Urbane outlook

摘要

Sat on the ground floor of a Hyatt Regency Hotel in the heart of San Francisco's financial district, the Technology Strategy Board's (TSB) head of sustainability, Richard Miller - the man responsible for allocating £25m of the organisation's £300m annual budget - appears surprisingly relaxed given the amount of work he is currently overseeing. We're on the Clean and Cool Mission with 16 of Britain's most promising clean-tech companies, hoping to secure investment from Silicon Valley's wealthy venture capitalists. While in a city which proclaims itself the greenest in the US - where public buses are powered by overhead electric cables and homeless people fill shopping trolleys of plastic bottles to trade in for money - the conversation is somewhat appropriately dominated around how the UK will meet the challenges facing its cities. The opening of the TSB's Future Cities catapult centre in March 2013 is one of the things keeping Miller busy when he's not photographing constellations from his rural back garden in North Wales. The location of the centre has not yet been decided on.