The new and smart cities,

The best cities to live,

MOST OF THE BUILDINGS WE NEED IN THE FUTURE HAVE ALREADY BEEN BUILT
For example in Finland, over half of the country’s built environment is from the 1950s-1980s. The situation is similar in other parts of Scandinavia and Europe. Yet smart cities as they are now often necessitate entirely new building stock. It is relevant to ask globally, too, whether we have the wealth to build these new cities from scratch – – and even if we do, to ponder on the amount of emissions that generates.

”A large deal of our built environment is now in need of renovation”, explains Demos Helsinki’s researcher Mikko Annala. ”We’ll have to estimate how much of this building stock we should refurbish and how. If we find clever ways to integrate smart solutions into older buildings, we can save significant amounts of resources.”

 SMART IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAN
Unlike it is often made to seem in the hyped-up press, smart cities like Songdo and Masdar are seldom celebrated by the people who live in them – at least not in the way they were expected to. For example Songdo was envisioned.