Sebastian lives in New York and works for NY City Council, Department of City Planning. He is currently dealing with a project whose main objectives are to design a new near-to-zero emission urban district in Brooklyn, to raise people's awareness about CO2 emission reduction policies as well as promoting environmentally sound lifestyles. As other world megacities, New York is characterised by a massive daily stream of people and vehicles, and consequently the city's energy requirements are extremely high and its management very challenging. Nevertheless, New York is also a city that is investing a lot in urban green areas, shared gardens and socially innovative activities aimed at reducing the local community's carbon footprint collectively. Sebastian's idea is to develop an app that lets the end-user collect points, which can be converted into discount tickets for “green purchases”, that is buyings of goods labelled with a “NY carbon-neutral” certification. There are many ways to collect green points. One can, for instance, go bike-riding along specific urban green lanes / roads – provided with special magnets which produce energy whenever a bicycle passes by them. The more time a person walks / run / bikes along these energy-autonomous green paths, the more clean energy he/she produces, the more points he/she collects. Another way to gain points is to frequent places where innovative light bulbs are deployed and integrated with normal lighting poles. These bulbs, through an environmental sensor, signal the presence of either a high concentration of green house gases in the surrounding atmosphere (turning into red) or a low/very low level of GHG emissions around (turning into green). According to the colour of the emitted light, whenever an end-user approaches the area where these bulbs are installed, he/she gets either no points, in case of red, or a certain number of points, in case of green light. This way both small local businesses, local public bodies and citizens are pushed towards adopting lifestyles that are environmentally friendly and that are able to “provoke” the emission of green lights from the bulbs. By doing so, the district attracts more and more green points hunters, with great benefit for the local economy and livability.

View New (York) Green Life in OrganiCity