Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Welcome to Smart in the city, the BABLE podcast, where we bring together top actors in the smart city arena, sparking dialogues and interactions around the stakeholders and themes most prevalent for today's citizens and tomorrow's generations.
I am your host, Tamlyn Shimizu, and I hope you will enjoy this episode and gain knowledge and connections to accelerate the change for a better urban life.
Smart in the city is brought to you by BABLE Smart cities. We enable processes from research and strategy development to co creation and implementation. To learn more about us, please visit the BABLE platform at BABLE Smartcities EU so I am here live today in the city of Rotterdam at the Urban Future conference, and I'm really grateful to be here for the third year in a row. And yeah, some of my favorite episodes I think I've ever recorded have been at urban future because we just have such great guests and great speaking here. Such one today that I can't wait to introduce you to is named Lykke Leonardsen. She's the program director for resilient and sustainable city solutions at the city of Copenhagen and also part time c 40 on water safe cities. Welcome, Lykke.
[00:01:19] Lykke Leonardsen: Thank you very much.
[00:01:20] Tamlyn Shimizu: I'm really excited to dig into everything smart and sustainable cities around water and all of that. But before we do, I like to get into a little bit of a teaser so we can get warmed up for the tougher questions.
The question I'd like to ask you today is so imagine that you have one wish from a genie, one wish to make, to make one change in Copenhagen. You can make it, obviously, I think, more climate resilient overnight.
What would that one change be?
[00:01:53] Lykke Leonardsen: That is a big question to start off with.
[00:01:56] Tamlyn Shimizu: Sorry, I didn't get warmed up too much.
[00:01:57] Lykke Leonardsen: Right. I think the one thing I would really like to change is I would have an even stronger connection and collaboration between the sectors in the city so that we could really use the potential of climate and climate resilience in order to actually see the potential of how we can create an even greater city.
[00:02:26] Tamlyn Shimizu: So your one wish would be all those silos broken down?
[00:02:30] Lykke Leonardsen: Exactly.
[00:02:31] Tamlyn Shimizu: Okay. I wish I could give you that and wave my wand.
[00:02:36] Lykke Leonardsen: If you knew the way to do that, I think you would get the Nobel Prize.
[00:02:39] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So I want to give everyone a little bit more background into who you are as a person too. Let's get to know you better also. So what's your background? Where did you come from? How did you get here today?
[00:02:55] Lykke Leonardsen: I have a very, very unusual background for what I do originally. I am trained as a near eastern archaeologist, so that's not the usual way you enter into this world.
But I've been working with urban planning and housing and so on since right after my finishing my education. I've added on an education as a master of public policy later on, sort of to get sort of a little bit of an idea of what I was working with.
But for the many, many years I didn't work with water. I started working with water and climate resilience in 2008 when I got to our technical and environmental administration in the city of Copenhagen and was made the head of the office that was working with water quality and these issues. And this is where we started working with resilience and our climate adaptation work.
In the beginning, I mean, I used to say to my staff that they could, I mean, easily be talking russian or greek, I wouldn't understand the word because I didn't know a lot about water, but it comes with practice.
[00:04:10] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely. Do you see any ties between your background in archaeology and what you do today? Can you use any of that in your.
[00:04:18] Lykke Leonardsen: Well, I can use a lot of the academic training that I've had, and I think in many ways it has also given me a benefit in the fact that since I was working in a field where I was actually trying to get a lot of different sectors to work together, it has helped me that I was not tied up closely with any of them. You couldn't say, oh, she's saying like that because she's an engineer or because she's an architect or because she's an urban planner or because she's a biologist. No, I mean, I could say, I'm not neither of those things. I mean, so I could ask a lot of silly questions and ask people, why aren't you doing this? And basically a lot of it comes with, well, we've never done it before. Okay, but can we do it? I mean, that kind of opportunity, my lack of professional background, if you could put like that, gave me.
