Here's an interesting article I got sent recently:
http://www.utne.com/Environment/What-Would-It-Take-Carbon-Neutral-City.aspx(text follows)
What would it take to shape a planet on which people, other
living things, and the systems that support us can sustainably coexist? For a
special issue, Momentum magazine invited experts from around the world to share
their thoughts on how we might craft solutions to some of earth’s toughest
challenges. Jeremy Faludi spoke with optimist Alex Steffen about what it would
take to make a city carbon neutral.
First, let’s talk
about transportation. What are your favorite tools or strategies that cities
can use?
Well, one thing I’ve learned that’s really shocked me is the
degree to which transportation planning in the U.S. is really traffic planning.
Even progressive cities like Seattle
have a sub-department that is about everything else but cars. They don’t have
any integrated strategy at all. The traffic modeling software used by the
planning commission for the five-county metropolitan area here doesn’t even
account for pedestrian trips or bicycle trips, and only does a one-to-one swap
for transit and cars, which we know isn’t the way the real world works.
If we’re talking about transportation, the best thing a city
can do is densify as quickly as it can. That needs to be said every time this
issue comes up, because it’s the only universal strategy that works. That’s the
best-documented finding in urban planning—that as density goes up, trip length
goes down and transportation energy use goes down. The main question that
nearly every city in North America needs to
address is how to densify quickly. Once people are grappling with that, though,
there are other things people need to do to make that work: making
neighborhoods walkable, with green spaces, street life, mixed-use zoning and
other qualities that make a place livable. If you have density without that,
you just have vertical suburbs.
How you get density is different depending on whether your
city is growing or declining. Most cities in the U.S. are growing because the
country is having one last population boom. The biggest thing growing cities
need to do is minimize barriers to development so that as long as someone is
doing good urbanism, they can get permitted quickly and get building quickly.
In a lot of places, one of the most expensive parts of building a new building
is the delay caused by permitting, public process, etc. Places that have done a
really good job, like Vancouver, basically set a high bar for what will get
passed, but once you’ve passed you’re good to go, there aren’t delays. I think
that’s one of the most important things, because we know there’s already a
giant pent-up demand for urban living space. We want to provide that urban
living space—but that requires building on a scale we haven't seen in 40 or 50
years.
What are the best
strategies to fill cities with carbon-neutral buildings?
In most places, the process of land use planning and
infrastructure planning is broken—even if it’s working well in most ways, it’s
broken in the slowness with which it grapples with change. In quite a few cities,
most civic engagement is mostly a matter of fighting development, people
saying, “not in my backyard.” Even in cities that are doing good planning, it
tends to be marginal and incremental and take decades to come to fruition.
There are a number of cities that have fast-track permitting for green
buildings.
Vancouver
has explicit policies about setting ambitious policy goals and strict building
standards, but then really expediting any projects that exceed it. A lot of
cities will need to embrace that. We have a lot more to lose by changing too
slowly than by changing too quickly. We know enough about how to legislate good
urban design that there’s no excuse for not picking up the pace.
I think people are
frustrated because all these things are such large-scale issues that people
feel they can only be solved through complicated bureaucratic processes of city
governments, which have glacial paces. What can we do about that?
One of the most unfortunate side effects of the urban
activism of the ’60s and ’70s is the belief that development is wrong and that
fighting it makes you an environmentalist. We know that dense cities are both
environmentally better and dramatically more equitable places. Walkable
neighborhoods are better than the suburbs for people with a wide range of
incomes, and what happens in cities that don't grow is that they gentrify and
poor people are pushed out. Trying to fight change makes you less sustainable
and more unfair.
I think we need to acknowledge that not everyone will be
happy with the results. But you need to be able to charge ahead anyway. I
really admire Janette Sadik-Khan, the commissioner of the New York City
Department of Transportation. One of the things she’s great at is that when
there’s an idea that’s understood to be workable and good because it’s worked
elsewhere, and with the amount of basic vetting needed to show it won’t have
unintended consequences, she goes ahead. She just makes changes, rather than
submitting things to lengthy process. The most famous thing she did was Times Square, making it a pedestrian plaza. She didn’t
put it through a five-year plan, she just did it. Same thing with a ton of bike
lanes, bus rapid transit, etc. She doesn’t get bogged down in debate about
things. We need more leadership like that. She’s had opposition—some people
haven’t liked what she’s done. But most people really do like it, because it
works.
