IAAC’s Academic Director Areti Markopoulou along with five other experts from the private and public sector participates in a debate held by El Periódico to address how cities have to move towards sustainability.

By 2050, it is estimated that two out of every three people will live in cities, which will need to cover high transport and social infrastructure needs of great complexity. Around 25{d857388f21b456b5950843ccf3ce3afcfd8f254def444a67f9da77e83e0d77e9} of the world’s population will live in 2050 in a country affected by chronic and repeated shortages of fresh and drinking water. The UN’s sustainable development targets for 2030 stress to the need to build reliable, sustainable, resilient and quality infrastructure.

In this regard, Areti Markopoulou reports on El Periódico de Cataluña daily, one of the leading newspapers in Barcelona, that the new infrastructures of cities must solve energy production and food. “Food should experience an increase of at least 70{d857388f21b456b5950843ccf3ce3afcfd8f254def444a67f9da77e83e0d77e9} in the coming decades and this cannot be absorbed by the outskirts, it must be integrated into the urban system,” says to El Periódico de Cataluña. The idea of our Academic Director involves hybrid infrastructures that integrate nature and technology to produce food and energy in buildings and public spaces.

In order to achieve this goal, IAAC is carrying out a Horizon 2020 initiative such as UrbiNAT co-funded by the European Commission, with three pilot cities in France, Portugal and Bulgaria, one of whose projects consists of “increasing green areas by integrating them with bio-photovoltaic technology that takes advantage of the photosynthesis of plants“. In addition, our Academic Director highlights in the daily newspaper that these new techniques and advanced solutions might be not as powerful as conventional photovoltaics, but they could provide the space itself with its night lighting.

To download the full report (in Spanish), please click here.