[00:05:12] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting, kind of a partial impartial view of things. Yeah, very interesting. Justine, you work with resilience and sustainability. And first I want to kind of define what that means to you. What does resilience mean and what does sustainability mean?
[00:05:28] Lykke Leonardsen: Well, resilience is sort of basically the ability of a system, in this case a city, to defend itself against shocks and stresses, but also to sort of bounce back if shocks and stresses hit the city.
And these can be physical, like due to climate change, but they can also be other issues. I mean, the last big shock and stress we had in Copenhagen was probably Covid because that also challenges the way that you run and manage a city, and it challenges the life of the citizens. So that sort of resilience.
But my main focus on that is resilience due to climate change. Yeah, of course, because of climate change, not due to, but because of climate change. And sustainability, for me, has undergone some change in my perception of it, because when I started working, sustainability had a lot to do with environmental, economic, and social sustainability. I mean, having that kind of balance. But lately, we've sort of added another aspect to it about sort of planetary sustainability actually working within the planetary boundaries. That is something that we in Copenhagen are working on in our upcoming climate action plan, is actually looking into that, sort of saying, how can we work in a way where we are not constantly overstepping the planetary boundaries? And I can tell you, it's a hard one to manage.
[00:07:14] Tamlyn Shimizu: Sounds difficult, sounds complex.
[00:07:16] Lykke Leonardsen: Right.
[00:07:17] Tamlyn Shimizu: You mentioned the climate action plan. Can you elaborate a little bit more on what's going into that and the path forward?
[00:07:23] Lykke Leonardsen: Yeah, we got a current climate action plan, which has sort of an end date in 2025. And then the ambition was to become carbon neutral by 2025. We're not fully going to make it. We're getting close, but not completely. So we are preparing the next one where we are actually working also on adding consumer based emissions to it, reducing consumer based emissions by 50% in 2035. So that's also a very, very ambitious target.
And so looking beyond just becoming carbon neutral, sort of as a city and as the system around the city, but actually also looking at what are our citizens doing when they are buying new phones or a lot of cheap chinese goods or traveling on vacation and all of that sort of, that's produced elsewhere in the world, but brought to Denmark.
And because we do, even though Copenhagen has a lower carbon footprint than the rest of Denmark, we are still way above what we should be. I think we are about ten ton per citizen. We want to get down to one.
[00:08:44] Tamlyn Shimizu: Ambitious, ambitious, right. So you mentioned about that resilience and urban development need to be closely integrated, and that we need this kind of paradigm shift away from working in silos, which you also mentioned, of course, that that would be your magic wish.
Can you elaborate more? We don't. Unfortunately, we don't have the magic wish. So can you elaborate more on specific strategies or frameworks that cities can use to achieve this integration?
[00:09:15] Lykke Leonardsen: Well, I think the first thing is actually to see it as a cross sectoral approach, saying that very often you tend to see adaptation and resilience sort of as an add on.
We also need to do something of this. You forget to actually link it to what's else going on in the city.
And I think we are missing a lot of opportunity by doing that.
We need to make sure that we are not talking about in one silo we got adaptation, in the other, we got traffic, in the other we got one and all the other sectors that we got in a city. We need to find a way of actually integrating adaptation into all of these sectors so that when we are talking about transportation, how does this actually also affect our resilience? How does it affect the way the city can manage heavy rains or the way, I mean, we form our streets? How can we make sure that this also can make it possible for citizens to be outside even during heat waves and so on? So there's a lot of ways where you can actually integrate this. And also I think it gives the opportunity to actually spend the money in the cities much more wisely.
And when you ask me how we do that, I think it comes from both the political wish, but even more importantly, I would say actually from the administration because they are the ones that can say, okay, these sectors need to work together.
Sometimes politicians tend to go, I mean, they're very taken or very interested in the sort of specific cases and things like that. And then they sort of tend sometimes to forget the overall view.
