Knowledge sharing

Urban environment protection

The significance of city cleaning and commodity management is constantly increasing, since more than 50% of the human population lives in cities.
In order to give the citizens a living experience, which is healthy and worth living, a professional urban environment protection approach as a joint project of all citizens is required.

For the artificial and human made system “city” to be a healthy, pleasant and worthy environment, complex and sophisticated processes need to be implemented targeting the urban issues related to health and aesthetics. The solution cluster of city cleaning as well as waste removal and processing, sewer services etc. serve the greater good of urban environment protection. Technical support for these tasks adduces the communal administration with their specialized tools and utilities. The economic efficiency of these services provides benchmarks across different fields of application. Living, housing, consumption and production standards tend to equalize in the early 21st century combined with an ever increasing world population. Furthermore, urbanization moves millions of people from their rural areas into cities and metropolitan environments.
As each of these trends alone would lead to resource scarcity, a new and resource preserving consumption model in hand with innovative concepts for urban environment protection needs to be developed.

CITY AND CITIZENS

The City

“The citizen of a badly built city [however], where the sheer coincidence sweeps up the houses with darn broom, lives unaware in the desert of his grim condition.”(Johann W. Goethe)

The city is a universal social phenomenon, which has been observed since the classical period with each and every higher level civilization. It is defined as a larger, centralized and in its borders clearly defined settlement accommodating a higher than average population density as well as independent administration and supply chains. A city is often divided into functional sectors like living, commercial, industrial and recreation areas.

Characteristic attribute of cities, which form a point of concentrated human activity, is the affecting of the surrounding area, which can be grouped into administrative, religious and cultural effects. Of high importance for the economic development of a city is the emerging of a secondary and tertiary economic sector: the cities of the oxidant
have also been defined by their juridical independence and the middle-class citizen as the dominant social group in the “ecosystem city”.

Citizen

“Could there be something better for a city than that there are men and woman - asdiligent as possible - found inside? - No, there couldn’t be anything better.” (Platon, the state)

The citizen was at the dawn of the medieval times the dweller of a castle settlement, a fortified city or a market settlement. The economically more or less independent upper class citizens arose to become the main driver for cultural and political developments. The French revolution declared the health of its citizens as a civil right and the citizens themselves became object to the public healthcare politics. The basics of urban environment protection

Hygiene

Hygiene is the science of the observation and curing of diseases as well as upkeep of a certain level of cleanliness and other measures of disease prevention. All these measures aim to ensure an environment which is patronizing overall health, retaining of the social structures and living conditions as well as the promotion of beneficial behavior for the population as a whole. This resulted in the situation that the life expectancy increased dramatically since the beginning of the 20th century. According to the WHO (World Health Organization) only 1/7 of the additional life expectancy gets attributed to improvements in medical techniques and knowhow, but the major part to improvements in the overall hygiene standards and other preventative health measures.

Aesthetics

“For such a vital future we must create cities, in which we want to live andin which wecan fulfill the human desire of self actualization. Yes, for such a vital future we must explore the solutions of the past, which have already been proven and donot need tobe invented still.”(Vittorio M. Lampugnani, ital. Historiker)

Aesthetics is the science of beauty, of its laws and the harmony in nature and art. It arose from the human desire of a pleasant, attractive and appealing living environment. The strong correlation of inner city hygiene and aesthetics becomes obvious rather quickly.

Profitability

Profitability is, in the context of urban environment protection, the benchmark to measure efficiency of the utilized tools and techniques. The employed communal tools
and organizations have to be in a sensible cost-benefit ratio. Profitability not only ensures reasonable priced services but also the generation of profit which can be reinvested in the improvement of these services. Therefore it is the foundation for the socio economic acceptance of all hygienic and urban environmental activities.

City cleaning and communal utilities

City cleaning

“I am very much shocked about the contempt for the rules and regulations that preserve the very basics of health and life itself. Neither eye, nor nose can withstand the disgust dueto the feces and decay [...] even more am I puzzled by the very fact that a civilized society can tolerate such a health hazard for more than just the blink ofan eye.”(English traveler about Danzig, 1869)

City cleaning is a cluster of different, sophisticated activities that serve the protection from harm for humans and their environment. The main pillars of city cleaning in an urban environment are garbage collection, waste logistics, street and social space upkeep, winter and sewer service to keep the human surrounding clean or in other words healthy and aesthetic.

Communal utilities

“Engineers have been the true reformers of health care.” (William Cubitt, President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Great Britain, 1850)

Communal utilities cover all technical tools of city cleaning as special utilities and machinery. Furthermore do they include the machinery utilized during garbage collection, waste logistics, street and social space upkeep, winter and sewer service, waste sorting and removal. Technical standardization and data intelligence for different process and supply chains are the prerequisites for their efficient utilization.