Page 452 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

422 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

to use just one illustrative example, at the March 28, 2017, International En-
ergy Agency’s (IEA) annual workshop of the IEA’s Renewable Energy
1
Working Party. The workshop was titled “Scaling-up renewables through
decentralised energy solutions,” and included a panel on “Drivers for change e
the role of cities, industry and smart solutions.” Stockholm and Seoul sent
experts to describe their combination of good governance and smart tech-
nology. By contrast, the Japanese dispatched an engineer from Hitachi, also
employed as a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He unwisely
opted to showcase his firm’s kit in his presentation on “Our experiences and
activities of smart communities and renewables.” Not surprisingly, the IEA
praised Stockholm and Seoul in its workshop summary article (IEA, 2017),
with no mention of what Japan is doing.
Moreover, the flagship “Japan Smart Community Alliance” (JSCA), a
consortium of 255 firms established on April 6, 2010, is remarkably poor at
communicating, even in Japanese. The JSCA declares (in Japanese and En-
glish) that its role is to promote smart communities in Japan and globally. It
defines the smart community as “a community where various next-generation
technologies and advanced social systems are effectively integrated and uti-
lized, including the efficient use of energy, utilization of heat and unused
energy sources, improvement of local transportation systems and trans-
formation of the everyday lives of citizens” (JSCA, n.d.). Yet this definition
has not changed to reflect the powerful role of disaster resilience following
March 11, 2011 (3-11). Neither has the JSCA Japanese language listing of
domestic microgrid projects been updated to include, for example, the Higashi
Matsushima City Smart Disaster Prevention Eco Town that we examine later
in this chapter.
As of this writing (May 2017), the JSCA’s most recent English language
material is a June 24, 2015, document “Smart Community: Japan’s Experi-
2
ence.” This material is not only woefully out of date, but also fails to include
Higashi Matsushima in a curiously incomplete list of post-3-11 projects that
stress disaster resilience. The entire document is also replete with inexcusably
poor English translations, such as the following paragraph on page 2: “Smart
Community being addressed in Japan has the concept involving smart grid.
Whereas smart grid refers to the state being smarter by information and
communication technologies (ICT) for electric power system, Smart Com-
munity is the effort of changing social system of a defined area into smarter
state with technologies not only for electric power system but also for a variety

1. The IEAworkshop outline and contents are available at the following URL: https://www.iea.org/
workshops/scaling-up-renewables-through-decentralised–energy-solutions-.html.
2. The JSCA English language pamphlet “Smart Community: Japan’s Experience” can be accessed
at the following URL: https://www.smart-japan.org/english/vcms_lf/Resources/JSCApamphlet_
eng_web.pdf.