And that's where we say by having that sort of foundation in the administration, we can integrate these specific cases into the overall view, not neglecting what the politicians say, because that's really important as a part of a democratic system, but making sure that it's filtered in the, the right way so that they get the results that they want, but it's integrated in the sort of a more holistic approach to urban planning in general.
[00:11:46] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting there. Of course, I feel like we've been talking about breaking down silos for so many years now.
[00:11:54] Lykke Leonardsen: I started out working on more on urban renewal in my day, and there the problem was also silos.
There were between the physical and the social issues and so like that. But I mean, I, I don't think we're going to do it, but if we have the understanding, I mean, and what we have in the city of Copenhagen is to sort of say, first of all, we're working very closely with our utility that's a publicly owned but a separate entity that's close partnership. And we do actually engage all our different parts of the administration in the development of what we are doing to make sure that we cover everything and make sure that we use the opportunity, opportunity to piggyback on others when they're doing something. So it is definitely difficult, but you can get a little bit further by trying to do it.
[00:12:53] Tamlyn Shimizu: So you feel like we're making progress collectively, I mean, across cities on breaking.
[00:12:57] Lykke Leonardsen: Down silos, I think we're making progress. I don't think we're making fast enough progress or enough progress, but I think we are doing that.
But I think it's also a question of time.
I normally use the sort of analogy of bicycling in Copenhagen. Copenhagen is really renowned for all our bikes, and when all of this transformation really started or the reintroduction of bikes in the city started in the eighties and nineties, it was, there was always an excuse for why you couldn't put a bicycle lane anywhere.
But now it's integrated into the way the planners are thinking. So people are not questioning the fact that we need these bicycle lanes. And I think it takes time to get that sort of massaged into the DNA of the planners we need. It comes also with a new generation of planners that has this. They are brought up in a different tradition. Many of the current planners, they come from a system, from their education, from their training, where they are sort of, they think in these silos.
[00:14:16] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:14:17] Lykke Leonardsen: So I'm not blaming them. I really want to say I'm not blaming them, but I think we need to start that transformation.
[00:14:26] Tamlyn Shimizu: Absolutely. I want to move into a little bit more around water, since it's a big area that you focus in. I know Copenhagen is leading in many different ways around water management. Can you discuss specifically, maybe gain a little bit more practical now on what are some of the most innovative, the best water management solutions that have been implemented?
[00:14:47] Lykke Leonardsen: Well, I think the best water management solutions in Copenhagen are the ones where we have really been able to integrate the water management into good urban design.
I think that's the key thing. I mean, we have a number of projects already finished in Copenhagen where you can come and see a park that has been renovated, but at the same time transformed into a huge reservoir that can store 22,000 water in case of heavy rains.
An area in a close to the royal palace that had suffered from severe flooding, where the square has been completely renovated and transformed into a much more attractive space for people, but at the same time, managing water, things like that, I think are, for me, where you can see, or another, the first one we ever made, where we transformed an area where nothing was going on a little green triangle in a housing area. All of a sudden, we created a square where people are now using it. It has become, it was no place, and it is now a place where people can actually go. They can use it, and it has the function that it can also store water during a heavy rain. But that's not what you see in your daily life when you go around in these places. I think that's the key thing.
[00:16:19] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. Water integrated into the design of cities is really, really important. What are you seeing? Because I was just saying, I came from Stuttgart, Germany, and right now we've experienced massive, massive flooding. And I was just talking to a wonderful Anna, the wonderful director from Poland, and she was talking about how drought is the biggest challenge in her city. This crazy paradox that we have.
[00:16:43] Lykke Leonardsen: Right.
[00:16:44] Tamlyn Shimizu: Too much water and too little of water that we have on earth. What are your biggest challenges that you're facing in Copenhagen, and how are you tackling being resilient?
