The city of Munich has decided to source all its energy from renewable sources starting from 2015. Many low carbon cities are being built around the world in these years and many towns and villages are transforming their energy systems, but Munich is the first major city and economic powerhouse to aim at this. The challenge is to design an energy mix that not only will be “clean” but will also allow energy prices to be competitive so that the economy of the city will not falter. If they are successful, it will be a major breakthrough and would give Germany (and Europe) a strategic advantage in the phase of adaptation to the effects of climate change. But key to the success though, is reducing the energy dependency of the city itself. Our contemporary cities are very wasteful machines, the era of cheap energy introduced by the use of fossil fuels has led to the creation of cities and buildings that are morphologically inefficient. Saving energy is cheaper and easier than producing it, that’s where the real challenge lies if large urban areas want to succeed in transforming their energy strategies. Form, orientation and exposure of cities and buildings affect deeply the amount of energy they use and it is there where the real gains can be found as they are also the cheapest systems and devices that can be implemented. The work we have done in the last three years with our team at Foster+Partners has revolved around un-tapping the creative potentials of such systems and has triggered our imagination.
