I'm So Bored of the U.S.A., and Sprawl, Too

“I'm so bored of the U... S.... A.....  but what can I do?”  -- The Clash

I'm at the end of a slow week at work, and I'm having a hard time mustering immediate passion or enthusiasm for discussing, defining or analyzing anything with rigor.  However, I do feel up to the task of casually kicking around loaded terms that signify much more complex issues.  For example, take sprawl.  Sprawl is arguably the most visible issue in urban planning today, fiercely debated both by professionals and the general public in almost every city across the United States, so I should have a readily-available opinion or view on this -- or should I?

What is sprawl, exactly?  Sprawl is a popular coinage because it richly evokes a kind of slouchy gigantism: one imagines development and growth to an abnormally large size, and all of the unintended consequences, tragic and common.  However sprawl is defined, I think people emotionally object to it on two levels, with regards to particular individual concerns, and then the collective impacts on the landscape.

Multiple negative impacts on “quality of life” -- another debatable term -- are attributed to sprawl, including social isolation, as in the dependence of children and elderly on automobiles; poor human health, as in debates about obesity; energy consequences, as in our profligate use of cars and fossil fuels; environmental consequences, such as the destruction of habitat and open space; economic problems of scale, such as traffic congestion; or mistaken social priorities, represented by the vulgarity of mansion homes and endless strip malls.  Sprawl is a convenient organizing theme for a lot of groups generally opposed to each of these consequences.

I don't disagree with any of these concerns, but I'm generally not receptive to each of these individual, separate arguments either, if only because each piecemeal fails to capture the underlying direction of a complex phenomenon.  Plus, none of these arguments to me really explains or changes the single overriding reason why people continue to choose to move to suburbs.  It isn't that complicated why sprawl grows in the New York City metro region, or others.  People have a preference for space, mostly in the form of single, inexpensive, detached houses, and to some extent, they feel that they have more connection with nature in the suburbs than they do in dense central cities.  This goes beyond culture, as the U.S. Census shows, it holds true for every ethnic and demographic group in most every region of the U.S.. 

Sprawl also carries a lot of cultural baggage as the successor term to suburbia.  Academic criticism of the suburbs has been rightfully criticized in turn for focusing entirely on suburbia's supposed conformity and homogeneity.  Despite the occasional explorer who actually went to the suburbs, and found it to be not that bad -- starting with Herbert Gans' “The Levittowners” in 1967, to the “Celebration Chronicles” -- arguments against suburbia are rapidly eroding for two reasons.  First, the majority of people live in the suburbs now, period.  Second, the same demographic forces that drive cities -- immigration, migration, economic restructuring -- all are manifested in changes in the suburbs as well.

Sprawl in the collective sense is a successor to, but not the same as, megalopolis -- the phrase and title that French geographer Jean Gottman used in the 1960s to describe the densely urbanized area stretching from Boston to Washington -- because we think of sprawl as particularly afflicting cities outside of the Northeast, though it certainly affects the Northeast as well.  Urban sprawl also seems to be a particularly American problem in the way that megacities are not -- though New York and Los Angeles are certainly among the biggest cities in the world, we don't necessarily have the same problems as most of the other megacities dotted throughout the rest of the world.  We don't have teeming masses of rural peasants packed into rapidly urbanizing cities: instead, we think that our problem is that our urban populations are spreading out too much.

Two more phrases that are personal bugbears: density and smart growth.  Though density has been shown to have numerous benefits in how we plan and build cities -- making the jobs of urban planners at least easier -- we also have to acknowledge that people don't necessarily want to live in dense environments, and that in the United States, we have more space  than almost any other comparable country in the world, that enables us to live at vastly lower densities.  Finally, what's so smart about growth?  That phrase always strikes me as a sop to those who cannot conceive of a world without growth.  This is why I write so often about environmental limits -- there has to be a point where we stop, and the sooner that we realize this, the sooner that we can shape our institutions, desires, and selves.

There is a real contradiction between what we want individually, and what we can have collectively.  The question is, does the fetishization of the terms sprawl, density and smart growth help us bridge this gap, or find new answers?

Technorati Tags: cities, environment, sprawl, urban, urban planning

Do We Have an Urban Agenda? No.