[00:16:53] Lykke Leonardsen: We have identified sort of actually four main challenges, the biggest one at the moment being rain, which we have addressed with our cloud based management plan that covers the entire city and that we are working on implementing. Now, the second threat is rising sea level and storm surges, and that will, over time, be an even bigger risk to the city than. Than rain, where it is actually something that can cause an enormous amount of damage to infrastructure and so on. Third is heat.
We are starting now to look into how heat will in the future be an issue for us in the city.
[00:17:49] Tamlyn Shimizu: For housing, you mean, or for heat like the temperature rising?
[00:17:53] Lykke Leonardsen: Temperature rising, yeah. Not heating the houses. That is under control. No, it's the urban heat island affect the whole idea of that, which is.
[00:18:05] Tamlyn Shimizu: Crazy also for people in the southern hemisphere to think about Copenhagen dealing with heat. Right?
[00:18:11] Lykke Leonardsen: Yeah, but that's because people are different. I mean, I don't know the numbers from Denmark, but I've heard from in Finland, if the temperature goes about 20 degrees, then they actually see a rise in deaths. So it depends on what you are accustomed to, I guess. So. I mean, for people living in India or Africa, places, I mean, they might be like, what?
[00:18:37] Tamlyn Shimizu: 20 degrees?
[00:18:38] Lykke Leonardsen: Let me put on an extra sweater.
[00:18:40] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, exactly.
[00:18:41] Lykke Leonardsen: But we don't. I mean, we're not that accustomed to heat.
And connected to heat is also actually drought because that is going to be, I mean, more and more, we are looking into also recirculation of rainwater in our system so that we can actually reuse that. At the moment, it's mainly for, like, watering and cleaning and so on. But in the future, it might also be for other purposes.
[00:19:09] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really interesting. And, yeah, some universal challenges I think we're all facing and, yeah, very, very tough and complex challenges, of course, as well. So I was just, you know, within BABLE, we, of course, deal a lot with how are we using technology, how are we using innovation to help solve some of these challenges? So I'm wondering, what do you see as important trends or emerging technologies that you think could really help you in your city? And on the flip side, also, feel free to say this is not what we want to do in our city. This technology is not something we would use.
[00:19:50] Lykke Leonardsen: Well, I mean, of course, technology.
We need technology for lots of things. I mean, the idea of having meters that can register amounts of rain and so on, and we use a lot of technology, or our utility uses a lot of technology in sort of managing the wastewater system and making sure that when it's one part of the city, it's getting stress, then they can actually move some of it to another part of the city and so on. So in that way, balancing the system, and, of course, we need technology for that.
But actually, I mean, I'm not the biggest technology buff. That's not my main interest.
So I wouldn't be able to say this technology is what we need. I mean, I can say, of course, there's a lot of technology that can help us in the process and we should use them. But I think a lot of our adaptation work is actually based on, like, natural gravitation and sort of the integration of water in the urban landscape in a different way than we used to before.
[00:21:05] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, of course, there's some emerging technologies that can support that, of course. Always as a tool, right? Not as the whole solution, I think.
Can you also, you've alluded to some projects that you're working on and stuff, but I want to take a little bit of a deeper dive into maybe a project that is really near and dear to your heart. Do you have something that comes to mind?
[00:21:31] Lykke Leonardsen: Yeah, I actually have two projects that are near and dear to my heart, and they're both in the same area. And one of the reasons that they are near and dear to my heart is that it's also the area where I started my municipal career way back in 1997.
At that time, we didn't think at all about adaptation or anything.
So now with the cloudburst management plan, two areas in that sort of very socially vulnerable, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Copenhagen have been totally transformed.
The first one is a street that was sort of a dead end street that was cut off during some kind of traffic sanitation issue a lot of years ago. And it was sort of lying dark and dead, only with parked cars. And with the help of local citizens, with the engagement of local citizens, this and some clever landscape architects, this street, which has sort of like this green area running all the way in the middle, like a little bit like a rumbler, has been transformed to eight sunken gardens, each with a different theme representing local biotopes in the area, and an elevated boardwalk walking on top. So you can walk, you can go down in the gardens, but you can also walk on top of it. And from being this place where nobody would walk, maybe you would walk your dog there.
