Saturday, May 24, 2014

Sustainability of Cities in Sweden with Gothenburg as an Example

Serendipitously, one of my best friends, Engineering Professor Kei May Lau, who used to be at UMass Amherst, and for the past decade has been a Professor at HKUST in Hong Kong, happened to be in Gothenburg, Sweden this past week. She was invited to speak at Chalmers University.

Since I am now back in Gothenburg as a Visiting Professor for several weeks this summer the timing was perfect - thank you Chalmers!

Kei May marveled at the greenery of this city, which is the second largest in Sweden.

In this beautiful city, there are different modes of transport to choose from and congestion pricing is really working!
In this lovely city, the canals were built by the Dutch. We visited the Gothenburg City Museum today, where I took the photo below of the aerial view of the city. The Gothenburg City museum recently was picked to be the best museum in Sweden.
I especially appreciate the walkability of this city, the safety, the architectural bbeauty and the proliferation of green spaces and parks.
And since sustainability is a theme of my research, I can't help but be inspired here and I thank the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg for my appointment as a Visiting Professorship of Operations Management!

Coincidentally, the new mayor of NYC, Bill de Blasio, was in Sweden last week and visited Stockholm (I was still in Sicily then) to learn about what Sweden does to maintain such a great record of traffic safety, as reported by The New York Times.