Adaptiveness becomes paramount
All over the world, cities are shaped by profound forces: their population, their technologies and their infrastructures. Even today, these forces collide and urbanization and climate change will spur dramatic changes in metropolitan areas. Cities need to pave the way for constant evolution: digital technologies are becoming increasingly important and urban infrastructures and buildings require a more efficient and sustainable setup.These changing environments set free a swarm of urban challenges: Developed cities for instance need to focus on cutting carbon emissions, improving efficiency in infrastructure and buildings, stimulating a market shift towards cleaner vehicles and more efficient and environmentally friendly public transportation. At the same time, infrastructure quality in many advanced economies is deteriorating. Looking forward to 2030, more than $50 trillion will need to be invested in infrastructure globally to keep up with GDP and population growth.
Cities in emerging markets on the other hand face issues such as power outages and inadequate public transport and roads, which brake on growth and development. Infrastructures cannot be built fast enough to keep pace with economic and urban development. In times of constrained budgets city leaders carefully need to identify their infrastructure investments ensuring that their investments address their environmental and economic priorities. Technologies need to be adapted to serve local needs to ensure that the right technologies are applied in the right environments, tailored to the specific characteristics of the individual city.
The Siemens City Performance Tool
To tackle these questions, Siemens has developed an interactive and comprehensive tool – the City Performance Tool (CyPT). It gives guidance to a city on how to achieve their environmental targets while providing an indication on how each infrastructure-related decision will influence job creation and the infrastructure sector growth.
The City Performance Tool
- is a leading-edge simulation tool that can be used in many different decision-making scenarios
- evaluates buildings, transport and energy technologies in a city through more than 70 technologies deployed at the desired time period and required implementation level
- measures the impacts of a city’s strategic plans, and compare traditional methods with state-of-the-art technologies
- determines the implementation rate needed for any city to meet its future environmental targets
- reports both environmental and economic KPIs across transport, building and energy sectors
The City Performance Tool of Siemens shows a way forward by going beyond a simple carbon footprint. The inclusion of further pollutants (PM10 and NOx) and further sustainability dimensions (cost efficiency and job creation) goes definitely in the right direction.Prof. Dr. Matthias Finkbeiner, Chair of Sustainable Engineering, TU Berlin