It has transformed into a very, very nice area that is being used by the local residents, which I think is fantastic.
[00:23:12] Tamlyn Shimizu: It's lovely to see that transformation.
[00:23:14] Lykke Leonardsen: And there's never any waste. That's also a good sign people are taking care of the area. And the other one is a much larger project which is called the Karen's Mina axis. Karen's in memory of Karen.
She was the daughter of one of the first people working with people with mental disabilities.
And this institution is now a library and a cultural house for the local area. And there was a stretch of green, a small park running next to it.
And this park has been transformed with a meandering brick river running through it, ending up in a new artificial lake at the very bottom.
And the transformation is magical. And there's a big wooden circle in the middle. So it's really sort of linking to the cultural side of the house.
It's linking the area together and creating new activities for people in the area. And I think it's really magical. It's won tons of prizes already, also for its good qualities. But I think going there and seeing what and how much is being used by the local community, that is what is the best for me. I always love to come out and see, okay, people are actually using. There was nobody here before. Now there are tons of people. Maybe there were a few people drinking beer, but now it's really being used by everybody.
[00:24:51] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, that's really powerful to see, and I can see why those are near and dear to your heart, for sure.
So to play a little devil's advocate, of course, you've probably heard the argument before that people are arguing that, you know, theres a lot of investment thats required for advanced water management, climate resilience projects. Maybe its a strain on city budgets and it diverts resources from more maybe very immediate social and economic needs that people have. How do you respond to those concerns and that prioritizing long term climate resilience might come at the expense of addressing maybe urgent community needs?
[00:25:31] Lykke Leonardsen: Well, I don't think it's a question of either or. I think you need to address both. I mean, I would definitely not argue that we should address climate issues and forget about social issues. Definitely not.
[00:25:43] Tamlyn Shimizu: But they're linked. Right.
[00:25:44] Lykke Leonardsen: But a lot of them are actually linked because I mean, if you're looking at most cities around the world, not so much Copenhagen, but a lot of the other cities that I've been working with over the years, you can see that it's also the most vulnerable groups, the poorest that are most at risk. So if you're saying, okay, we're not, I mean, what's the use in helping somebody to improve their home if that home is going to be flooded?
I mean, so, so, so it's also a question of how you actually look at these things. You, for me, in, in most cases, you are also helping the most socially vulnerable. If you're looking who's got these economic power to actually have an insurance, a flood insurance? Well, I mean, the well off people will have it.
[00:26:38] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. The wealthy will be fine for a long time, right, in the climate.
[00:26:41] Lykke Leonardsen: They can manage, they can move also if they don't want to live there, they have that opportunity. But if you are poor, you are less mobile. You have to stay where you are, where you can actually afford to stay. You may not even be able to afford an insurance. So you are the one that will be hit the hardest if flooding or something like that happens in your part of the city. So I think it has to go hand in hand.
And I think also by having a community engagement in the development of a project, you also have the opportunity to understand and address some of the social issues at the same time.
I know many places, they try to engage local people in the development of the projects, but also creating jobs in the construction and the maintenance of the projects afterwards. So there is an opportunity to actually use this. I'm not saying it works every time, but for me it is really important that if you want to have people living in your city, you have to be sure that they can feel relatively safe.
[00:27:59] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah. The basic needs.
[00:28:01] Lykke Leonardsen: The basic needs, absolutely.
[00:28:04] Tamlyn Shimizu: So we're here at urban future and I'm guessing that you're here to engage with different stakeholders and learn from others and also share your learnings and things along those lines. And so I'm wondering what tools or what resources and what connections you're hoping to get out of the event that will help you kind of accelerate your ambitions.
