International reporting
Sweden: the city invents a sustainable future at the H22 festival
Audio 02:34
The city of Helsingborg in Sweden hosts the city and urban innovation festival: H22.
© Pixabay / endlessboggie
By: Frederic Faux
3 mins
With climate change, it is forests, biodiversity and the oceans that are threatened.
But this should not make us forget that the solutions are for the most part in our cities.
Today, 60% of the planet's inhabitants live in cities and the way they move, eat or keep warm has a direct impact on the planet.
All these urgent issues are at the center of a festival of the city and urban innovations - H22 - which is being held until July 3 in Helsingborg, in the south of Sweden.
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“
Well here is the machine, this big square thing.
You put the food scraps inside.
We turn it on, it's going to be a little noisy.
And all this waste goes to the treatment plant, it will be transformed into biogas
»
This system for recovering food waste through a dedicated evacuation already exists in a few cities in Europe.
But there is only one to have installed it on the scale of an entire district, in all dwellings: it is Helsingborg, in the south of Sweden.
This port of 150,000 inhabitants on the edge of the Oresund Strait, which separates it from Denmark, hosts until July 3 H22, for Helsingborg 2022. A city festival inaugurated by Crown Princess Victoria.
You can see a lot of innovators there, like this Estonian company that offers secure bicycle parking to be installed in the street
“
This metal arm blocks both the frame and the wheel of the bicycle.
And in the event of an attempted theft, an alarm is triggered
,” explains a member of the company.
Essential if we want people to leave their car in the garage.
Or this architect from Oslo, Nicolai Riise, who built an office building with 70% recycled materials.
“
Supporting structures like slabs, columns, beams have already been used.
I believe this is the first new building made with recycled materials in the Western world, at least for a century
”, he comments.
In the midst of all this good news, there is less good news: many of the solutions that are proposed to reduce our CO2 emissions or limit our impact on the environment are often technological, very expensive, and very unsuitable for the cities of the South, which are among the most populated in the world.
Santiago Uribe, head of resilience for the Colombian city of Medellín, realized this.
He is one of the few participants, if not the only one, to come from Latin America, or Africa.
And what he sometimes hears in the debates of H22, makes him jump.
“It's sometimes borderline surreal, because a city isn't just about infrastructure, buildings, technology.
The essence of a city is us, the people.
We focus a lot of attention on the power of money, of big technologies, but we leave aside the human factor,” he exclaims.
H22 is held in Helsingborg, with many activities and exhibitions open to the public until July 3.
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Also to listen: Heat waves: the need to change the city
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Architecture and urbanism
Environment
Biodiversity