Interesting commentary by City Comforts on sustainablog's disappointment in the major political blogs to report either well or consistently on the environment, sustainability, and the built environment.

On a related matter, I have been meaning to blog on the lack of commentary on urban issues.  One of my recent entries was titled "Can Cities Affect Global Warming and Sustainability?", and I answered this question quite literally: "Yes."  However, if I had to answer the question of whether we (as a society) have an urban agenda, the answer is resoundingly and depressingly, "No".

The issue of an urban agenda, and vision, has fallen off our collective consciousness, and in the media, since the 1970s.  If you look back at any number of books or articles, the late 1960s and 1970s were two decades of intense anxiety and concern about the future of American cities, whether the issue was governance, finances, race, poverty, or urban renewal.

The haunting, sobering, shorthand phrase that we use to describe that era -- 'as the cities burned' -- evokes the numerous urban riots of the 1960s, including the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965, and the Newark and Detroit riots of 1967, and the rioting following the 1977 blackout in New York City.  One only has to recall the names of the American mayors at the time to evoke their heroic efforts to hold their cities together.  Remember Kevin White, the mayor of Boston, enlisting the help of the one-and-only James Brown to broadcast on the radio in 1968, to help quell the violence after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.?  (A description and video are available here.)  Or how about John Lindsay, the patrician mayor of New York, touring urban ghettoes in the hot summers?

The great scholarship of cities also seems to have come and gone with the 1960s.  Remember Pat Moynihan before he was a senator?  He was once a young, upstart Harvard professor featured on the cover of Time magazine as an "Urbanologist", in a special issue titled "The Embattled Cities".  The cover is wonderful and the issue can be browsed here.  Reading Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford today, I find it inspiring and wonderful that discourse about cities reached such a high level that the two of them could battle it out for the National Book Award (with Mumford's The City in History winning it in 1962) -- and sad, because our discussions about cities peaked more than forty years ago.

A current urban agenda, in my mind, would be: first, developing political, social and economic systems that value the building and preservation of cities; and second, a consistent set of goals, frameworks, or viewpoints about how we achieve this.  The former is the fault of wider social forces and desires, the latter, the fault of the professionals and scholars of urban life.

The political issues we read about everyday are, in my mind, always eventually filtered into the built environment, whether it is in the form of trade disputes, a lousy transportation bill, a lousy energy bill, Supreme Court rulings on property rights, the elimination of community development block grants from the new federal budget, or so on.

However, physical environments, including human-built environments and natural ecosystems change relatively slowly at timescales that humans have a hard time perceiving, reacting to, or even understanding.  This problem is amplified further by all forms of media (including blogs), which tend to react to discrete events at increasingly shorter timescales.  I do really like reading particular blogs about cities, and City Comforts' political commentary is well aided by sharp eyes.  (In fact, I wrote so a few days ago here).

I respectfully have to argue with even the experts -- whether bloggers, journalists, scholars, i.e. those professionals with specialized knowledge, as identifed by Sucher -- that we lack fundamental and consistent insights into how we understand cities, such as the interaction between social forces, economics, and psychological experience.  Let's consider that hoary topic, sprawl: in the past hundred years, urban planning has gone from concerns about tenements, light and air, to streetcar suburbs, to at-grade crossings in cities, to suburbs, to sprawl, to smart growth.

What's our vision for a good, just, and sustainable city? Do we really know?  How should it work?  And once we've figured it out, how do we make people sensitive to the changes and continuous forces that shape their environments?

Technorati Tags: cities, politics, sustainability, urban

TrackBack Added

I have been meaning to add TrackBack to this blog for awhile, and using the automatic installation at Haloscan, commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

I am bummed, though, that your comments, O Loyal Reader, keep on getting wiped out as I relentlessly upgrade my systems. If you'd like to post your comments again, I would be grateful, because I am still eager to get more comments, feedback and complaints. Hopefully adding TrackBack will help with this in the long run.

For the unwashed, uninitiated masses -- including myself -- Wikipedia has a good article defining TrackBack.