[00:28:26] Lykke Leonardsen: Well, I'm always going to these events with the hope of getting new ideas, new inspiration. And that can be from hearing interesting talks, but it can also be through talking to people that I meet who tell me what they are working on and how they're working, and sometimes also people who come to me and ask me, forcing me to sort of reconsider what is it actually that we're doing and how we are working on that. So I think that's my main, I think mostly, I think the interesting part of these events actually takes place outside the conference rooms, the sessions.
[00:29:16] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, definitely the networking, the connections that.
[00:29:19] Lykke Leonardsen: You make bumping into people and, oh, and what are you doing and how are you working? And that's interesting. And let's. Because I can see that over the years, those kind of connections can also really help me. Maybe not like going back home and say, oh, I know this now, but maybe in a year's time somebody will come and ask me, we're looking into this and so on. And they say, oh, I remember talking to this guy and let me get in touch with him or her, and we can get back to and ask what were they doing? Can make the link. And I found that kind of network is really important for me.
[00:30:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely. And what other tools do you think that you need to really make Copenhagen resilient?
What tools are you kind of missing from your toolbox?
[00:30:20] Lykke Leonardsen: What I'm really missing is national legislation, especially regarding coastal protection.
Yeah.
And I look around the world, and that's a picture I see in many cities that national legislation seem to be sort of lagging behind, not following.
I don't know why, but it seems like there's some kind of anxiety to get really close to that problem. I don't know if it's question of costs or whatever it is, I don't know, but I feel that there's this.
[00:31:06] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, yeah, there's kind of this interesting. When you were saying that, I was kind of thinking, you know, people complain a lot about cities being bureaucratic, but I was just thinking that actually, cities are some of the most agile forms of forms in many ways, in comparison to national governments or other forms of government, maybe.
[00:31:29] Lykke Leonardsen: I'm not sure. It's. Yeah, I mean, I, I mean, having worked for the city of Copenhagen for 27 years, I know that there's a lot of bureaucracy in the city, but I also learned to manoeuvre it.
And I think that's probably the case in many. And that also goes for national governments. It's a question of manoeuvring.
The problem is, I think that the national governments, I mean, they get a lot of more attention from the public and so on, on what they're doing.
A lot of concern about how do we actually split the costs. Because, I mean, of course you need to work more on adaptation in cities, meaning that you will have to prioritize money to some of the big cities. And with the ongoing sort of agenda between sort of urban and rural areas, especially in Europe, that's maybe not always the easiest thing to do.
[00:32:29] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, absolutely. Not easy at all.
So with that, I want to give you a little bit of space also for an open floor.
I like to give you this in case you feel like we didn't touch on a topic that you think is really important to talk about that we missed in our conversation. Do you have anything that comes to mind that you say, oh, people need to know about this?
[00:32:52] Lykke Leonardsen: Well, I mean, I think the only thing that I would like to stress, I think I've touched upon it, but sort of really want to stress is, is the issue of water. I mean, the fact that for many years we have forgotten both about the importance of water, the fact that we really need good water in order to survive.
We've talked a lot about climate change and emissions and heat and so on, but we haven't talked about the lack of water. That is going to be really difficult.
But also the fact that we've in many countries, I mean, we are here in the Netherlands, they live nicely protected behind their dikes and every dutch person thinks it's fine. The government has taken care of everything. I don't need to worry. It's the same in Denmark. People feel, okay, we are protected and all of a sudden things happen that shows people, oh, we're nothing. We are actually much more vulnerable than we think. And that kind of forgetting because we have sort of been able to fall asleep with open eyes, forgetting about the danger that is actually out there when it comes to too much water.
So those things about sort of how crucial water is for our survival, but also how dangerous it can be for our cities if we are not able to manage it in the right way.
[00:34:26] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, very important message. It's kind of. It's kind of weird to think about that we've forgotten a little bit about water, right? Like it's so integral into what we need to survive and everything. But you're right, we have many conversations about emissions, but not as many about water.
