A polyglot gathering of international climate change experts, scientists, architects, planners, local government officials and students created a hotbed of discussion on the topic of Sustainable Cities at Te Papa in Wellington yesterday. 

The one-day workshop was a showcase for the work of Germany’s Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy and the event itself was sponsored by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research. 

Speaker Manfred Fischedick, of the Wuppertal Institute, presented an array of models being deployed in Germany to achieve a low carbon economy and sustainable cities. 

These featured municipal climate protection plans, sustainable urban infrastructure strategies beginning with a blueprint for Munich (highlighting the importance of office building insulation and life cycle planning), 100% renewable energy regions, and an innovation city competition in the industrialised Ruhr valley won by the city of Bottrop. Wuppertal is also actively involved in a project that is pairing low carbon initiatives underway in the Chinese city of Wuxi (near Shanghai) and the German city of Dusseldorf. 

Leading Australian academic and author Peter Newman then shared his views on the green wave of emerging eco-cities with a particular focus on Singapore, as well as the evidence-based lessons to be gleaned from his personal and professional advocacy of increased public transport corridors in Perth. He also spoke about Perth reviewing itself as a polycentric city and cited figures related to property development at Cockburn Coast (next to Fremantle) showing a payback of 55% less carbon emissions for added investment of just AU$5600 per house.  

There was a consensus at the workshop that cities offer “the only way to go” for both mitigating and adapting to growth pressures and climate change – particularly because they create the critical mass needed to build a sense of community responsibility. 

Much of the general discussion about the context for change in New Zealand turned to a vocal opposition to the Government’s recently announced ‘Better Local Government’ reforms and the constraining effect this could have on the international move towards more democratically driven, sustainable and self-sufficient cities. 

Victoria University’s Ralph Chapman contended that the reforms, as announced, contain “truly fatuous and ridiculous statements” about limiting the role of local government. International speakers affirmed that the growth of sustainable cities with any form of first-mover advantage is totally dependent on strong local government, and even moreso if central government policy levers aren’t being used. 

A concern was expressed by Philippa Howden-Chapman, director of the NZ Centre for Sustainable Cities, at the clear absence of a central government agency in New Zealand that sees urban development and sustainable cities as a core part of its brief. 

Comments were made that if the current Government was serious about change, the next ‘super ministry’ should be a Ministry of Infrastructure which would co-ordinate regulations and be responsible for day-to-day infrastructure projects within each region (derived from value capture and taxes, not rates). This would avoid stripping away the fundamental remit of cities and towns to be directed by their citizens in determining from the bottom up how resources and new technologies improve their lives, and would refocus local government more to social infrastructure such as housing, cultural amenities, planning inputs and social innovation. 

Such a restructuring would require central government to co-locate transport-related policy and decision making alongside the related policy and decision makers at the Ministry for the Environment, Department of Building and Housing, CERA, Civil Defence and Emergency Management and, along with a purview of transport and energy SOEs and Crown entities (including Crown Fibre), perhaps even Statistics NZ as an arbiter. This was considered preferable to the hidden and closed-door approach being taken to infrastructure. In addition there was support for more collaborative governance in New Zealand, of the kind seen in the Land and Water Forum, in order to tackle gnarly issues and to encourage the “mutual implementation culture” needed to achieve sustainable cities.   

As Chris Cameron, Wellington City Council’s Principal Climate Change Advisor, acknowledged in his summary of the day, all of the efforts being made are really just scratching the surface if there isn’t an end-game in sight. “Either we strive for a true, quality-based path of living sustainably or not. As societies based on a model of non-sustainability, we’re not even close”. 

This one-off Sustainable Cities workshop was jointly hosted by the Wuppertal Institute, Wellington City Council and Massey University, with speakers such as Peter Newman fresh from preceding meetings of the worldwide Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also held in Wellington. 

A practical outcome announced at the workshop is that the Wuppertal Institute will be working with Wellington City Council over coming months to discern how Wellington sits alongside other cities in the world and to share best practice. 

Note: The next major climate change event in Wellington will be a conference focused on the challenges that New Zealand will need to contend with due to rising sea levels – more information on that is available from the New Zealand Climate Change Centre.