Launch of City21, international database for sustainable cities

After the success of its exemplary and sustainable buildings observatory, Construction21 opens City21, a new database dedicated to green cities and their sustainable urban solutions.

Sustainable solutions are more and more often thought at a block or district level, rather than at a building level. Cities are identified today as a central element of the fight against climate change.

By 2050, 70% of the world population will live in cities, 90% of them in emerging countries. Therefore, sustainable cities must generate more human development and participate to the attractiveness of territories, while consuming less energy, resources, space…

It’s a huge challenge that several pioneering cities and companies already started to take on, imagining here and there innovative solutions to reduce their carbon footprint.

Disseminating new ways to build and manage cities

The fast dissemination of these best practices is a key element for the mutation of cities toward sustainability and Construction21, social media dedicated to the sector, had to take on this challenge by creating City21.

This new database pursues two goals: a tool for exchange and information toward local governments, where they can find inspiration for their future urban projects, as well as a promotion tool for companies of the sector, where they can highlight their actual realizations.

This tool of general interest is developed with the support of ADEME and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s R20. Michèle Sabban, President of R20-Regions of Climate Action, tells the origin story of this collaboration: « We had a project to develop an observatory for sustainable cities, in order to disseminate the feedbacks we gathered from our projects around the world toward local governments and companies. As City21 perfectly meets that need, we chose to develop it with Construction21 ».

A benchmark for innovative solutions, inside the Construction21 ecosystem

City21 proposes, on each Construction21 platform, case studies describing exemplary urban projects, eco-districts, but also activity zones, hospitals, campuses, or even rural projects. Some of the urban solutions implemented in these districts can be found in the database to inspire other cities. City21 benefits from the know-how acquired by Construction21 since 2012 in managing databases fed by professionals themselves.

City21 benefits also from the natural audience of the Construction21 network among professionals of the sector, bringing great visibility to published projects. The Construction21 websites received 300,000 unique visitors in 2014, and gets 70 000 visits/month. On Construction21, a case study is viewed by thousands of professionals in only a few months.

The integration of City21 to the Construction21 ecosystem allows to connect City21 case studies to other contents provided by the platform: buildings case studies, thematic online communities, companies databases or trainings related to sustainable cities.

Other interfaces are considered with other regional, national or international observatories, as Construction21 can offer international visibility to their data, reports and analysis.

A City21 case study