Matthew Slavin is founder and principal of Sustaingrup, developing clean energy technologies and sustainable building and aligning business and government leadership, goals and strategy to create a more sustainable future. His publications on energy, climate change and sustainability have been featured in leading professional journals and metropolitan newspapers.

Sustainability in America’s Cities

Creating the Green Metropolis

By Matthew I. Slavin

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Island Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59726-742-7

Contents

About Island Press,
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
FOREWORD,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
Chapter 1 – The Rise of the Urban Sustainability Movement in America,
Chapter 2 – Strategic Climate Action Planning in Portland,
Chapter 3 – Greening the Industrial District: Trans forming Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley from a Blighted Brown field into a Sustainable Place to Work and Play,
Chapter 4 – Phoenix, the Role of the University, and the Politics of Green-Tech,
Chapter 5 – LEED in the Nation’s Capitol: A Policy and Planning Perspective on Green Building in Washington, D.C.,
Chapter 6 – The Greening of Mobility in San Francisco,
Chapter 7 – Wind, Waves, and Watts: Creating a Clean Energy Future for Honolulu,
Chapter 8 – Clean Waters, Clean City: Sustainable Storm Water Management in Philadelphia,
Chapter 9 – Toward a Sustainable New York City: Greening through Urban Forest Restoration,
Chapter 10 – Greening the Food Supply in New York,
Chapter 11 – Where Sustainability Stands Now: Contemporary Trends and Future Prospects,
REFERENCES,
CONTRIBUTORS,
INDEX,
Island Press | Board of Directors,

CHAPTER 1

The Rise of the Urban Sustainability Movement in America

MATTHEW I. SLAVIN

It remains to be seen how U.S. cities will act to reduce their carbon emissions in coming years … given that most cities … have already been built and it is becoming crucial to find ways in which to make them function sustainably.

—Herbert Girardet, World Future Council, 2008

In searching for a tipping point at which sustainability became mainstream in America, one might look to 2005. In that year website SustainLane.com began issuing annual rankings of the fifty most populous cities in the United States. SustainLane is not the only rating system that uses quantitative scoring to rank U.S. cities in terms of how green they are, but it has become the most highly visible and widely referenced source for comparatively assessing sustainability in urban America. Its annual rankings have been reported by broadcast media networks National Public Radio, CNN, NBC, CBS, and ABC, posted on a wide range of social networking Internet sites, and received coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. Mayors Michael Bloomberg of New York, Richard Daley of Chicago, and Gavin Newsom of San Francisco have all publicly praised the website and the high rankings accorded their city’s greening initiatives. In the age of the Internet, SustainLane is perhaps the most visible sign of the rise of sustainability to the top of public policy agendas in the urban milieu in which nearly 80 percent of Americans now live and work.

Defining the Sustainable City

The word sustainability has come into such common usage that it sometimes seems ubiquitous. At the outset, this leads to the need to answer two principal questions with regard to the sustainable cities movement. First, what is a sustainable city? And second, why is it important that cities become sustainable? In answering these questions, it is useful to draw a distinction between sustainability and sustainable development. Sustainability in its broadest sense is the capacity of natural systems to endure, to remain diverse and productive over time. Sustainable development is the practice of humans arriving at a level of economic and social development that does not inevitably alter ecological balance.

Sustainable cities are those that design and manage their form of governance, economies, built environment, transportation systems, energy and water use, food production, and waste in a manner that imposes the smallest possible footprint upon the environment. They strive to transport themselves using means that minimize fuel consumption and pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and build and operate buildings that conserve energy and water and provide healthful living and working conditions. They feed themselves with locally produced agriculture and utilize renewable energy. They have economies that seek to benefit from emerging growth technologies and job sectors that minimize environmental externalities and embrace long-term commitments to an inclusive range of workers. They strive to reuse brownfields and recycle, re-manufacture, and otherwise divert materials from landfills and incinerators. Sustainable cities couple top-down visionary governance with bottom-up involvement. They embrace a collaborative and consensual approach to policymaking among governments, businesses, and environmentalists that aims to proactively and cost-effectively eliminate or reduce the loss of biodiversity and forestall potential ecological calamity. The sustainable cities movement signals a departure from the kinds of trade-offs and antagonisms between economic development and the environment that have traditionally characterized urban development in the United States.

