Closing dialogue 9.12

Hi,

We had our closing dialogue on Thursday.  We had a guest from Finnish consulting firm Poyry, Professor Risto Laukkanen. He has studied mathematics in Helsinki University of Technology and microbiology in the University of Helsinki in the 70ties. Laukkanen spoke about the role of engineers in the world. He did not have any lecture slides which was a bit disturbing. The topic would have been more organized with using a few power point slides. The speech itself was very inspiring and interesting. Laukkanen spoke about his own studies and todays working life and its expectations. It was very pleasant to listen to him. Laukkanen spoke about need vs. demand. There needs first to be a need for engineers before there can be a demand, in many countries like Germany it is a lack of engineers currently. After some time there will be demand as well. Nowadays there are cheaper engineers for example in china and Brazil. In order the European engineers to get jobs, they have to be more competent or settle down to lower salaries. The demand of engineers is also affected by political values in the country. Many decisions are actually political, not technological.

The next topic was sustainability. We discussed that with current lifestyle 1,3 globes are needed. The world is going to be sustainable with one way or another, and Laukkanen hopes that it is possible with changing our lifestyle to be more sustainable. The other option is that large number of people is going to suffer from poverty or diseases, which reduces the population growth. Sustainability is related to risk management. We have to invest in the future the get results. We as engineers have to be able to adding value in our work. Finally, Laukkanen introduced his view of sustainable global technologies; it consists of sustainability, technology, communication and organization. I think his lecture was very interesting and gave good viewpoints to the work of engineers. It is very true that the world is going to sustainable in the end in a way or another. I really hope that people learn to life with more sustainable lifestyles. Someone from the audience asked Mr. Laukkanen if he would give up his summer house so someone else could live in it. He answered, that he would rather give up his house in Espoo and move to his summer house, very funny.

In the end there were a few questions from Olli Varis and then the lecture ended. The last course of sgt program is going to be in spring. I heard it includes workshops with for example Kemira. I think it’s going to be a nice course but need much time and involvement. I’m looking forward to the course.

Thank you for nice course and happy holidays!

E-lecture on Independence Day 6.12

Hello,

The e-lecture was held by Mr Matti Sinko from United Nations Economic Comission for Africa (UNECA) in Ethiopia. First Mr Sinko introduced the United Nations eight  Millenium goals, which we already have learned earlier: fighting poverty & hunger, improving education, improving gender equality, decreasing children mortality, improving maternal health, fighting diseases, protecting the environment and creating global partnership for sustainable development.

Mr Sinko has lived and worked in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. The country was never colonized, so there are not traces of colonialism like in many other African countries.

Next, the term ICT was introduced. ICT means Information and Communication Technologies, like telecommunication, mobile technology, services and usage. ICT has became a subsytem of the economy and society. It can be integrated to for example education and health care. There are many interactions with other subsystems and the society.

In Africa, Governments plays a major role in controlling economy. Real markets are larger than the formal ones. Currently the mobile markets are starting to emerge. There are large unregulated areas in the e- economy. Governments are struggling to control the e- markets. There has been a real mobile revolution in the developing countries. Some countries, for example Somalia and Ethiopia have not started developing as fast as others.

The problem in Africa is the lack of infrastucture and educated work force. The development has to happen in all the levels of society: education, health, government and business. ICT development can be linked to the millenium development goals. High education needs more time than the other society levels to develop. UNESCO has ”Education for All” program , which is needed in achieving the MDGs and ICT goals. Education and science have to meet in order to get permanent results in Africa.

There was also two videos to watch. In the other video, ICT development in Uganda (if I remember right?) was introduced. The second video was made by World Bank and it told about the ICT revolution in Rwanda. The development in Rwanda has been really fast if you take into account the political instability in the country a while ago. I got the image that the video was a bit ”coloured” with the ideas of World Bank. The situation is maybe worse than it was showed on the video. I knew that the Chinese are doing a lot of commerce in Africa, and there was a Chinese ICT factory on the video. The Chinese representative was very happy that the factory doesn’t have to pay hardly any taxes. Chinese buying property in Africa and getting tax revenues and cheap labour seems like a second wave of colonialism to me. Is there a real benefit for the locals or is everything going to the pockets of World Bank or the Chinese?

