Video Blog Summary: The question today is should you ever take on a small project? Does it make sense? Is it worthwhile? Is it a good strategy? Well, let’s explore this together. In the vast majority of cases, I would suggest against taking on smaller projects. Why? Because when you work on larger projects you […]
VIDEO: Small Consulting Projects and Clients: Are They Really Worthwhile? is a post from: Consulting Success
High Speed Rails in Sweden
This article is about two new high speed rail project in Sweden, Europabanan and Götalandsbanan.
Sweden is located in northern Europe, and is not just one of Europe’s largest countries measured by size, but also the largest market in the Nordic region. In the region, which in total is made up of nearly 25 million people, Sweden has the largest population, of which 85% of the residents live in the southern third of the country.
Sweden hosts an excellent infrastructure. It matches or outperforms that of any other European country. Extensive public investment ensures a nationwide network of roads, railroads, waterways, harbours and airports and sustainable development is at the forefront of Swedish society planning.
In 1988, the rail tracks were transferred from Swedish State Railways to the Swedish Rail Administration and the following years parts of The Swedish State Railways were gradually transformed into seven separate companies, all owned by the Swedish Government: These companies are:
The existing railways are relatively congested, because they are used by fast passenger trains, as well as slower regional trains and even slower cargo trains. Therefore, plans have been made for two totally new high speed railways in Sweden. The new rails would be built similar to French TGV-lines to allow for high speeds, between 300 and 320 km/h and would be dedicated to high speed passenger trains.
The first of the above mentioned high speed rail lines is called Europabanan (the Europe line), the name for its Swedish section, and it would lead from Jönköping to Helsingborg to Copenhagen through Malmö. Its length would be 300km
Europabanan would be connected to the second line which is called Götalandsbanan (the Götaland line) in Jönköping. This line would lead from Stockholm to Linköping to Jönköping to Borås and end in Gothenburg. The length of this line would be approximately 440km.
The main idea behind the creation of there two new rail lines is to reduce rail travel times between major cities in Sweden. One of the risks of the projects is the terrain which has steep hills, lots of lakes and wetlands, which could cause difficulties, add costs or reduce speed of construction. Therefore cost estimates should be made very carefully.
The rate of diversion from other means of traffic should also be carefully studied, and the emphasis should be put on socio-economic benefits.
It was important to detect the influence of the project in all of the four sections, to put emphasis not only on the hard factors, but also on the soft factors of the project, mainly the effect it will have on the community.
In the graphic displayed below, we have mapped the vision of the project, through four main factors that we identified were relevant in all of the projects we analysed.
The Europe Line
This line supports the idea of an European Corridor (Europakorridoren), whose goal is to establish a new railway between Hamburg and Stockholm, called the European Line. Until now, it got support from 40 different stakeholders, from local government to chambers of commerce and businesses. As mentioned earlier, it would be connected to the Götaland line in Jönkoping.
The Götaland Line
Trafikverket investigated the route Göthenburg – Jönkoping – Linköping – Stockholm, and Benverket wanted the entire project to be completed by 2030. But the national plan for the transport system 2010-2021 did not include funds for this line. Therefore, Swedish Transport Administration cancelled the project for now, but it may be built du
ring 2020s
As for the financing of the both high speed rail lines, possible financing for the project is expected to come from the EU, regions and private financing as co-financing of the project, as well as from the State of Sweden as appropriations loans. Total estimated value is expected to reach
SEK 125 billion. The anticipated structure of the funding is displayed in the graphic below.
In conclusion, the construction of these two lines would provide the passengers with more reliable and safe travel, at the same time cutting travel times and reducing congestion in the rail network, which would in turn free capacity on the standard lines for freight transport. This all would further contribute to development and competitiveness of Sweden.
Next week we will feature another railway project in Sweden, the Arlanda airport link.
The post Multimodal Transport and Railway Systems- Europabanan and Götalandsbanan appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
The infrastructure in many cities lags behind the population’s needs. This is a major challenge for city governments in both emerging, high-growth places and industrialised nations with low growth and less public funding to replace aging public spaces and utilities.
