Smart Green Cities: New Technologies, New Strategies, New Practices
Focus
In 2008, for the first time a majority of the world's population lived in cities. Rapidly rising standards of living and migration are contributing to an unprecedented worldwide surge in urbanization--in China alone, if trends continue, by 2025 more than 220 cities will each have more than one million inhabitants. The explosive growth of cities around the Pacific has widespread implications for energy use and has led to the demand for cities to become both smart and green.
But while billions of dollars of investments are pouring into urban energy solutions, and around the Pacific "low-carbon cities" and "eco-cities" are moving center stage, there are enormous challenges (and opportunities) facing the effective application of information technologies (IT), other innovative technologies and industrial growth.
The intersection of IT and environmental sustainability on the urban scale will require a complex integration of expertise, tools, and know-how from multiple disciplines--from building design and real estate development, to mobility and water systems, IT hardware and software, and energy providers. Although innovations in strategies and implementation are evolving quickly in pockets of excellence around the globe, early results have been highly uneven. Frameworks for understanding and analysis are still fragmented, innovative design and implementation rapidly changing, and best practices have yet to be defined.
Purpose
Led by SPRIE at Stanford University, this conference aims to gather an elite group of experts, decision makers, and thought leaders from across disciplines and geographical boundaries to focus on smart green cities around the Pacific. Participants will:
- Pursue a deeper understanding of the complex interactions among the key drivers that impact the extent that cities are green and smart
- Focus on core challenges of capitalizing on opportunities and overcoming obstacles--technological, economic, behavioral or political
- Explore what innovations in strategy or practice are leading to positive outcomes, including human livability, financial viability, economic vitality, and environmental sustainability
- Discuss implications for the evolution of markets and development of industries
- Lay the groundwork for future actions, such as industry strategies, research agendas, and policy recommendations
Participants
"Smart Green Cities" will invite a select group of government, business, and academic leaders from the United States and Asia for two days of expert presentations and fruitful discussion at Stanford University. The summit will enable participants to better lead to improved strategy, action, and outcomes for building the next generation of smart green cities.
Agenda
Agenda is preliminary and not all speakers are confirmed. Please download below
Sponsors
Many thanks to our sponsors for making this event possible.
Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)
John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building
366 Galvez Street
Stanford, CA
Stressed by Strife: ASEAN from Pattaya to Preah Vihear
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is Asia’s most resilient regional organization. Its ambitious new charter aims to foster, in a dynamic but disparate region, a triply integrated region comprising a Political and Security Community, an Economic Community, and a Socio-Cultural Community. The charter’s debut under Thailand’s 2008-09 chairmanship of the Association was badly marred, however, by political strife among Thai factions, clashes on the Thai-Cambodian border, and border-crossing risks of a non-military kind. How have these developments affected ASEAN’s regional performance and aspirations? Are its recent troubles transitional or endemic? Do they imply a need for the Association to reconsider its modus operandi, lest it lose its role as the chief architect of East Asian regionalism?
Dr Thitinan Pongsudhirak is director of the Institute of Security and International Studies and an associate professor of international political economy at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is a prolific author, having written many op eds, articles, chapters, and books on Thailand’s politics, political economy, foreign policy, and media, and on ASEAN and East Asian security and economic cooperation. He has worked for The Nation newspaper (Bangkok), The Economist Intelligence Unit, and Independent Economic Analysis (London). His degrees are from the London School of Economics (PhD), Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (MA), and the University of California (BA). His doctoral study of the 1997 Thai economic crisis won the United Kingdom’s Lord Bryce Prize for Best Dissertation in Comparative and International Politics—currently the only work by an Asian scholar to have been so honored.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room