The Rise of the Sustainable Cities Movement

As to why cities globally are acting to make themselves more sustainable, three principal reasons present themselves. First, urbanization has created increasingly unavoidable conflicts between development and local environmental carrying capacity. At the same time, the limits of traditional infrastructure and other technological approaches to maintaining a balance between development and the environment are becoming unavoidably clear. Cities have embraced sustainability in an effort to find alternative, low-impact solutions to meeting their public infrastructure, health, and community livability obligations. Second, economic development is a primary function of municipal governance. In their sustainability initiatives, cities seek to capture the benefits of emerging green economy opportunities. Third, global warming is perhaps the predominant imperative confronting the world in the twenty-first century. The threat it poses to America’s cities is significant. Cities have embraced sustainable development as a means to mitigate and adapt to climate change. How cities are responding to these challenges though their sustainability initiatives is the major theme of this book.

Today 80 percent of Americans reside in urban areas. The nation’s cities are home to preponderant concentrations of America’s economic resources and industry. An overwhelming majority of the nation’s 71 billion square feet of commercial office, apartment, and industrial buildings and 128 million housing units are in cities, which together consume 40 percent of the nation’s energy and produce an equivalent amount of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Feeding the 244 million Americans who live in urban areas is highly energy intensive. So is transporting urban America; transportation accounts for 29 percent of U.S. energy use and generates an equivalent share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. In 2007, the United States generated approximately 254 million tons of municipal solid waste, mostly from cities.

Sprawl has been perhaps the most defining characteristic of urban America over the past 60 years. Sprawl and attending automobile dependence and decentralization of industry have had a number of deleterious consequences including air and water pollution, congestion, and disintegration of once-vibrant central city neighborhoods. Sprawl has led to encroachment upon wildlife habitats and destruction of wetland resources critical to controlling floods and protecting drinking water supplies and increased public service and infrastructure costs. Urban sprawl has been linked to increased public health risks arising from poor nutrition, increased obesity and hypertension, and heightened incidences of traffic fatalities.

That urban infrastructure is under pressure is clear. A widely cited 2007 study by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton placed the price tag of repairing urban water, power, sewer, and transportation infrastructure in the United States over the following 25 years at $6.5 trillion. Retrenchment by the federal government from financial assistance to cities that began in the late 1980s placed greater burdens on local governments. The generally growing economy of the 1990s and first half decade of the twenty-first century bolstered city finances. However, the recession that settled upon the United States in December of 2007 has struck city finances hard. Overall city revenues dropped in 2009 for the first time since 2002, providing for the worst fiscal outlook for U.S. cities in twenty-four years. With the Wall Street Journal reporting that American cities “have the worst ahead of them,” they are unlikely to be able to fund the investments needed to construct new infrastructure and repair deficiencies on their own in the foreseeable future. To the degree that urban sustainability initiatives can reduce the cost of these investments while addressing environmental carrying capacity concerns, cities will be better able to meet their public infrastructure needs in the future.

Highly public spectacles have brought home the risks of neglecting environmental carrying capacity and the limits of reliance on traditional infrastructure solutions to problems urban America faces. In 1987, the nation’s TV viewers were treated to nightly reports of a garbage barge that sailed from New York City and was repeatedly turned away from discharging its cargo at ports along the eastern seaboard and Gulf coast before it foundered at sea, heightening the realization that landfill space is a finite resource. On August 1, 2007, an interstate bridge spanning the Mississippi River collapsed during rush hour in Minneapolis, killing 13 and injuring 145. In 1998, the Loma Prieta earthquake collapsed a section of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge while tens of millions of Americans watched the 1989 World Series. Above all, the destruction of much of New Orleans in 2005 after flood barriers constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed during Hurricane Katrina provided evidence of the risk of relying upon technological solutions alone in the face of the vicissitudes of Mother Nature. Technology failed again spectacularly in April 2010 when British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded and collapsed into the Gulf of Mexico. With more than 4.9 million barrels of oil having spewed into the Gulf—twenty times what was discharged into Prince William Sound by the Exxon Valdez—Deepwater is “the worst oil spill in United States history.” Queuing at gas stations during the oil crises of the 1970s brought home the vulnerabilities of an urban energy infrastructure dependent upon imported oil in an unavoidably personal way to almost every city dweller. Herbert Girardet points to this as the moment when the urban sustainability revolution started.

While the federal government has enacted important laws that address threats to our water and air, these efforts have often been piecemeal, approved only after pressing problems reached such potentially catastrophic levels that the need to act was unavoidable. This left pressing problems such as the recycling of household waste unaddressed. It can be argued that earlier action would have forestalled or at least mitigated the worst environmental excesses and that the cost would have been lower if action was taken earlier. These realizations have played a significant role in prompting the leaders of America’s cities to search for more sustainable, cost-effective, and low-impact solutions to meeting the infrastructure, health, and environmental management needs of their communities.