The on-going rebalancing of global economic power has led to unprecedented investment plans in infrastructure in the emerging markets. For example, the Asia Pacific market, driven by China’s growth, is expected to represent nearly 60% of global infrastructure spending by 2025. In contrast, Western Europe’s share is expected to shrink to less than 10% from twice as much just a few years ago, according to PwC and Oxford Economics’ Capital Project and Infrastructure spending outlook to 2025 report. But infrastructure is expensive and especially in emerging markets, the cost of capital can be prohibitive for large scale public investments.
The trick is to work with financial innovation and value capture. Today Marco Kimaya at UN Habitat pointed out an excellent brief article on CitiScope Global News, about how Sao Paolo in Brazil uses value capture to raise funding for infrastructure projects. Click on this link to read the article.
The post How Sao Paolo uses Value Capture to Raise Billions for Infrastructure appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
The universe is made of energy, matter and information, but information is what makes the universe interesting. Without information the universe would be an amorphous soup. It would lack the shapes, structures, aperiodic orders, and fractal arrangements that give the universe both its beauty and its complexity. Yet information is rare. It hides in pockets as it battles the universe´s perennial march to disorder. the growth of entropy.
– Cesar Hidalgo, Why Information Grows, 2015, Prologue
What is economic growth? And why has it through history occurred in only a few places? Traditional efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finance, and psychology. But according to César Hidalgo, Assistant Professor at MIT Media Lab, understanding the nature of economic growth requires going beyond the social sciences and looking for a answers from the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity.
To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order. He attempts to explain this with the book Why Information Grows : The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies which was published in May this year and reviewed by the Economist last week.
The books goal is to unite economics with biology and physics, through the common thread of big data information theory. By doing so, he extends our understanding of intellectual capital in a very exciting way, and as we in Bearing works with how to ignite economic growth through innovation, this book is an important read.
Hidalgo has previously compiled The Atlas of Economic Complexity together with Professor Ricardo Hausmann, a well known expert on economic development. The atlas attempts to measure the amount of productive knowledge that each country holds, by visualizing the differences between national economies, and it is available online from this link, leading to Harvard University’s website.
At first glance, the universe seems hostile to order. Thermodynamics dictates that over time, order-or information-disappears. Whispers vanish in the wind just like the beauty of swirling cigarette smoke collapses into disorderly clouds. But thermodynamics also has loopholes that promote the growth of information in pockets.
Although cities are all pockets where information grows, they are not all the same. For every Silicon Valley, Tokyo, and Paris, there are dozens of places with economic systems in stagnation.
So, why does the US economy outstrip Brazil’s, and Brazil’s that of Chad? Why did the technology corridor along Boston’s Route 128 fail while Silicon Valley blossomed? According to Hidalgo, in each case, the key is how people, firms, and the networks they form make use of information.
Seen from Hidalgo’s viewpoint, economies become distributed computers, made of networks of people, and the problem of economic development becomes the problem of making these computers more powerful. Blending deep theory with detailed data, Hidalgo demonstrates that countries grow, firms prosper, and individuals thrive when they enmesh themselves in diverse, talented networks that produce complex physical order, i.e. information. So why do economies grow? Because information does and the intellectual capital which is developed fuels productivity and growth.
By uncovering the mechanisms that enable the growth of information in nature and society, Why Information Grows clarifies the origins of physical order and economic growth. Situated at the nexus of information theory, physics, sociology, and economics, this book proposes a new theory of how economies can do not just more things, but more interesting things. This beautifully written and carefully researched book may set in motion a paradigm shift in economic thinking.
Below is a video of Hidalgo explaining his thoughts from the book.
The post The Evolution of Order from Atoms to Economies appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
Objections from buyers of consulting services are commonplace. Yet most consultants find themselves shutting tight like a clam and hoping they don’t encounter a buyer’s objection. That’s a bad move and won’t get you anywhere. In fact, if you want to win more consulting business you’ll want to do the exact opposite. You’ll want to […]
4 Proven Steps to Overcoming Client Objections is a post from: Consulting Success
Last week, McKinsey and UN Habitat published an essay by Joan Clos, on how we can build better cities. In the essay he points out that in the economic history of humanity, urbanization has always been an accelerator of growth and development, and we are now in the process of massive urbanization.
Already 55 per cent of the world’s population lives in cities and this figure is likely to reach 70 to 75 percent in the next 30 or 35 years. Clos asks, rhetorically, what kind of urbanization will nurture sustainable growth? In his view, there are three areas that we need to address to ensure prosperous urbanization, which he describes in the essay text.