Climate Change Impacts on Specific Cities

Via the always excellent Worldchanging.com, the good find of a link to a Columbia website that predicts the local effects of climate change specifically on New York City, including:

The Regional Impacts category is split into five sections: projected changes; major consequences; coastal impacts; transportation effects; and economic impacts. Each section is filled with charts and graphs, laying out the sobering details about what the New York metropolitan region can expect to face over the next century. Special attention is paid to the effects of flooding, unsurprising given the rising sea level projections (potentially over 11 inches by 2020).

In the bibliography of the Columbia website, there are three other websites listed predicting the local effects of climate change on Miami, Boston, and London.

Technorati tags: cities, urban, global warming, environment

Architectural Entertainments

Just because it is too good to be true, Donald Trump offers his vision for the World Trade Center site here. The best line in this article, far and away, is that "Trump mentioned that he will draw attention to the proposal during this week's live airing of 'The Apprentice'."

Also, don't be like me -- I missed Frank Gehry's appearance on the Simpsons! An excellent account via Veritas et Venustas here.

Urban Explorations

One of my high-priority tasks is to add photos to this blog, to "liven it" up a bit. Now that it's nice outside, I need to get out and take some pictures! Another way that I have been meaning to make my musings more relevant to cities is to write about specific places and issues, though being one person, it is going to be hard to cover a city in any depth, in the way that other websites manage to.

Of course, being a blog not concerned with competition, I can just refer you to those more comprehensive blogs and websites about cities. I've mentioned Gothamist before, and I always like the tone and range of interests there. That site has branched out to other cities, such as Bostonist, Londonist, LAist, though I find the new additions less compelling -- either the sites and stories are less interesting, or maybe I just care less about those cities.

There is a wide range of sites interested in urban issues, if only because those issues range so widely. There is Gridskipper, the urban travel guide that tries a little too hard to be sexy, to the real estate blogs like Triple Mint and Curbed, which probably just are sexy for most people, if only because real estate is what most people in New York fantasize about and fetishize (they need to get out more, too).

For urban planning, there are the broad standard portals, like Cyburbia and Planetizen, which could certainly benefit from an infusion of sexiness. I like better the voices of Atlanta Larry and City Comforts, which always manage to sound ruminative, thoughtful, and still interesting. I also find those blogs less compulsive about "dominating" the discourse or addressing everything: they're just two people with sharp eyes and pens.

There are a lot of blogs about architecture, which I try to avoid for the same reasons why I avoid architecture magazines, they tend to trade in gossip, hagiography, architecture porn, and advertisements for building materials. Metropolis Magazine is good, though it used to be better written, back when they were in tabloid format. If you want to go to the dark side, there is Gutter, a newly founded offshoot of Curbed, which by offering "ill-mannered commentary on the architectural arts," seems prepared not to be taken seriously. One of the better blogs about cities written by an architect is Veritas et Venustas -- his writing is more thoughtful than snobby, which is what I usually associate with classical architecture and the bow-tie crowd.

Most of all, I like the truly weird and wonderful sites devoted to "what the hell?" in cities. I am very fond of the urban exploration webring, "focussing on the art of urban exploration: touring storm drains, abandoned buildings, rooftops, transit tunnels, college steam tunnels and other off-limits locations". A good place to start is Infiltration, which describes itself as "the zine about places you're not supposed to go to." Other places to see where people shouldn't be going are Urbanized, Industrial New York, and Drains of My City, "a frequently-updated website whose focus includes drains, buildings, tunnels, bridges, and any other place I can get into."

Now, you can either read more, get out more, or else crawl down a drainpipe (with friends of course).

Technorati tags: cities and urban

Green Guide's Top Ten Green Cities in the U.S.

Via folks at Greenbiz.com, a reference to the Green Guide, which has just put together a list of the top 10 green cities in the U.S.  It's a nice list with a clear rationale:

We [The Green Guide] sought out good water- and air-quality, efficient use of resources, renewable energy leadership, accessible and reliable public transportation, and green building practices. We also looked for parks and greenbelts and access to locally-grown fresh food through farmers' markets and community supported agriculture groups. Finally, we included affordability in our green criteria, since the health benefits, public parks, and other amenities of living in a greener city need to be available to more than just the wealthy.

