Human impacts on the world’s landscapes are dominated by the resource appetites of urban areas that now stretch across much of the globe. The planning and management of new cities as well as the retrofitting of existing ones need to undergo a profound paradigm shift. The urban metabolism must be transformed from its current operation as an inefficient and wasteful linear system into a resource efficient and circular system.
The World Future Council (WFC) Regenerative Cities Programme seeks to identify policies that help cities harness their own regenerative capacity in order to reconcile their ecological footprints with their geographical magnitude. The WFC is dedicated to promoting existing regenerative urban development initiatives by identifying and analysing best policies and practices and disseminating these findings to policy-makers worldwide to encourage their widespread adoption.
About the WFC Think Tank Panel
As part of the WFC's commitment to promoting best policy solutions for regenerative urban development, it will invite five experts to take part in a two-hour open think tank panel discussion which will explore and discuss regenerative urban development with a particular focus on the city-hinterland relationship in the energy sector.
The core question is: How is the Energiewende an opportunity to improve city-hinterland relationships?
The think tank panel will explore how the Energiewende (energy transition) in Germany is redefining the relationship between cities and their surrounding hinterland. This is a central issue for regenerative cities, which should build the capacity to regenerate the materials and resources they use by fostering a mutually beneficial relationship between urban areas and their surrounding territories. Furthermore, the nature of an energy transition based on decentralised renewable energy is also inevitably hinting at a change in how cities relate to their surrounding regions to derive their energy.
Within this context, the panel shall provide insights to help cities develop policies that take into account the opportunities and challenges of a transition towards 100 % renewable energy and the implications to cities and their surrounding regions.