The post Joan Clos Message on how to Build Better Cities appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
Does This Sound Like You? Most of your business comes from referrals and you’re not getting enough of them? You don’t have a marketing process in place to bring you qualified leads consistently? You’d like to earn higher fees but aren’t sure how to make it happen? You’d like to become an authority in your […]
6 Steps to Consistently Attract More Consulting Clients is a post from: Consulting Success
“Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no industrial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur, 2011
Two weeks ago, on July 6th, the Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis announced his resignation. With his departure the stage of European politics lost a highly witty and entertaining actor, but I bet he will remain a vocal observer in the public debate.
Varoufakis announced his resignation in a post on his blog titled ‘Minister No More!’, where he said that he was made aware that there was a ‘preference’ from some Eurogroup participants that he be absent from many of their meetings. Varoufakis changed his Twitter bio to reflect his new employment status and wrote: “Economics professor, quietly writing obscure academic texts for years, until thrust onto the public scene by Europe’s inane handling of an inevitable crisis”
However he has not only written obscure academic texts. In 2011 Varoufakis published a book titled “The Global Minotaur – America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy”. I got the book some months ago and read it two weeks ago as I was recovering from a cold, just before the author resigned from the Greek cabinet, and I found it to be both remarkable and provocative.
Varoufakis explores well-known facts that increasing volumes of trading on the financial markets, ineffectual regulation of banks, free-roaming Wall Street Masters of the Universe, wide-spread greed and globalisation were the root causes of both the Eurozone crisis and the global big recession. However he then seeks roots further than the traditional explanation and claims the recent economic crises are symptoms of a much deeper malaise which can be traced all the way back to the Great Crash of 1929, then on through to the 1970s, the time when a ‘Global Minotaur’ was born.
Varoufakis claims that just as the Athenians of the classic age maintained a steady flow of tributes to the Minotaur of Crete, so Europe and the rest of the world began sending large flows of capital to America and the financial wizards of Wall Street. The Global Minotaur became the ‘engine’ that pulled the world economy from the early 1980s through to the financial collapse of 2008.
According to Varoufakis, today’s deepening crisis in Europe is just one of the inevitable symptoms of the weakening Minotaur, the illness of a global system which is now as unsustainable as it is imbalanced. Going beyond this, Varoufakis lays out the options available to us for reintroducing reason into what he believes to be a highly irrational global economic order.
The destruction of the Minotaur in 2008, by a storm of its own making, laid bare the instability of world demand. This is where the saga of Greece and the Eurozone enters the tale. What Germany ferociously defends in the Eurozone is is a system of fixed exchange rates between disparate economies, without any means of recycling surpluses in successful European economies towards deficit member countries.
One can clearly see how Varoufakis thinking in the book have influenced his negotiation tactics during the past six months, where Germany in his view is the villain. In his world-view, neither benign hegemon (like the US Marshall aid after the second world war) nor voracious, irresponsible minotaur, Germany sits successfully atop the European economy, bargaining stagnation outside its own national borders for the security of its surplus.
However the main question I asked myself as I was reading the book was, how can Varoufakis see decisive intelligence behind the rational behaviour of the markets? Surely it is the collective rules of the game that steers the decision of many towards disastrous results, just as lemmings go over the cliff. Not menacing ambitions of a few in hidden board rooms.
Therefor new regulations such as Basel II, Basel III and MiFiD of the post crises regulatory ecosystem are essential elements and a major step towards a more sane financial industry, just as the rules and institutions of the old England was essential for the development of our economies during the Industrial revolution.
Varoufakis thinks differently, and therefore the book reads more as a drawn-out conspiracy story that just happens to use economic terms, than as a work by a Professor of Economics. The author, at times appearing confounded by supply and demand, is determined to see Machiavellian manipulations behind every flow of capital. One of the mysteries the book clears up is how Varoufakis could so annoy Greece’s creditors that his departure proved essential for the latest Greek bailout deal.
In January, as Syriza won the election and before his appointment as finance minister, Varoufakis quoted Dylan Thomas as he wrote on his blog: “Greek democracy today chose to stop going gently into the night. Greek democracy resolved to rage against the dying of the light.”During Greek elections“.
