Talk to anyone in a country pub and inform them that you live in a ‘city’ and you can probably expect a range of reactions from ‘how do you like the air’ through to ‘how do you cope with the traffic’ and ‘do you live near any good restaurants’. As a Londoner I have experienced many of these reactions. London, for many is a bit of a divisive word. A bit like Marmite, you either love it or hate it. Although, looking at London today in terms of its size and energy intensity could possibly provide us with a glimpse into the future of the form that many other UK cities may take. In many ways London can be described not as just a city, but a ‘mega-city’. However, an expanding number of UK and world cities face significant energy related challenges now and in the future. One of the most fundamental challenges is how, and in what form, should the energy infrastructure designed to serve a growing population be configured in order to provide sustainable energy supplies?


The rapid urbanisation of the world population is already in train and will be a widespread trend during the next decade. In fact, the World Energy Council predicts that in the next 20 years, the equivalent of seven cities with ten million people will be added every year. Furthermore, as the International Energy Agency points out in their 2010 edition of World Energy Outlook, in 2009 for the first time in history, the world’s urban population was larger than the rural population. The population living in urban areas is projected to grow by 1.9 billion, passing from 3.3 billion in 2008 to 5.2 billion 2035, with most of this increase occurring in non-OECD countries. Most of this growth occurs in cities. Now whlist one’s immediate reaction could be ‘well that’s just going to be down China, Brazil, India etc… isn’t it, so what does that have to do with me living in the UK’?, the growth of megacities not only presents Green House Gas emission challenges, but more importantly it puts a strain on resources. Indeed, it has been postulated by some that if every country in the world were as resource hungry as the USA, we would need three planet Earths worth of resources to meet our needs. It is therefore widely expected that the rapid urbanisation of our populations will push up demand for modern energy services, which are commonly more readily available in towns and cities. However, amid this projected growth in the number of mega-cities, ensuring that access to modern energy for poor urban and rural households will remain an increasingly urgent and pressing challenge.


Therefore, bringing this back to the UK and our own energy and climate change challenges, as our cities grow we not only need to ensure that they do so in a way which is climate friendly and low carbon, but also utilising our resources more efficiently at a community scale. However, making more efficient use of the low carbon/renewable resources which our kingdom is blessed with will require us to think differently about how we design and deploy the infrastructure that serves our conurbations. In simple terms we need to become more integrated in our thinking. We need to look for


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Sustainability and the City Sus


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Marco Marijewycz, Advocacy and Stakeholder Manager, E.ON. E.ON are a member of the UK Green Building Council.


ainability and the City


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