Which synergies for urbanism, architecture and real estate ?
Finding synergies between urban planning, architecture and real estate is necessary to reduce the environmental impact of cities and buildings.
Between health news, geopolitical news and sports news (sorry for Parisians) difficult to keep time for scientific news… Yet the IPCC released the second part of its sixth report more than a week ago.
Why is it alarming? Why change now and act immediately?
While one of the principles of the Paris Agreement was to limit the rise in temperature from pre-industrial levels to 1.5°C, in 2021 we are already at +1.1°C!
The impacts on biodiversity and society are already being felt and will certainly increase.
Already more than 3 billion people are living in a context of high vulnerability to climate change.
By 2050, nearly 1 billion people living in coastal regions will be threatened by rising water levels or marine flooding.
Okay, let’s stop knocking you out with pessimistic but surely realistic numbers and news…
A small window of opportunity exists, however, in which we must rush. The wheels towards a more virtuous system are still accessible.
While cities are home to nearly 2/3 of the world’s population, construction is one of the most CO2-emitting sectors, a massive consumer of primary energy and the largest producer of waste. The professions of urban planning, architecture and real estate have a responsibility to assume to plan, design and manage the city of tomorrow.
Which levers of action?
The economic development of small and medium-sized cities, human size, proximity to nature, calm are their assets, favor entrepreneurs local small and medium-sized enterprises is the key to revitalize formerly prosperous regions. Their development is also a way of offering an alternative to metropolises, which are increasingly attractive in terms of capital and talent but increasingly energy-intensive.
City-wide planning, renovation/rehabilitation to transform them by proposing new uses more adapted to today’s society while minimizing the use of materials and energy. For this, designers and operators should rethink their business models based on “the bigger, the more profitable it is”, but being long-term on small diffuse operations is certainly also a way to gain visibility in the long term…
Strengthening the partnership ecosystem between communities, developers, developers, architects, urban planners and start-ups. They offer many new solutions to facilitate, make more fluid, more responsible the city’s factory. We must generalise innovation in a sector that is just beginning to emerge from its inertia. The identification of start-ups in urban planning, architecture and real estate will be the subject of our next article! Stay tuned!
And of course the reuse of materials, construction with biosourced materials, bioclimatic design etc.
The policies of the planning of the territory, of the city, of the housing must also support these levers of urban transformation in order to offer to the future generations, cities and territories where they will not need to hide in an atomic shelter to protect themselves from the summer days at 50°C (and crazy dictators?).
For curious people:
Paris agreements
https://unfccc.int/fr/process-and-meetings/l-accord-de-paris/qu-est-ce-que-l-accord-de-paris
Link to the IPCC report
https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6wg2/pdf/IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf
Link to the book Réparons la ville
https://www.reparonslaville.fr/