I guess we will never know if this was paraphrasing Michael Caine´s usage of the phrase in Interstellar, or if he considered the final stanza of the poem, which raises the climax of fighting death to the last agonized moment. We know now that either potential inspiration was truly foretelling.
Below is a video of Yanis Varoufakis presenting his book at the 6th Subversive festival, on 2013-05-15 in Zagreb, Croatia
The post The Global Minotaur appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
Robert Neuwirth’s presentation at The Future of Places III conference which we published two weeks ago was very popular with the readers of this blog, so here is Neuwirth’s Ted Talk from 2012 with more thoughts about the power of the informal economy.
For those of us who have visited, the mere mention of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial centre, brings up images of booming economic activity, but also injustice, crime, corruption and motionless traffic. Car tires are burned to provide light during power outages and the bodies of people run over in car accidents can be left on the street for hours and commuters are sometimes caught in shoot-outs between robbers and policemen.
I remember some years ago, Richard Shaw and I arrived in Lagos for a series of meetings and could not find our local taxi driver at the airport, so we asked the French Embassy for support, and an French Government armored truck arrived and brought us to our hotel.
Yet, economic development is slowly trickling down to benefit also the poor people who acted with violence out of desperation. The informal economy, the last decade much enabled by mobile phones and internet, is growing and supporting families and slowly bringing prosperity also to the lower levels of Nigerian society.
Lagos is a lot better now than it was two decades ago. Robert Neuwirth spent four years among the chaotic stalls of street markets of the worlds urban slums, talking to pushcart hawkers and grey marketers, to study the world’s unlicensed economic network. Responsible for some 1.8 billion jobs, it’s an economy of underappreciated power and scope.
The post The Power of the Informal Economy appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
The World Economic Forum have issued a new report on the Future of Financial Services. The report is very well written, and well aligned with projects we have done at Bearing for SWIFT and also new research on fintech clusters.
For decades, banks, insurance companies and other asset managers have employed the same relatively static, highly profitable business models. They make money on deposits and management of money, and on fees for transactions on the customers money. But today they find themselves confronted on all sides by innovators seeking to disrupt their businesses through financial technology. Rising investments in fintech start-ups globally are helping fuel the challenge to entrenched players, with $12.2 billion invested into the fintech sector last year, more than threefold the total of 2013, the report notes.
The World Economic Forum report draws on over 15 months of research and 100 interviews with industry experts and a series of workshops that put strategy officers from global financial institutions in the same room as fintech innovators to discuss the changing industry. Their findings suggest this round of innovation just might make the big names in financial services rethink their business models in some very fundamental ways for the six fields of financial services that the report identifies.
According to the report, there are five characteristics of today’s innovators to suggest this time might really be different when it comes to disruptive innovation in financial services:
Past innovators often tried to replicate the whole bank, resulting in complex business models that meant “more of the same” and either appealed only to the most tech-interested or price-conscious customers.
Today’s innovators are aggressively targeting the intersection between areas of high frustration for customers and high profitability for incumbents, allowing them to “skim the cream” by competing with the incumbents’ most valuable products. Bankers who once thought financial regulation was a barrier to new entrants are seeing non-bank fintech rivals go after the most profitable areas of their business, while avoiding regulated market segments.
It is hard to think of a better example of this than remittances – banks have traditionally charged very high fees for cross-border money transfers and offered a poor customer experience, with transfers often taking up to three days to arrive at their destination. UK-based company Transferwise is challenging this process using an innovative network of bank accounts and a user-friendly web interface to make international transfers faster, easier and much cheaper. Thanks to this business model, the company now oversees over £500 million of transfers a month and has recently expanded into the US.
Innovators are also using their technical skills to automate manual processes that are currently very resource intensive for established players. This allows them to offer services to whole new groups of customers that were once reserved for the elite.
Automated advisors like Wealthfront, FutureAdvisor and Nutmeg have automated a full suite of wealth management services including asset allocation, investment advice and even complicated tax minimization strategies, all offered to customers via an online portal. While customers must forego the in-person attention of a dedicated adviser, they receive many of the services they would offer at a fraction of the cost and without needing to have the $100,000 in investible assets typically required.
As a result, a whole new class of younger, less wealthy individuals are receiving advice and support in their efforts to save, and it remains unclear if they will ever have the desire to switch to a traditional wealth adviser, even as their savings grow to the point where they become eligible for one.
