WASHINGTON, September 20, 2013 - Do you dream of a city that saves, rather than savages, the environment? What’s your vision of an ecologically balanced urban space? Connect4Climate wants your ideas.
Working in collaboration with the upcoming 10th Ecocity World Summit on Sustainable Cities, and with Lego®, the beloved builder of childhood fantasies, Connect4Climate has issued a global invitation for individuals and groups to design and build models of environmentally sustainable urban spaces.
Photos or videos of the plastic brick models for the #BuildTheChange challenge must be posted to Connect4Climate’s Facebook page before September 29th. Competition details and rules can be viewed here.
Selected submissions will be exhibited at the 10th Ecocity World Summit on Sustainable Cities in Nantes, France alongside a series of local Lego® “BuildTheChange” workshops to be held from September 24th – 29th. The workshops will bring together several thousand children and families as well as professional planners to design and build their own models of sustainable urban spaces.
“There's an opportunity right now to build cleaner cities,” said World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, who has made sustainable development a top priority for the bank, ”We have the opportunity to create a world for our children which is not defined by stark inequities, but by soaring opportunities”
The Ecocity summit is an international event designed precisely to explore new ways to make our cities efficient and exciting places to live in. It brings together a wide variety of government officials, business leaders, researchers and citizens to examine creative ways of making the global phenomenon of accelerating urbanization more environmentally-friendly.
Pursuing its mission to heighten understanding of climate change, Connect4Climate will participate in the summit in several ways. It will be documenting some of the most innovative models and interviewing their creators to make a digital collection of the best ideas, as well as taking part in the working sessions, debates and exhibits.
Connect4Climate was jointly launched by the World Bank, Italy’s Ministry of the Environment and the Global Environment Facility, an independent financial institution, to raise awareness about the dangers of climate change and stimulate communities to act to slow global warming.
The Ecocity summit’s host city of Nantes was designated by the European Union as European Green Capital 2013 in recognition of Nantes’ promotion of urban development policies that meet high environmental standards and that create a better quality of urban living.
The summit’s goal is “to unite people around a new way of living on the planet,” according to Kirstin Miller, executive director of the summit’s initiator, Ecocity Builders, a California-based nonprofit organization dedicated to reshaping cities in order to meet global environmental challenges.
Working sessions at the summit will provide platforms for discussions of topics such as how to reduce cities’ ecological footprints and how to address the energy challenges of urbanization.
The summit is being organized in partnership with UN-Habitat, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), Climate Alliance, as well as several French government ministries, departments and private corporations.
Nantes also is hosting the World Mayors Summit on Climate Change on September 27th - 28th, a conference jointly organized by Nantes, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and the World Mayors Council on Climate Change.