Cheers for college towns (3 out of ten), the underrated Midwest (2 out of ten), and the Pacific Northwest (2 out of ten).  Jeers for the Northeast and South -- no cities, though Boston and Athens, GA are runners-up (and college towns, too).  Only one big city makes the list (Chicago).  It's too bad that American cities don't compete in anything except sports and crime statistics!

Technorati tags:  cities, environment, urban

Technorati Tags: cities, environment, urban

Lessons from the Dinosaurs

Today I read an interesting blurb from an interview from a scientist working at the American Museum of Natural History museum's new exhibit on dinosaurs. (Gothamist, as always, is excited about the exhibit). He was asked, as I am sure he is in every interview, about the recent recovery of dinosaur DNA, and whether this could lead to "a Jurassic Park-type scenario" (see note below). Anyway, the scientist used an excellent metaphor to explain the possibility of recreating a dinosaur from its DNA. He said something to this effect:

Imagine if someone chopped up one hundred copies of War and Peace, and you had to try to recreate a single copy from the pieces. If the novel was chopped up into individual letters, it would be impossible. If it was chopped up into paragraphs, you have a chance to recreate the novel, using the overlaps.

I thought this was a good, simple metaphor to think about DNA as the physical set of instructions for all life. This also got me to thinking: if we chopped up a city, what would be the code to put it back together again?

I've been putting off writing about cities as systems for awhile now, if only because cities form systems of so many different things, including and not limited to: humans, animals, diseases, plants, water, social structures, trade, economic systems, religion, migration..... the list is almost infinite, and the set of things I know about is decidedly finite. However, one has to start somewhere and some time. I think I'll finish my list of environmental challenges first.

Until then, I suggest you all read The Complete's Idiot Guide to Decoding Your Genes.

[Note: Dinosaur scientists -- or, as they're properly known, paleontologists -- must get sick of hearing about that crappy book written by Michael Crichton. No, I mean the one about dinosaurs. On the other hand, in the movie they got to see their life's work animated in mind-boggling detail, devouring Jeff Goldblum no less. That's a pretty fair trade-off, if you ask me. Not all paleontologists can be that bothered, either, since one of them wrote the inevitable book, titled The Science of Jurassic Park, or How to Build a Dinosaur.]

Ecotopias, New, Old and Different

Via GristMill and Planetizen, a thirtieth anniversary review of Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia. Wikipedia also has a short and useful summary of the book. How popular was this book? Seattle Weekly, in a lengthy interview with the author, states that it sold over a million copies in nine languages. The same page also shows the same cover as my battered old copy, with the monorail crossing the rainbow. (Ecotopia is an urban planner's paradise!)

I remember when I first picked up a copy at a used book store in high school. As a description of an alternative future, it fit in well with the other science fiction books on my shelf. However, nothing in the book required any extraordinary leap of scientific imagination, either in the workings of the universe or of humanity. Though the book does imagine social structures designed to curb the innately greedy or destructive tendencies of humanity, it doesn't require (or supply) any fundamental insights into human behavior, or why humans exploit the environment.

Kim Stanley Robinson is another writer of alternative future novels. A good summary of his work is here. His alternative futures range through history and space, from his most recent novel, The Years of Rice and Salt, which imagines Europe (even more) thoroughly decimated by the Black Death in the 14th century, and the flowering of medieval Islam and Buddhism; to the Mars trilogy, which imagines the terraforming and colonization of Mars; to his first novels, which envision three alternative visions for the development of Orange County, ranging from post-nuclear apocalypse survival, to a city shaped by greed and exploitation (the "O.C." comes to mind), to another vision of Californian ecotopia (the one I've read).

All of these books, like the original Utopia by Sir Thomas More, are all equally alluring, powerful, and flat, because they sketch the workings of alternative worlds, rather than the inhabitants within. Maybe creating an alternative world is already hard enough, without giving the characters any additional emotions. Another possibility is that the people we know, and care about, are the people who are faced with the same challenges that we face everyday -- and once we remove these challenges by describing an alternative history, we remove their connection to our emotional reality. Or perhaps we're still waiting for the writer who is skillful enough to depict characters that we can empathize with, a writer who can depict the people we know, but within the circumstances of an alternative future.