Customer data has always been a central decision-making factor for financial institutions. Bankers make lending decisions based on your credit score while insurers might look at your driving record or require a health check before issuing a policy. But as people and their devices become more interconnected, new streams of granular, real-time data are emerging, and with them innovators who use that data to support financial decision-making.
FriendlyScore, for example, conducts in-depth analyses of people’s social networking patterns to provide an additional layer of data for lenders trying to analyse the credit-worthiness of a borrower. Does your small business get lots of customer likes and respond promptly to complaints? If so, you might be a good risk. Are all of your social connections drinking buddies “checking in” at the same bar? Well that might count against your borrowing prospects.
Meanwhile, a new breed of insurance company is identifying ways to generate streams of data that help them make better pricing decisions and encourage their policy-holders to make smart decisions. Oscar, a US-based health insurer provides its clients with a wearable fitness tracker free of charge. This lets Oscar see which policy-holders prefer the couch to the gym and enables them to provide monetary incentives (like premium rebates) to encourage customers to hit the treadmill.
As the sophistication of these analytic models and wearable devices improves, we will likely see more and more financial services companies working to nudge their customers towards better behaviour and more prudent risk management.
Companies like Uber and Airbnb have shown that marketplace companies, which connect buyers and sellers, are able to grow revenues exponentially while keeping costs more or less flat. We wrote about this in a recent blog article about disrupting the customer interface.
This strategy has not gone unnoticed by innovators in financial services. Lending Club and Prosper, the two leading US marketplace lenders, saw their total originations of consumer credit in the US grow from $871 million in 2012 to $2.4 billion in 2013. Lending Club alone issued $3.5 billion in loans in 2014.
While this is only a fraction of total US consumer debt, which stood at $3.2 trillion in 2013, the growth of these platforms is impressive. Analysts at Foundation Capital predict that marketplace lenders will issue $1 trillion in consumer credit, globally, by 2025. Even more impressive, they have done so without putting any of their own capital at risk. Instead, they have provided a place where borrowers looking to get a better rate can meet with lenders (both individuals and a range of institutions such as hedge funds) who are eager to invest their money.
Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter have achieved something similar, becoming an important source of funding for many seed-stage businesses. These platforms connect individuals looking to make small investments in start-ups with an array of potential investment targets, and allow the “wisdom of the crowd” to decide which companies will and will not be funded (while taking a slice of the funds from those that are successful).
This one might seem strange. After all, disruptors are supposed to replace the old economy, not work with it. But this is an oversimplified view. Smart investors have realized that they can employ bifurcated strategies to compete with incumbents in the arenas of their choosing while piggy-backing on their scale and infrastructure where they are unable to compete.
For their part, incumbents are realizing that collaborating with new entrants can help them get a new perspective on their industry, better understand their strategic advantages, and even externalize aspects of their research and development. As a result, we see a growing number of collaborations between innovators and incumbents. ApplePay, the most hyped financial innovation of the past year, does not attempt to disrupt payment networks like Visa and MasterCard, but instead works with them.
The post The Future of Financial Services appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
Freiburg im Breisgau. Sustainable living model
The City of Freiburg is often called Germany’s "ecological capital" and has been recognized internationally as one of the world’s most livable, sustainable and child-friendly cities. As a national example of sustainable urban planning, ideas developed in Freiburg have been used in countries around the world. What makes this middle sized city in the heart of Europe be so visible on the world map?
On a first glance Freiburg is a typical university city with a population of 220,000 inhabitants located in southern Germany near the Swiss and French borders. Its GDP per capita is 11 per cent above the European average and city has the highest concentration of sunshine in Germany, with more than 1,700 hours per year.
Freiburg shows an outstanding dynamic of new jobs creation for the last 20 years and keeps the top position in the Baden-Württemberg region in comparison with other major cities. Freiburg directory specified that in the last twenty years there was an increase of 22 per cent of new jobs created.
What makes the city differ from the similar cities around Europe is its continuity of the integrated urban planning approach, which over the last 30 years has led to the development of Freiburg as a leading exemplar of sustainable living in a compact car-lite city.
The vision of Freiburg – improving quality of life and promoting environmental sustainability – has been formed in the late 1970s by political approach galvanized during successful opposition to the building of the Wyhl nuclear power station. Powerful team of local politicians, economists and especially University leaders, combined with the local green movement, worked out a value-driven approach to the development of Freiburg.
