The COP21 that meet in Paris this December will discuss new agreements between countries for regulating activities that are detrimental to the global environment. Cities, because they organize in systems of cities are the best tool (that was invented long ago by societies) for solving environmental problems: first by circulating in a top-down way the international and national directives, second by sharing bottom-up ingenious local inventions to reduce pollution and save resource. This should no longer be conceived as a competition between cities for being considered as “the smarter” but as a collective challenge for territorial intelligence through interurban emulation. That message was presented last September in a conference at a meeting organized in Versailles by ESRI France that you can find here.

Denise Pumain