The economic development needs of urban areas provide another impetus to the sustainable cities movement. Studies prepared by the Pew Charitable Trust and by consulting firm Global Insight for the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) help highlight this. The Pew report showed that green economy jobs grew at almost two and a half times the rate of overall U.S. job growth in the period between 1998 and 2007. The USCM study estimated there to be a total of 750,000 green jobs in the United States in 2006. Approximately 85 percent of these jobs were located in metropolitan areas with more than half in the high-paying science and engineering, legal, research, and consulting sectors. The nation’s ten largest metropolitan areas accounted for almost 25 percent of the total. The USCM report projected that up to 4.2 million new green economy jobs could be created in the United States between now and 2038, with the majority in America’s large cities.

Green collar jobs in manufacturing offer the potential to revitalize the economies of hard-hit industrial areas. The doors to a number of shuttered manufacturing plants have already been reopened for the production of wind turbines and solar energy panels. In 2009, the state of Michigan and General Electric announced plans to reopen a former General Motors manufacturing plant in the economically devastated Detroit area for research and development of electric vehicle batteries; that facility is expected to employ up to 1,200. The plant began operations in January 2010, using fuel cells manufactured in South Korea to supply batteries for GM’s new Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.

The growth potential of the green economy offers tremendous opportunities to re-employ displaced low- and semi-skilled workers in vocations such as installing rooftop solar energy cells, weatherization, and other retrofits that increase the energy efficiency of commercial buildings and homes. The green economy offers the greatest opportunity for creating jobs and wealth since the commercialization of the microprocessor and personal computer. Given the important place economic development occupies on the agendas of the leaders of America’s cities, the potential to capture growth in green economy business formation and job creation is a central driver in urban sustainability initiatives.

The third main factor in the rise of sustainability to the top of urban agendas in the United States is global warming. If SustainLane’s rankings highlight the degree to which sustainability has become mainstream in America’s cities, a look at how sustainability has taken root in an institutional manner helps demonstrate the instrumental role played by climate change.

The point at which sustainability began to assume an institutional character can be traced to 1983 and issuance of a report by the World Commission on Environment and Development. Commonly known as the Brundtland Commission in acknowledgment of its chair, former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, the United Nations convened the group to develop policies to promote economic and social development in the face of accelerating global depletion of natural resources. The Commission’s report offered what has become the most widely accepted definition of sustainable development in use today : “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

A framework for development of sustainable cities followed in 1991 with the establishment of ICLEI, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, when more than 200 local governments from forty-three countries convened at the first World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Future at the United Nations in New York. The Congress was a prelude to the U.N.’s summit on sustainability in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Brundtland Commission had noted that cities in industrialized nations have a special responsibility for fostering sustainable development because they “account for a high share of the world’s resource use, energy consumption, and environmental pollution.” Agenda 21, the U.N. development program to promote sustainability that emerged from Rio, gave further attention to this point in that:

So many of the problems and solutions being addressed by Agenda 21 have their roots in local activities, the participation of local authorities will be a determining factor in fulfilling its objectives. Local authorities construct, operate, and maintain economic, social, and environmental infrastructure, oversee planning processes, establish environmental infrastructure, and assist in implementing national and sub national environmental policies.

In 1993, the same year that environmentalists, architects, planners, and property developers began discussions on what would emerge as the LEED green building rating system, Portland, Oregon, adopted the first comprehensive local government plan in the nation aimed at reducing CO2 emissions. The goals of Portland’s Local Action Plan on Global Warming were ambitious: a 20 percent reduction from 1990 CO2 levels by 2010, exceeding what was later prescribed by the Kyoto protocols. These goals were to be pursued through six strategies: land-use planning, transportation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, solid waste recycling, and urban forestry. As an instrument of urban policy, Portland’s climate plan demonstrated the city to be taking an approach to sustainability through a range of instruments, providing an essential link in bonding the concept of ecological carrying capacity to the city’s development process. Other cities followed, including San Francisco, where a citizen-led movement that began in 1995 resulted in the city adolpting a comprehensive citywide sustainability plan in 1997.

Another important step in the institutionalization of sustainability occurred in 1994 when British management consultant John Elkington coined the phrase “the triple bottom line.” Elkington employed the principles outlined in the Brundtland Commission’s report to describe a methodology for managing, measuring, and reporting government and business activities within the context of an interlocking relationship among environmental health, social well-being, and economic performance. This relationship is often depicted in terms of a Venn diagram of three interlocking circles, each circle representing respectively planet, people, and prosperity. Elkington laid the groundwork for cities to begin developing indicators to measure their performance in sustainable development. In 2007, the triple bottom line was adopted by the United Nations and ICLEI as a standard for public sector full-cost accounting of the societal, economic, and ecological costs and benefits of sustainable development.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Sustainability in America’s Cities by Matthew I. Slavin. Copyright © 2011 Island Press. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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