Page 265 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Urban Circular Economy: The New Frontier Chapter j 12 239

emergence of a new economy that respects the environment, through local
hires and community channels. As far as energy is concerned, In the Marne-la-
Valle ´e region, the heat produced by data centers is recovered for the Paris Val

d’Europe business park network: water at a temperature of 48 C is channeled
directly from the exchanger outlet to the municipal heating pipes of the
business park. Ready to use, it is particularly virtuous from an economic and
environmental point of view. The city of Paris is asking the private sector to
invest itself to accelerate the momentum surrounding urban regeneration and
the adaptation to new economic, social, and environmental challenges. Each
new project has to demonstrate its contribution to a sustainable and intelligent
city through its design, its technical specificities, its planning, and its place in
the immediate and metropolitan environment. This is expressed via the use of
new circular economy technologies, as well as the ability to adapt and
accompany, and even generate, new lifestyles.
Milan, the Italian economic capital, in spite of being part of a country with
the highest rate of private cars per inhabitants in Europe (700 cars per 1000
people), has become in just a few years a European benchmark of sustainable
transport and shared mobility, a laboratory of new economical and social
models. How? Very simply: the city leaders have decided to shift from a
mobility system based on private vehicles to a newer one, focused on acces-
sibility, investing, and sustainable planning.
In a few years the number of shared mobility users and the number of
nonprivate vehicles and operators has increased steadily, leading to citizens’
higher appreciation of more comfortable, practical, cheaper, and cleaner
services.
The enabling conditions to reach this result have been the abandoning of
subsidies to private vehicles, improvement of public transport services, new
funding to bike and pedestrian infrastructure, and, in parallel, supporting the
new model of sharing mobility systems.
The main result of this innovative city policies has been in 2016 a reduction
of private vehicles use, reaching only 30% share of private vehicles trip in
Milan, against 65% in Rome, and achieving the following:

l A car sharing explosion: 4% of vehicles from car sharing schemes, 10,000
car sharing rentals per day in the city;
l The bike sharing success: 5000 shared bicycles and 270 stations operating
in the city;
l A car pooling growth: first city in Italy with urban car pooling use;
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l A low-emission zone: 136 km in which only clean vehicles may enter
without paying toll.
Milan has shown that mobility cannot be treated separately from urban
planning. A major reason for Milan’s success is the idea of investing on the
concept of urban regeneration and maintain a “compact city,” the circular
model for building and architecture, and trying to limit urban sprawling. Milan