What has enabled goals to be pursued steadily over decades could be seen as three key factors of the city success: direct citizen participation in the city development, dynamic planning, and consensus. Freiburg’s success owes much to its democratic strength and strong leaders. Active democracy was the first step when citizens worked to oppose the planned nuclear power plant.
This early activism has evolved so that citizens are directly involved in land-use planning, the city budget, technical expertise committees, developing public information on sustainability, and as shareholders in local renewable energy providers. Quad Helix approach has been naturally developing in Freiburg over years and today is demonstrated in the city at its best. Active involvement of local community in the decisions taken by local government guarantees clear understanding and support.
Other significant success factor is the “one element – many functions” approach, which ensures that different potential ‘solo’ problems are solved in a joined-up manner, with plenty of creative synergy and with natural involvement of all place actors under cohesive vision “umbrella”.
Sustainable Urban Development
Urban planning and development have always had a special impact on Freiburg.
The city was rebuilt from the 1950s onwards, taking note of traditional urban patterns and cultural heritage, but with a focus on sustainable development. Key areas for the long-term plan of urban development included: tramline extension, built before residents arrived so they would not have to buy a car; the expansion of residential areas or how to deal with open space.
The idea of small plots with a high population density (the group ownership model) with affordable flats and a common garden for every four or five plots, as the newcomers were mostly family with kids, was considered as a first solution. These ideas, developed through public consultations, were in the foundation of the sustainable energy-saving land-use plan of Freiburg.
The now widely known districts of Vauban and Rieselfeld were built, taking into account social aspects, energy-efficient design and high-quality open space design. Another remarkable example is “Buggingerstraße 50”, Germany’s first high-rise building renovated to passive house standard. According to specifications it consumes 78 per cent less energy than the original building, with minimal rent increases. The Vauban and Rieselfeld developments were built without any contribution from the city budget. The income received from selling the serviced plots of land to co-operatives, individuals and small builders covered the costs of the land and all the necessary physical and social infrastructure that the city provided.
Sustainable Transport System
In the late 1980s the regional government introduced the Cybernetics Mobility Concept, with the aim of strengthening environmentally friendly means of transport. This strategy involved five pillars of activity:
This approach involved significant investment and business innovation in the public transport infrastructure, not only in Freiburg but throughout the surrounding region. The full pedestrianisation of the historic centre has been followed by a comprehensive, and in many ways visionary, land use/transport strategy based on walking, cycling and public transport. The plans aimed to improve mobility while reducing traffic and benefitting the environment. It prioritized traffic avoidance and gave preference to environment-friendly modes of transport.
Traffic avoidance was achieved in conjunction with urban planning that made Freiburg a city of “short distances”—a compact city with strong neighbourhood centres where people’s needs are within walking distance. In 1973 the entire city centre was converted to a pedestrian zone (shown in white on the map to the right).
Today 70% of the city population lives within 500 meters of a tram stop.
Besides working to make public transport convenient, fast, reliable and comfortable, the city administration also made it cheap, by introducing a RegioCard in 1991. The RegioCard allows passengers unlimited use of not only Freiburg’s urban transit but also public transport in the whole region, plus the tracks of the German Rail. Any ticket for a concert, sports event, fair, or big conference also serves as a ticket for public transport. Freiburg’s administration has developed over 400 km of cycle paths.
This includes bike-friendly streets, street side bike paths, and separate bike paths, e.g., along the river Dreisam. About 9,000 bicycle parking spaces were also developed, including “bike and ride” lots at transit stations. As a result of the above policies between 1982 and 1999 the percentage of bikes in the total volume of inner-city traffic rose from 15 per cent to 27 per cent and public transport rose from 11 per cent to 18 per cent, while the percentage of trips made by car fell from 38 per cent to 32 per cent (City of Freiburg).
The city was rewarded for its efforts in 1995 with the award of the “European Local Public Transport Prize”.
Climate protection and Energy Supply.
According to the city vision climate protection, energy supply and urban development are inseparable from each other, another good exam of the creative complex approach addressing city development. Freiburg has been considering energy related aspects in the development of urban districts for many years.
