SIEMENS

Cities are like magnets. They exert a powerful attraction on people. More than half of the people on our planet already live in urban areas. According to United Nations estimates, the world’s urban centers will grow by an additional three billion inhabitants by 2050 — and this increase will take place almost exclusively in today’s developing countries and emerging economies. What’s more, about half of the world’s total economic output is already generated in the 600 largest cities, and this trend is gathering momentum.

On the face of it, the growth of urban regions is positive. They bring people together. They help to stimulate creativity and entrepreneurship. They attract people by offering work, education, and healthcare. In developing countries and emerging economies in particular, living in a city promises people a considerable increase of opportunities and income compared to living in the countryside. However, it’s not unusual for city dwellers to gain these advantages at the cost of considerable compromises in terms of quality of life.

Heavy traffic, crowded living conditions, pollution, and noise are problems faced by city dwellers all over the world. Moreover, in many places, efficient local transportation networks and running water are scarce commodities. As a result, making cities places where people can enjoy a high quality of life is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. This challenge is being accepted by political decisionmakers, planners, and companies such as Siemens. That’s why we’ve established a new company sector in which we are combining key parts of our portfolio in order to offer sustainable and holistic infrastructure solutions to our urban customers even more consistently.

We are doing this because all cities have one thing in common: In order to grow sustainably they need more than just trains, local public transportation, traffic control systems and charging stations for electric vehicles. They need mobility concepts (“Flexibility in Motion”) that integrate all of these elements efficiently. One example of such a concept is described in the “Quality of Life in Cities” section of this issue of Pictures of the Future.

A similar approach must be taken with regard to energy supplies. Booming cities and regions need more than just power stations, power lines, and substations. In the future they will also require smart grids, which will help them to better coordinate energy demand and energy use — in other words, to manage the chain leading from energy generation to distribution and consumption in an economical and sustainable manner (“Better than Broomsticks”, “Record-Setting Power Plant” and “Sugar, Oil and Inventive Minds”).

The huge differences between the starting positions and requirements of cities are revealed by the results of the Green City Indices that were compiled on behalf of Siemens by the Economist Intelligence Unit (“And the Winners Are...”) and by a comparison of cities such as Jakarta (“Living in Asia’s “Big Durian””) and London (“Better than Broomsticks”). In Jakarta, the main focus is on improving the living conditions of many of its inhabitants, as well as basic infrastructure measures, such as providing a water supply, managing waste, and building the city’s first subway system.

By contrast, in London there is an urgent need to modernize the Underground, which is almost 150 years old, and to expand local public transportation in order to cope with growing numbers of passengers. Here, Siemens technology is helping to deal with these pressures on the city’s infrastructure. Hybrid buses and electric vehicles are improving air quality in the British capital. Part of the city’s power now comes from wind farms off the southern coast of England, where it is generated by turbines from Siemens.

Of course, the sparing use of resources is an important issue in general, not only in cities. Rapid economic development in countries such as China (“Winning Formula”), India (“Infrastructures for Everyone”), and Brazil (“Sugar, Oil and Inventive Minds”) has led to huge increases in resource and energy use. A major trend in the emerging economies is an increase in the number of people entering the middle class, where they generate new demand for comfort, consumer products, and mobility.

Sustainable growth is therefore the order of the day. Some solutions in this area are examined in the “Efficient Use of Resources” section of this magazine. These polutions include making the energy supply system more efficient (“Record-Setting Power Plant”), finding alternatives for scarce raw materials (“Alternatives in the Making”), optimizing recycling processes (“Fast Track to a Second Life”), and taking environmental protection into account as early as the design process. The products involved include dishwashers (“Energy-Saving Champions”), computer tomographs (“A Benchmark for Efficiency”), and smelters (“When is Green Really Green?”).

Achieving resource-conserving growth and enhancing the quality of life in cities are without a doubt two of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Siemens is determined to respond to both of these existential issues in order to ensure that our world remains an attractive place to live.