We have less than 4,000 days to act on the Sustainable Development Goals, audiences were told in a session on sustainable cities on day two of the sixth annual Knowledge Summit held at the Dubai World Trade Centre.

Bearing the title ‘Innovation: The Way to Sustainable Cities’ and moderated by Sally Mousa, Host at Pulse 95 – Sharjah, the session brought together Dr Mahmoud AlBurai, Managing Director of the Dubai Real Estate Institute; Prof. Jason Pomeroy, Founder of Jason Pomeroy Studios; Karim El-Jisr, Executive Director of the SEE Institute at The Sustainable City – Dubai; and Steven Haggart, Founder of Australis.

“We have many problems that make sustainability a priority issue – especially in this region,” asserted Dr Mahmoud AlBurai, who was also the speaker that cautioned the audience that we are running out of time to address the problem, with a mere 4,000 days left to act on the SDGs.

“Our region has a pressing refugee crisis, high illiteracy rates… nine out of ten people are breathing unsafe air,” he added. “The world’s population is on track to reach nine billion in 2050. We need to rethink the way we plan our cities. We need cities for the people and we need to look at systems that cater to that.”

Dr AlBurai showcased what he called the ‘City’s Competitiveness Model’, which relies on three ‘Competitiveness Levers’: Quality of Life, Government and Resilience, and Affordability. The Model is to be implemented along delivery platforms ranging from stakeholder engagement and system leadership, to governance, transparency, trust, technology, and innovation.

For his part, Prof. Jason Pomeroy shed light on the ‘triple bottom line’, where urban planning relies on three elements: culture, space, and technology. “We live in increasingly multicultural setting with more people migrating to different locations,” he said. “Couple that with the increasingly dense urban spaces, and it poses a challenge to communication and human interaction. The tall building – symbol of power, wealth, and prosperity – needs to be coupled with open spaces for interaction. When I studied architecture, I was passionate about sustainability. We can’t have a conversation about social sustainability without space; it is all about preserving space for our interactions.”

Steven Haggart followed, telling the audience, “Sustainability implies more than just maintaining the status-quo. We do need to preserve our environment, but we also need to regenerate it. We do need to be resilient, but we must regenerate the environment, the culture, and the system.”

“We need to move beyond using financial returns as the only criteria,” he explained. “We have to redefine abundance; knowledge, technology, health and wellbeing, and the overall experience should also be potential measures of value. We can play around with those metrics to create a system, and governments have a huge role to play here.”

“Instead of fighting cities, let’s join them,” recalled Karim El-Jisr as he narrated the trajectory that led him to his position at The Sustainable City in Dubai. “I thought, let’s join the builders in Dubai and bring sustainability to the city.”

With a background in agriculture, which he said helped him develop a deep understanding of sustainability by shedding light on natural cycles, El-Jisr was involved in The Sustainable City Project from the beginning. “Fast forward to today and we now have 3,000 people living in The Sustainable City. The challenge now is how to replicate this to cater to 30,000, or 300,000 or 3 million inhabitants,” he said.

“My role is to capture data and use it to drive solutions for sustainability in the City,” he added. “Our approach relies on six main pillars: environmental sustainability, food, energy, water, products and building materials, mobility, and waste. Many visitors expect to see very little green spaces in a sustainable city because they associate sustainability with less landscaping, but we have a system to recycle water and we choose the right landscape. Green spaces aren’t only about aesthetics, they can also be functional.”

Organised by the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation (MBRF), the Summit is taking place November 19-20 at the Dubai World Trade Centre under the theme ‘Knowledge for Sustainable Development’. The event is set to showcase relevant experiences and best practices that have helped countries on their development journey in various sectors.