The City Council succeeded in attracting as many other stakeholders, including companies, energy providers, private households, the university, on board to support the implementation of a climate-neutral city plan and climate protection is perceived as a shared responsibility for all city actors.
A basic procedure for „climate protection in land use planning“ was developed to transfer the experience gained to new districts Vauban and Rieselfeld: „Solar optimisation of the development plan“, „Study of energy supply alternatives“ and „Compliance with Freiburg building standards“ are some of the approaches applied in the new residential district of Gutleutmatten. A local heating system incorporating solar heating and combined heat and power is also being built there in a pilot project, the only one of its kind in Germany (City of Freiburg).
Freiburg has an ambitious goal to become “climate neutral” by the year 2050. The interim results are also remarkable: in 2010 the city has achieved a 25% reduction in CO2 emissions and 40% reduction is planned to be achieved by the year 2030. According to official brochure of GreenCity Cluster “The renewable energy industry delivers technology and expertise for the rapid phase-out of nuclear power and for Germany‘s alternative energy policy, often referred to as the „Energy Revolution“, which is emphatically driven forward in Germany – according to the Federal government, it will invest up to 550 billion EUR in this by 2050.
Freiburg follows the path to get „100 per cent energy from renewables“ in order to contribute to regional value creation: according to this study, some 3 billion EUR in investment is needed for renewable energies and some 12 billion EUR for building renovation in the Freiburg region. Regional businesses, trades and employees will benefit greatly from this. The associated ecological target thus serves as an economic stimulus programme – a win-win situation for both ecology and the economy” (Regional Indicator).
Freiburg is regarded today as a model for the reconciliation of ‘’soft’’ ecology and ‘’hard’’ economics. Its city brand is based on the four key differentiators that make Freiburg special:
All of these factors make Freiburg a successful model of sustainable city development worth to explore and to follow.
The post Freiburg im Breisgau. Sustainable living model appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
This case study is about the High Line, a unique, elevated linear park that was created on top of and abandoned rail line on Manhattan, in New York. It has been on an elevated section of a disused New York Central Railroad section called the West Side Line.
In the early days of public transport, elevated railways were common in central urban areas where there would otherwise be a large number of level crossings.
The earliest elevated railway was the London and Greenwich Railway on a brick viaduct of 878 arches, built between 1836 and 1838. The first 4.0 km of the London and Blackwall Railway (1840) was also on a viaduct. From the late 1860s elevated railways became popular in US cities.
The railway line in Chelsea neighbourhood of Manhattan has been long abandoned, ever since the last train that carried three carloads of frozen turkeys ran through it in 1980. In the meantime, in the 25 years prior to the redevelopment, the landscape on and around the High Line grew freely, which later on inspired the current design.
In 1999, two of the areas residents, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, founded a community group called Friends of the High Line whose aim was to rescue it from being demolished by creating a public park. A special zoning area was set up by the City in 2005, which fostered the development.
The elevated structure of the rail line was sound, but it was in complete disrepair and there had been many US native shrub species growing on the line itself. A competition was held in 2004 and the design team was selected, which consisted of James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and planting designer Piet Oudolf in collaboration.
The design was inspired by the found landscape, and today over 350 species of plants grow on the High Line. The park is an integrated system of seating areas, planted areas, concrete walkways and special features blended in between. This design has become synonymous with the High Line itself.
The construction was divided into three parts. The construction of the first section began in 2006, and the first section was opened in 2009. The second section was opened in 2011, and the third one in 2014. Now there is only a smart part of the High Line left to be redeveloped, called the Spur of the High Line. High Line at Rail Yard is expected to be completed 10-15 years from now.
The rezoned area provided opportunities for new commercial and residential development, affordable housing along the High Line was created and the neighbourhood’s gallery district was enhanced. A new Whitney Museum of American Art which is located at the far southern end of the High Line Park was opened to the public in May 2015.
It was important to detect the influence of the project in all of the four sections, to put emphasis not only on the hard factors, but also on the soft factors of the development, mainly the effect it will have on the community.
In the graphic displayed below, we have mapped the vision of the project, through four main factors that we identified were relevant in all of the projects we analysed.
Friends of the High Line continue to maintain the park, they oversee operations, maintenance and programming. Besides from that, they also raise funds to complete the construction and stimulate future operations. In total, Friends of the High Line raise 98% of the High Lines annual cost budget.