Transportation Workshop 2.12

Hi,

Thursday’s workshop was held by Antti Ruotoistenmäki from Aalto University’s Lifelong Learning Institute Dipoli. We were divided into groups and each group chose a topic to prepare a short presentation of two minutes. The task was called ”evevator task” because the groups had to present their views during an imaginary two minutes elevator ride, and get the ”board” (=Mr Ruotoistenmäki and Matleena) to buy their idea. There werevariuos topics to choose from concerning transportation. The case was Helsinki metropolitan area. The problem was, that the traffic input has to be reduced to get more effective and sustainable transportation system.

Mr Ruotoistenmäki showed us very interesting statistic on the connection between GDP growt and the number of private cars. It seemed that they have almost linear relationship. There are over five million private cars in Finland these days. The introducing lecture included almost the same features as Dr Rahaman showed us in the e-lecture on Tuesday.

 Our group chose the topic vehicle sharing versus private ownership. There were three main points in our solution. First, there are over 5 million cars in Finland, this means that ebery family has two or even tree cars. If the number of cars could be reduced to just one car per family, that would help a lot. The fact is, that some peolple want to have a private car/they need a private car if there isn’t good public transportation where they live. Second, vehicle sharing can be promoted by for example by putting road tolls for single drivers, setting special ”car pool lanes” or giving tax revenues for people who share their car with others. Third, there are many people in the city centre who don’t have a car. There could be special electric rent cars that you could rent and then return anywhere in the city to be rented forward. By doing this many people would use the same car. Another group  had almost the same solution as us.

There was an interesting solution to the same problem that we had. There would be small electric cars that had no driver and you could order them with mobile phone. The cars would follow metal spikes that are put on the ground, so they wouldn’t need a driver. This way every passenger would have privacy that is maybe the most valued feature in using private cars. The solution was futuristic but I think it could be a really good option.

This was the second last lecture on this course if you don’t count Independence Day’s individual work. Time goes so fast! I’m already looking forward to the last sgt course in the spring semester.

Monday 29.11 e-lecture on Transportation

Hi,

Monday’s e-lecture was held by DR Khan Rahaman. The broadcast came from  Canada. First, Dr Rahaman  introduced the term ”SUT”, meaning sustainable transportation. This means environmentally, socially and economically sustainable transportation system. The key terms in SUT are access, mobility and affordability. Sustainable transportation is environmentally friendly. Social sustainability means safety and affordability, meaning that also poor people should have access to transportation. Economical transportation means cost allocation and possible subsidies for public transportation. How are these goals met? Governance is needed in a form of proactive government involvement and consolidation.

The next topic was related to urbanization. Urban population growth especially inn Asia has led to intensive motorization. In countries like Vietnam, India and China CO2 emissions are increasing rapidly. This is due to increase of the number of vehicles. In these areas there are for example lots of motorbikes. It was a surprise to me that motorbikes are the cause of increased CO2 emissions in Asian transportation. I thought it would have been cars.

So is the transportation sustainable in Asia?

The answer is no! Some reasons listed below:

-          no development strategy

-          unsustainable transport policy -> new infrastructure instead of developing old ones

-          low income groups suffer, because policies favour private transport, which is expensive

-          poor can not live in city center because transportation  is expensive

Solution  Dr Rahaman gave includeded design of integrated transport sustems, analysis, planning, implementation, and monitoring.

