they rather have to know what they need to do to cope with it.
Niels affirmed that first “we need to adopt to the unavoidable consequences of climate change and secondly, we need to focus much more on how can cities can contribute to a world wide sustainable development”.

Copenhagen Agenda for Sustainable Cities 

The session concluded with the presentation of the “Copenhagen Agenda for Sustainable Cities” and the “Finger Plan 2007” for the Greater Copenhagen.
The Agenda relies on the creation of a common mindset, stressing the need for a new mindset, new forms of planning and new kinds of leadership. (For more information of the Agenda and other subjects look up: www.ifhp2007copenhagen.dk)

2007 IFHP Student Congress 

The 2007 IFHP Student Congress - the academic forum for ideas and debate of the understanding and approach to the challenges facing the futures of cities from a student perspective. The Student Congress featured some keynotes of the World Congress and had several parallel sessions. The presentation and review of the Student Competition was central to the Student Congress. This event shared with the World congress Joint-Sessions that were conducted as parallel forums with a mixture of speakers, paper presentations and practitioners on several themes:

• Sustainable Futures for Megacities
• Construction of Urban Identity
• Affordable Housing
• Large-Scale Housing Estates
• Nature in the City
• Shrinking Cities.

IFHP Ranko Radovic Student Competition

The IFHP Ranko Radovic Student Competition of the IFHP Congress 2007 in Copenhagen was a worldwide call for proposals for implementations securing the Futures of Cities on all levels and scales, from the globalized city, the buildings that constitute cities, to the individual housing unit, to the quality of the urban realm which binds the city together.

The competition theme was “City regions, regional cities” with the following categories of intervention: Planning, Building, Housing and Urban Quality. All of the 193 projects from 35 countries were exhibited in public at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture.

The winners of the IFHP Ranko Radović Student Competition were Jonathan Nastler and André Schmid from Technische Universität, Braunschweig, Germany: “Trawling city”.

Last Updated @ Thursday, 06 March 2008