The financing for the project was (and is) a combination of public and private investment, where the Friends of the High Line have played a mayor role in raising private funds. The structure of the funding is displayed in the graphic below.
The construction of the first two sections of the High Line created 344 new construction jobs, and many more have been created during the construction of the third section, and will be created by the ripple effect from High Line in the surrounding neighbourhood.
A special focus has been given to sustainable practices, e.g. planting of US native plants, innovative system of watering them and similar.
In the end, the High Ling Park has become a unique public space, a combination of restored and original rails with paved pathways, areas for relaxation and natural foliage, providing amazing views to Chelsea in Manhattan. It has become a leading model for community driven adaptive reuse.
Next week, we will present two case studies of High Speed Rail projects from Sweden, Europabanan and Götalandsbanan.
The post Innovative Sustainable Re-Development – High Line appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
Consulting retainers are one of the most effective pricing models you can use. In this video I share the 2 types of consulting retainers and how to use them effectively with clients. What you’ll learn in this video: The two types of retainers consultants use Why retainers are one of the most effective way to […]
2 Types of Consulting Retainers and How to Use Them Effectively is a post from: Consulting Success
In November 2014, Jean-Claude Juncker presented an investment plan for Europe, to boost investments by using public funds to gain confidence and investments from private sector investors. The plan aimed to address the dramatic fall in investment affecting Europe since the beginning of the great recession, which has been a significant brake on growth and employment for six years now.
We wrote about the plan in an article here on the Bearing Wave, where we took the bold step to compare the plan with The New Deal in United States in the 1930s.
Since then we have not heard much about this in the news. However after months of deliberations and negotiations with the European Commission and the Council of the EU, the European Parliament on 24 June adopted the text establishing the European Fund for Strategic Investment (EFSI). This has not been much noticed in the news, and there are reasons for this.
The idea with the fund as it was presented in November last year, the EFSI would be financed by an initial €21 billion, including €16 billion from the EU budget in the form of a guarantee to the European Investment Bank (EIB), and €5 billion from the EIB’s own resources. Through a multiplier effect estimated at 15:1, a total of at least €315 billion would be mobilised in additional private sector investments over the following three years.
The fund as it will be implemented is far from the ambitious plan that Jean-Claude Juncker presented. The funds devoted to the Commission’s flagship investment project will consist only of €8 billion from a reshuffling of EU budgets from 2015 to 2020 (representing only half of the initially pledged €16 billion, and €5 billion from the past profits of the EIB.
Given that the European Commission has been heavily constrained by the limited funds allocated to the plan, its initial idea was to use the funds to offer guarantees to risk-averse private investors in order to finance high-risk/high-return investments. At the time, this seemed like a smart idea, and a possible second-best solution to directly financing projects, as long as the guarantee was offered for investments that were not able to find financing.
However, looking at the details of the plan approved last week by the European Parliament, there are now some good reasons to be sceptical and to think that the plan’s impact on growth and employment will be minor.
Although EFSI is presented as a proper fund, it is important to understand that it will just be a label for some of the new EIB assets. This label will be awarded by the newly created “EFSI investment committee” to some projects that the EIB previously did not want to fund because it considered them too risky, and that will now benefit from the EU guarantee.
This is also important because it makes it impossible for private investors or governments to inject capital into the “fund,” as was suggested at the beginning. The only thing they can do is participate as co-financiers of the EIB’s EFSI-labelled projects. Below is a flowchart of how the fund will function, from Bruegel, the Brussels based think-thank.
In the best-case scenario, the creation of EFSI would lead to a major change in the way the EIB functions (even if the EFSI assets will never represent more than 10 percent of total EIB assets). The EIB would finally take on more risk, funding high-risk/high-return projects that are not able to secure finance because of the current high risk aversion of investors because of the crisis.
Unfortunately, the €8 billion used to create the fund will be taken from reshuffling money from Horizon 2020 and the Connecting Europe facility. Clearly, significant opportunity costs will arise from taking money from the EU`s main research and innovation programmes. Yet again showing us how fragile long-term rational behaviour is in a democracy.
Anyway, the EFSI will create some employment. In case of interest among our readers, here is a link to the Managing Director job for the EFSI, and here is a link to the Deputy Managing Director job.
The post Decision on the European Fund for Strategic Investment (EFSI) appeared first on Bearing Consulting.