The next topic was Europe’s transportation. It is estimated that  84 % of European inhabitants live in cities by 2050. Most of GDP is generated in cities currently and  40 % of CO2 emissions are from transport. Most of the road accidents happen in cities. Dr Rahaman gave 3 solutions: Energy efficiency, cleaner energy, less use of energy. Lots of policies have been developed to improve  the situation. EU research programme ”city vitality and sustainability” CIVITAS is focused on creating cleaner technologies for transportation. I have notices the change in Europe in the past 5-10 years. Nowadays there are for example electric cars and biofuels. The problem is they are more expensive than conventional technologies, and recently car manufacturer Toyota admitted that the carbon foot print of a hybrid car is larger than a normal car. In my opinion, new technologies are however an important milestone for developing better technologies in the future.

In  Canada: 80 % of people are living in cities, Mostly Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

60 %  of transportation is based on car, because of poor public transportation especially in smaller towns. Recently the situation has improved in larger cities in the US and Canada, for example bicycle roads have been built.

In the end, Dr Rahaman gave conclusions. To achieve sustainable transportation, teamwork, and communication between stakeholders parties (goverment, national, local) are needed. The use of public transportation can be increased by  for example road tolls  and mproving public transport. In the very end Dr Rahaman gave an interesting example: If you measure how many people per hour  can pass through a 3,5 m lane in one our,  the result is higher walking than with a bus.

In the end there were a few questions from audience:

Question 1: Is it a good option to change the place of capital to improve transportation?

Answer: There have been examples where part of the city has been moved, like Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Bagladesh and Indonesia. This can lead to better transportation planning. Not everyrhing can be however changed from the city center, because especially poor people in informal economy would suffer. Government offices can be moved. and building separate bus lanes makes public transportation more effective.

Question 2: More demand for logistics or transporting people? ->

Answer: Integration of service transport and transport of people means shorter distances and more sustainable transportation.

Question 3: Where does public transportation work best?

Answer: Helsinki and Stockholm have very good bus transport. Railways are effective in Germany and Tokyo.

Question 4: How to improve public transportation in Toronto?

Answer: By changing peoples attitudes towards  public transportation, for example with roal tolls.

Thursday 25.11 Sanitation workshop

Hi,

As a pretask, we were told to watch a video from YouTube called ”Living from a bucket”. The film told about a voluntary group in a slum called Kibera, which is situated in Kenya. The group was called "Hands of love", what a great name! A group of young boys were cleaning up in the slum every Saturday to improve the standard of living in their neighbourhood. In Kibera, inadequate sanitation is a major problem, and sometimes people just use plastic bags and throw them somewhere after use, this is called ”flying toilets”. It really touched me on te video that young peolple want to make a difference to improve everybody’s lives.

On Thursday’s workshop, we had four different tasks related to sanitation. I was in group 1. In the beginning of the workshop, we had a sort of ”brainstorming”, and everybody had to discuss with other people to get solutions for all the four tasks. After brainstorming, the solutions were written to post-it notes and put on the wall. Every group had to organize the post-it notes and come up with a solution to the problem. I think this brainstorming was great, because after that the solution was kind of ready. Everybody had great ideas and quite many had similar ideas concerning our problem. Our problem in group 1 was to plan sustainable sanitation for Kibera. UN gives 600,000 dollars to improving living conditions on the area. Our plan was following:

1)      Inform locals on the importance on hygiene and proper sanitation -> The change has to happen from the people. You can’t go and say ”This is bad for you”, you have to proof your ideas so that the change is permanent.

2)      Set up a campaign with the help of NGO’s to spread information and to get the locals involved in cleaning their environment. If all the waste was even dumped to the same place, the living conditions would be much better.

3)      Technical solution is dry toilets, because they are easy to build and because there is no water piping in the slum. Some of the slum housing settlements are not legal so permanent water piping and normal toilets are not an option everywhere.

I think the plan was quite easy to make because the solution was already on the post-it notes. Therefore we didn’t have to think everything by ourselves and start from scratch. The brainstorming part took quite along time but I think it was more useful than just sitting with the group, because now we had everybody’s ideas and not just the group’s. Sometimes it was hard to have good ideas in the brainstorming session but in the end there were quite similar answers, because we had to talk to as many peolple as we could. I think the workshop was fun and useful.

