Clean water, air & efficient public transport should be main priorities for smart city: Katarina Luhr

Stockholm — the capital of Sweden — has emerged among the top green and smart cities of the world. dna's Sudhir Suryawanshi spoke with the city's vice mayor of environment Katarina Luhr, who spoke extensively about how they managed to achieve their goal and their future plans. She also said that urbanisation is a big challenge and to cope up with it, the cities should use innovative technology and green fuel.

EXCERPTS:
What should be the main priority for any metro city?
Katarina: Adequate supply of clean water, air and efficient public transport should be the main priorities for any city and its leaders. Stockholm was the first city to receive European Green Capital award by the EU Commission. Besides, to achieve the city's environmental goal, there should be efficient cooperation between inhabitants, the private industry and the public sector. Environmental and information technology are another important factors to develop a sustainable smart city. Moreover, while developing the infrastructure such as road, in our planning, we give first priority to walkers, second to bicycle, then public transport and in last the private vehicles. We are encouraging the people to use cycles in large numbers which helps to reduce pollution and keep the people physically fit. There is separate policy for the bicycle. We are planning to spend one billion on creation of bicycle infrastructure. We are getting good feedback for our promotion of bicycle policy. Besides, our focus is also on the renewable energy such as solar and electric vehicles.

How do you get funding for these infrastructure projects?
Katarina: We get funds from our government and through levying taxes or we manage funds from some other department where the fund is lying unused. European Union also extends the financial aid for green projects in Europe. So, we do not have any issue in regards of funding.

Urbanisation has been going up across the world but most of the cities are not prepared to handle it. What is your view on it?
Katarina: In Sweden, 85% population stays in urban localities because of easy job availability and better lifestyle. So, we have to plan in advance by bringing various stakeholders and experts and politicians at one platform. Our cities should be inhabitant friendly. In Stockholm, we have many such experts group therefore before implementing any major project, the project report details gets discussed thoroughly. Better planning yields better result. Every day, 20,000 to 25,000 people are moving to Stockholm. Housing is a major issue for these migrants. We are planning to construct 1.40 lakh houses in the next few years. We are tying up with private developers who will be given the land and that land will be used for construction of sale and rental apartments. Rather than going up, we are going beneath the ground. Most of our new malls and shopping centres are beneath the grounds. High rises requires more power and other facilities that increases the maintenance cost. Besides, we have to spend on fire safety measures. Therefore, in new projects, we are restricting the heights of the buildings.

Any plan to dispose off the large quantum of generated waste in cities?
Katarina: It is true that solid waste waste disposal is a major issue. However, we are trying to use the waste to generate bio-fuel. In all housing colonies, we have set up waste processing plants. People can put the wet and dry garbage in separates and fixed pipe bins. These pipe bins are connected to computerised processing centres across the city. So, there's no headache in collecting the garbage from house to house and apartment to apartment on a daily basis. Other urban cities should also follow this green and computerised model that will get ride of overflowing dustbins and foul odour. We have set a target of making Stockholm fossil fuel free by 2040. Besides, whatever bio-fuel, we are generating that has been reused to run the 200 public transport buses. Only 10% of the waste are not used, remaining stuff is recycled for various purpose.

Have you explored the water transport facility efficiently?
Katarina: Actually, we are yet to focus on this area. We are planning to clean our rivers and lakes after which we will have a better plan to use our rivers for water transports effectively.