Honesty. Transform post #1

Transform is an international project that deals with the urban transformation of cities depending on carbon based energy, to cities independent of it. Sounds easy, right?
Since Kyoto, dozens of cities all over Europe defined goals to reduce their carbon emissions. Big ambitions of 20% carbon reduction and more are defined. It turned out that reaching the goals is much more difficult than setting them. Since, sometimes more than a decade ago, no real changes happened.
The question is: why? In all these cities there is a lot of political power at work, a huge amount of scientific research done and business working on solar panels, building refit or energy production by wind etc.
Still big changes did not start and most probably hardly any city will reach their goals by 2020. There has to be something else at stake. This is exactly what Transform is about.
Transform is about finding the real barriers. Finding the bottle necks and finding new solutions for change. Urban transformation is about changing an enormous complex system of energy production, energy distribution, consumption, related policy, economy and legal structures. But Transform is also about human behaviour, about changing old school business, urban redevelopment and changing rusted systems.
Transform is, bottom line, about honesty. Cities being honest to look at themselves and dare to discover the barriers for change. Taking action!
If cities are able to not only look to the little successes they make but also to the big picture, they are able to find these barriers. Whether the barriers are political, economic, legal or else.
More information: www.urbantransfoem.eu