Building the sustainable city
Adaptation of management frameworks
Achieving maximum efficiency in all our activities involves the definition of global management frameworks that make an operator responsible for management of a flow and enable :
- the manager to take responsibility for quality and performance objectives;
- elimination of conflicts of interest between producers and distributors (essential when considering economy of resources);
- control of long-term changes to infrastructures;
- simplification of control applied by the public authority.
The exercise of competition involves :
- setting up periodic competition, intrinsic to the delegated management model;
- appropriate segmenting of territories;
- subcontracting of some activity segments while maintaining global consistency of the contract.
Updating remuneration methods
Under different conditions, each of our activities requires a progressive change to its economic logic :
- for water, the percentage of the remuneration related to the quality of service and saving of resources must increase,
to compensate for a reduction in the remuneration for volumes distributed; - for environmental services, the percentage of income related to landfilling must decrease, and be compensated for by an increase for treatment methods to recover the material or energy;
- for energy management, combating climate change requires an increase in remuneration related to energy and carbon efficiency;
- for public transportation, the virtuous aspect of high volumes which avoids more disruptive and polluting means of transportation, does not eliminate the need for fine tuning of means (financing, urban land occupancy, energy) to transportation needs.
Sustainable urban planning
The objective is to compare investment costs, management costs and the environmental and climatic impact of measures to be taken, based on :
- characteristics of each region in terms of economic and natural resources, infrastructures and town planning;
- improvement objectives defined by the public authority.
At the moment, innovative technical-financial instruments may be defined based on measurements of carbon savings achieved.
This enables a comparison between actions planned in a wide variety of sectors such as transportation, housing, waste treatment, lighting, city planning, social housing, etc.
In the future, a more ambitious approach will be necessary in order to change from carbon saving to measurements of the global ecological footprint (taking account of biodiversity and local social, economic and cultural aspects).
Adaptation of the contract model in emerging countries
Creation or modernisation of essential services in these built-up areas requires research and particular adaptation to take account of :
- the frequently enormous size of these built-up areas and their rate of change, that corresponds largely to future urban growth;
- special difficulties in creating an economic balance that requires optimized matching of means to needs, both for investments and operation;
- whenever possible, reconciling traditional economic and social realities with modern and secure management methods;
- definition of regulation mechanisms setting down principles of sustainable governance and increased responsibility
of persons or companies causing pollution or using resources.
