Government officials, businesspeople and experts from Indonesia, Sweden, Singapore and Thailand gathered in Jakarta on Thursday to discuss the challenges of building sustainable cities.
“Sustainable cities are a vision that must be made real. It is essential to the urban future of Southeast Asia,” Belinda Yuen, an associate professor at the School of Design and Environment at the University of Singapore, said during the seminar, titled Sustainable Cities: Challenges for Indonesia and Sweden.
Yuen said Asia was experiencing rapid urban growth. By 2030, Asia will have an urban population of 2.6 billion, or 61 percent of the world’s total urban population, according to the United Nations.
“It will have serious implications for resources, with many people not having access to basic services,” she said.
The seminar was organized by Sweden’s Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia’s State Ministry for the Environment and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.
During the event, Hans Lundberg from the Swedish Environmental Institute presented a concept called SymbioCity — Sustainability by Sweden.
SymbioCity is a concept focusing on energy, waste management, water supply and sanitation, traffic and transportation, landscape planning, sustainable architecture and urban functions like housing and recreation.
“The SymbioCity approach finds links between the sectors and their system investments in order to optimize the results,” according to the website Symbiocity.org.
For example, waste destined for landfills or household biowaste can produce energy that fuels public transportation.