[00:34:42] Lykke Leonardsen: Nope. So, yeah, I mean, that's.
I mean, in Denmark, it's actually, it's prohibited to, to use your basement for living spaces. But when we've had the big cloud bursts in Copenhagen, a lot of damage happened to people who had actually forgotten about that and basically expanded their small houses into bigger by using the basement especially for. It's a good place to throw your teenage kids down there and so on. And all of a sudden they had to face up with insurance companies that were a little bit doubtful. How much can we actually deal with this? Because you are not supposed to be using this as a residential part of your house. It's for storage. I mean, if you've got your ski gear, we can do that, but I mean, if you've got expensive furniture and electronic gear and so on, I mean, most of them, the insurance company said, we're going to pay this time, but we're maybe not going to do it the next time.
And that's because people have forgotten.
[00:35:46] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, exactly. It's not on your mind in day to day life. Yeah, really interesting. So now we go into our segment, and the segment I chose for you today is called shout out.
Shout out.
Mention a person, an organization or a city you think deserves more recognition in the field.
Do you have someone that comes to mind? Someone or some entity?
[00:36:16] Lykke Leonardsen: Oh, there's so many cities that I think needs a special shout out.
I think I would actually mention two cities, one in Europe, and that is Oslo.
They are doing so much great work on water.
They have an issue about getting the finance for it, but the thoughts and the way of approaching it is so smart and so clever, and I think that's really good. And, I mean, if to mention a person, there would actually be a guy called Bent Braskerul who's done a lot of work in that area for the city of Oslo.
And another city, which is outside Europe, is Buenos Aires, where they have also done a lot of work. We in Copenhagen had several years, we had a collaboration with Buenos Aires, where we were working with them, and they did a lot of work. For instance, they worked on making a strategy for creating green streets, using the fact whenever they were doing, like, road work in specific areas, how can we actually do that, having found out where do we need these green streets? So whenever there was something going on on these specific streets, they would be able to piggyback on that.
[00:37:51] Tamlyn Shimizu: Yeah, really great shout outs. Thanks for that. And I always like to do that also so that people can also discover more use cases or discover more inspiration. Right. For the future. So with that, we have our final question. It's a question we ask every single guest, and the question is to you, what is a smart city?
[00:38:13] Lykke Leonardsen: For me, a smart city hasn't got anything to do with technology, or it hasn't got anything specifically to do with technology. I would rather say a smart city is a city that really thinks about how the way the city is constructed and how the city works, how the different things in the city actually basically support and are in harmony with each other.
I think that's a way of when you're thinking smart. For instance, using, I mean, to brag about my own city, Copenhagen, using the cloudburst system to also manage what we call everyday rain, saving the utility tons of money in expanding the sewer system and so on. So that kind of thinking is, for me also a smart city where you are looking at how can this actually also create another opportunity for us to do things better, quicker, cheaper? I mean, depending on how you're looking at it, that's a smart city for me.
[00:39:23] Tamlyn Shimizu: Really good answer. We've been compiling all the answers from all the guests, and it's really interesting to see everyone's different perspectives there. I really like your word that you used around harmony as well. So really, really interesting. And with that, that's all I have for you today. I want to first of all say thank you so much for coming on. I found it really insightful also to remind us about the importance of water and around a lot of the initiatives that you're taking on in Copenhagen. I found it really inspiring. So thank you so much for your time.
[00:39:54] Lykke Leonardsen: Well, thank you for having me.
[00:39:56] Tamlyn Shimizu: Absolutely, anytime. And a huge thanks goes out to urban future. Thank you for hosting us today here in Rotterdam. Really amazing getting to know so many incredible people here. And of course, thanks to all the listeners. Don't forget, you can always create a free account on bable-smartcities.eu. You can find out more about smart city projects, solutions, implementations and more. Thank you very much.
Thank you all for listening. I'll see you at the next stop on the journey to a better urban life.
