The future cities exhibition at
The Crystal building points out a startling truth early on: half the world’s
population lives in cities, and by 2050 this number will have risen to 70%,
something like 6.5 billion people. Every second another two people move to a
city.
The Crystal proclaims itself one of the world’s most sustainable
buildings
How are cities are developed, and
how we travel about them is therefore of extreme importance. The free
exhibition has eight zones, but the one of most interest to me was ‘Keeping
Moving’, looking at aspects of public transport in future. A statistic on one
of the many interactive screens reported that keeping Cairo moving led to 234
road accidents a day, with 1 death and 25 injuries every 13 hours.
It will be no surprise to learn
that mobility about cities is most easily achieved in the well-developed cities
of Europe and North America. Those cities struggling to cope are in turn those
less-developed cities in Asia and Africa. Cairo finds itself with one of the
lowest scores on the displayed graph of ‘complete mobility index’ (towards the left hand side), an index
that takes into account all forms of transport.
Making a point graphically; transportation is easiest in the richest
countries (on the right of the graph)
The same screen that reported
Cairo’s accident statistics reports 50,000 taxi drivers in Cairo replacing
belching taxis for modern vehicles using cleaner liquefied natural gas. One of
the things the Keeping Moving zone does best is highlight (to children) our
continued reliance on dirty fuels.
A clever gadget enables visitors
to calculate their carbon dioxide emissions in reaching the exhibition. My
local trip by train, light railway, cable car, and foot had resulted in the
release of a shocking sounding 5 kg of CO2. Compared to other
visitors I was doing well. The average visitor CO2 expenditure was
79 kg. It was just a shame the exhibition was so empty.