Monday 22.11 Waste management

Hi,

We didn’t have a lecture today and this blog writing is based on individual work. Based on the two articles given, Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSWM) is management of garbage from communities. Municipal waste doesn’t include for example industrial waste because it is a result of human activity.

According to UN Development Programme, inadequate waste management is the second largest problem faced by citizens after unemployment. This can easily be true. Italy comes to my mind when talking about waste problems in Europe. The whole city went into chaos because of poor waste management. I think the situation was affected by Italian mafia somehow. One of the articles showed that two factors affect organizing proper waste management: policies and technology. The situation in Italy happened due to bad policy.

Arranging proper waste management is difficult. First, the city has to choose if it uses private company or smaller, community based organizations. The benefit in using community based organization is that it is labour intensive, so the workers can go to places were the big machines can’t. Supervivion is really important, and it is normally done by local authorities.

It says in one of the internet links that: ”Waste management in developing countries must emphasize and be linked to the creation of jobs, poverty alleviation and community participation.” Waste management is different in developed and developing countries. Many poor people live by sorting out garbage and waste management arranged like in developed countries would destroy their livelihood.

Based on the references, it seems that in many developing countries, there isn’t any kind of waste management. I think that is horrible. Dumping waste near by housing can cause serious illness, pollution and water degradation. Maybe waste management seems like the smallest worry when you don’t have a job or enough food to eat. But in the end, it can lead to a disaster. In the developing countries inadequate waste management is closely linked to urbanization. Web link number 2 says in my opinion less important reasons to waste management: “Poor visual appearance of these cities will have negative impacts on official and tourist visits and foreign investment.” That must be true, but I think health risk to citizens and pollution are more important reasons. A good point in the web link was to emphasize the role of finance, since waste management typically has very low priority in developing countries. I wonder why?

Waste management is taken for granted in Finland, so I haven’t even realized how large process it is. I become to respect city planners and government even more for proper waste management. I have thought that some services are well handled, when you don’t even recognize they are taking care of. Developed countries should certainly help developing countries to get proper waste management, because it instantly improves the standard of living in the whole city. I realized there are many urbanization related issues that I haven’t thought about before.

Workshop Thursday 18.11.10 Sustainable energy

Hello,

Thursday’s workshop was about sustainable energy sources. We were divided into 4 groups. Each group had a case to solve concerning the use of sustainable energy. Our group’s task was to design decentralized solution for a school in an urban slum in Ethiopia. The solution had to be decentralized because the local electricity supplier didn’t want to electrify the slum because it was afraid of excessive looting. We decided to plan the electrification using renewable energy sources, because in spite of large initial investment, they are cheap to use. We were thinking that we would need around 15 lamps in the school plus some extra for a computer on daytime. We counted that 5 solar panels would be enough and they would cost around 7500 euro together.

To store the extra energy, we planned that we needed batteries and a water boiler, so excess energy could be used to warm water. In addition to solar panels, we wanted to have some kind of a back up system. We came up with the idea of having a small biogas plant that used toilet waste to create biogas. To get electricity with biogas, we planned that the school would need two small generators. Biogas could also be converted to biofuel and sold to the community for cooking and heating. The material that doesn’t burn could be used as fertilizer in agriculture. According to our budget, the whole electrification of the school would pay 10 500 euro. To get the community to be involved in the project, we planned that there could be evening courses for the citizens of the slum.

Every group had to give feedback for one group. The group we had to give feedback designed a sustainable electrification for a small village in India located 2500 above sea level. They included micro hydropower, solar cells and biogas in their plan. We agreed that their plan was good, but they could also make biofuel to be used in old diesel generators the village already had.

I think the most interesting solution was a water tower which used potential energy to pump the water from a well. Our lecturer wasn’t sure about the practicality of the plan, but I think it was a great idea. It would be great if that kind of new solutions could gain space from old systems, like diesel generators or wood.

I think the workshop was really useful and fun. All our group members had to use their imagination to create a sustainable energy solution. Maybe some time from now, this kind of solutions can be reality.