About Our Solutions

Here, we present our findings for major problems in cities around the world and some ways cities can solve these problems to become more sustainable and equitable in terms of consumption. We decided to address the areas of consumption of air, energy, food, housing, and water since they comprise some of the most common and widespread problems found in cities. See our mission for more details about our focus.

We took the following approach to our research:

1. Determine specific goals in our areas that a city should reach in order to become sustainable and equitable in consumption,
2. Identify and explore major problems in our categories,
3. Explore, select, and compile solutions to the identified problems,
4. Determine how solutions can be implemented and the obstacles that need to be overcome to solve the identified problems in cities.

Find out more about our mission and our goals here.

To learn about our research into problems and solutions for cities in consumption, please go to the subtopics of air, energy, food, housing, and water.

We have collected all our solutions and grouped them into categories corresponding to different types. This list can be seen here.

Government Programs

• Define “peri-urban” areas (land between country and city) and ensure that they have a constant supply of energy, since they historically have had more difficult access.
• Enact laws that prohibit food waste from being discarded in landfills and redirect the food waste to management facilities.
• Implement public systems to collect leftover food from restaurants, homes and other facilities to donate and reuse.
• Develop a system of interconnected parks and green spaces.
• Track the progress of inclusionary zoning policies and customize them accordingly. Tracking should include monitoring the production of on- and off-site affordable fair housing and its effects on the market.
• Treat water as a public resource rather than privatizing water or distributing it through public-private partnerships. This will ensure that cities are designed for efficiency rather than profit and prevent water from becoming too expensive for residents to afford

Technology

• Invest in the development of low-cost sustainable building materials in order to make building houses more affordable.
• Introduce new technology in kitchenware to minimize food loss houses and restaurants.
• Use RFID trash bins that charge consumers for the amount of food waste they generate.
• Utilize materials which have low impact and low waste life cycles and are easily available.
• Redesign infrastructure and repurpose land into green space. For example, take abandoned infrastructure and parking lots and turn them into green walls and roofs.
• Invest in higher-capacity energy storage technologies for the power grid and smaller scales.
• Upgrade antiquated infrastructure by fixing leaks and installing stormwater treatment to reduce pollution into waterways.

Education

• Launch education initiatives to create an environmentally literate public that can make sustainable choices.
• Educate the public on sustainable food shopping practices including awareness of shelf lives.
• Provide self-training guides to teachers in cities with limited resources. Consider Community-Led-Total-Sanitation as a method of decentralized and low-resource education for residents of urban areas in developing countries.
• Instruct residents to apply small behavioral changes like taking shorter showers in order to reduce water usage.

Fiscal Policies

• Create tax breaks and other economic incentives to encourage individuals and companies to donate, compost and decrease food waste.
• Maximize the efficiency of the national food welfare program by decreasing administrative costs and allowing more flexibility for aid recipients.
• Provide subsidized or free water fixtures to residents.
• Encourage companies to invest in water reuse systems through tax breaks.

Financial Feasibility

• Promote implementation of renewable energy and grid connections to developing cities by encouraging world development banks to invest in these projects.
• Find funding for building green space (e.g. capital improvement, grants, donations, mandatory dedication, and surplus property programs) through government and public funding.
• Provide funding for voluntary inclusionary policies through third parties and federal or state loan programs.

Equity

• Reduce the cost of grid connections so all people can gain access to electricity.
• Build smaller, piecemeal parks, which are better at preventing gentrification than building megaparks.
• Promote programs that sell high quality, nutritious foods to underserved and impoverished neighborhoods at low prices by working with local government, charities, and communities.
• Residents should be included in the planning and implementation of upgrading informal settlements.
• Implement affordable housing near parks and green spaces to integrate low-income neighborhoods, improve the health of their residents by providing a variety of services, and allow the economy to grow. The resulting increased density also lowers the need for unsustainable transportation, since commuters are more likely to live near their places of work and leisure, improving the air quality in these neighborhoods, .
• Prevent socioeconomic segregation by residential value with mixed-use zoning, which brings home closer to jobs and limits the amount of time spent commuting. This zoning method also reduces the reliance on individually-owned vehicles.