In almost all city governments in America, the small group of people
who don’t want change are able to block change. Sometimes these people block
change for good reasons, but much of the changes we need, that will improve
cities, also get blocked—which is a loss for everyone involved.
How do you streamline
the hearing process but still allow people’s voices to be heard? For instance,
when the big-box store wants to move in that would kill local businesses, how
do people have recourse against that?
My experience is that, in most cities, the planning process
isn’t used primarily to block things like that. It’s used primarily to block
things like extensions of transit, affordable housing, large residential
projects, etc. There are bad projects, and people have every right and duty to
block them, but most NIMBY opposition isn’t to stuff that’s actually bad, it’s
just to stuff people don’t like because it’s different. And I don’t think the
public has a duty to listen to the same arguments again and again and again. I
think once officials are elected who have a clearly articulated agenda, they
should just go do them. There are converging approaches that are designed to
involve more people in the process, change the process itself. Some of this is
in the Government 2.0 movement of better data transparency; some of this is in
open-source planning, etc. Most of the process in most cities I’m aware of is
de facto exclusionary because you can’t participate unless you can take time
off in the middle of your workday to go to the hearings. So you end up with
wealthy NIMBYs, public officials and developers, which isn’t a very good mix.
Putting pressure to change those systems, for civic revival, would greatly
help.
So you’re arguing not
for shutting down public hearing process, but for letting cities decide on
projects by whole classes of projects rather than individual cases?
Yes, exactly. You don’t get the pace of change that’s needed
out of case-by-case evaluations. If you’re willing to make tough choices right
up front, we know it’s possible to do a lot of this stuff without taking away
anything that people love about their cities. In fact, we can add value to
people's neighborhoods.
There’s a great plan for the city of Melbourne, which they presented at TEDx
Sydney. The city’s growing quickly, needs to add a million people over the next
decade or two, but they don’t want that to be sprawl. So they took a digital
map of the city and blocked off everything that’s currently single-family
residences, everything that’s a historical building, everything that’s green
space, working industrial land, and other things people are vociferous about
valuing. That left a fairly small percentage of land. But they showed that if
they concentrated density in those corridors, they could add a million people
without expanding the city at all, and it would add all these benefits, like
better public transit and such. You can dramatically increase the density of
places without taking away things people want—and actually adding things they
want but couldn’t afford today—because the average suburb isn’t dense enough to
financially support a tram or the like. But if you add a dense core that can
support that, suddenly even the people around it, in their single-family homes,
get the benefit, too. I call that “tent-pole density,” where extremely high
density in a small area brings up the average for a whole neighborhood, even
when the rest of the neighborhood doesn’t change. I think it’s a really
important concept, one that most people don’t get.
We’ve run out of time for incremental approaches. For
carbon-neutral cities, there are things worth talking about in how our
consumption patterns can change—sharing goods, etc.—but those are a fraction of
the impacts of transportation and building energy use. If we need to choose
priority actions, the most important things are to densify, provide transit,
and green the buildings.
Published in association with Momentum , a print, online and
multimedia magazine for environmental thought leaders produced by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment.
Read more:
http://www.utne.com/Environment/What-Would-It-Take-Carbon-Neutral-City.aspx#ixzz1n7k024jR
(back to me)
This is an overall, comprehensive approach. In just a few paragraphs, this article delves into cities large and small, dealing with issues that affect all of us to one degree or another. While some strategies may work well in some places, other places will require creative application of sound principles to generate positive outcomes and quality living environments. Further, there is a real and pressing need to have people get involved, to help foment change, and to oppose those who are trying to stop positive improvements. This need is all pervasive, and it is in cities that people can have a real impact.
I'd be interested in any thoughts you might have... :)
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