Technorati tags: cities, environment, politics, books

Can Cities Affect Global Warming and Sustainability?

After my recent post on global warming and cities, I was chatting with someone in a meeting the other day about New York City's need for a policy on global warming -- which does not currently exist -- and they replied,

“It would be ridiculous for New York City to have a policy on global warming -- New York isn't going to go out and fix the global warming problem by itself!”.

This conversation was particularly topical to my life both inside and outside of this blog, because this week New York City signed up to the Kyoto Protocols!  Why this is not a front-page article, I don't know.  This article in the New York Times profiles the other 131 mayors across the country that have signed their cities up to attempt to meet the Kyoto protocols on greenhouse gas emissions.  One of the verifying sentences in the article from a global warming expert, however, goes unchallenged:

Nathan Mantua, assistant director of the Center for Science in the Earth System at the University of Washington, which estimates the impact of global warming on the Northwest, said the coalition's efforts were laudable, but probably of limited global impact.  “It is clearly a politically significant step in the right direction,” Dr. Mantua said. “It may be an environmentally significant step for air quality in the cities that are going to do this, but for the global warming problem it is a baby step.”

I find both quotes wrong but interesting.  Let's stay with the example of New York City, and just to supply some facts for argument, today I'll focus simply on economics.  New York City is a powerhouse of economic production, and therefore also consumption of goods, services, energy and resources; and the City of New York -- the municipal  government -- has a huge ability to shape that market through regulation and innovation.

New York City's Economic Power

New York City has considerable economic power among nations.  New York City itself accounts for 4.6% of the United State's gross domestic product (GDP).  If New York City was a separate nation, it would be the thirteenth (13th) largest nation in the world, with a gross metro product (GMP) of $461 billion, only smaller than the G-8 countries and most of the BRIC nations (Brazil, India and China), but still larger than Russia, South Korea, the Netherlands and Australia.  In fact, five U.S. cities rank among the top 25 nations, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Washington, DC.

Comparing New York City within the United States, if New York City was a state, only four states in the U.S. would have larger gross state products (GSPs) -- California, Texas, Florida, and Illinois -- and New York City is still more productive than the rest of New York state.  New Haven, CT, (GMP of $80B) and Pittsburgh, PA (GMP $84B) are on par with the state of Nevada (GSP $82B).  Taken together, metro areas in the U.S. account for nearly 85% of all employment, labor income and gross domestic product.  (National and state figures from the 2002 U.S. Conference of Mayors, full report is here.)

New York City is also one of the dominant nodes of a global system of cities.  The April 18th, 2005 issue of Fortune again reports that New York State and City are home to more of the Fortune 500 (54 companies) and Fortune 1000 (90 companies) than any other state or city.  Finally, I haven't found figures yet, but I would be willing to wager that a substantial portion of the world's capital is headquartered or managed from New York City.  These two academic projects at Loughborough University and the Brookings Institution, respectively, study the relationship between globalization and cities, and the role of international centers of finance in controlling the world economy.

City of New York's Regulatory and Innovative Power

The municipal government itself is a huge consumer of goods and services within the area.  According to the Independent Budget Office of the City of New York, the latest budget presented by the mayor projects roughly $52-56 billion in expenditures, roughly 10% of the New York City's GMP.  The vast majority of those expenditures will be in the New York City area.  According to the City of New York's Energy Task Force (an excellent document in itself, found here):

“The City of New York owns more than 2,500 major building assets, containing over 200 million square feet, and leases an additional 22 million square feet of space.  These facilities are utilized by twenty different City agencies and range from brand new schools to the landmarked City Hall, courts, police precincts, correctional facilities, homeless shelters, hospitals, and recreation centers in parks.  The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) is managed independently of the City and is the largest public housing agency in the nation. Its 181,000 dwelling units in 346 developments are located in 2,724 residential buildings.

In all, New York City, excluding NYCHA, holds more than 5,000 electricity accounts.... Together, the City of New York and NYCHA use more than 10% of the total energy consumed in the entire City. By expanding and improving their efforts to deploy distributed resources, City agencies can significantly reduce electric demand and energy usage in the City; reduce the burden on taxpayers; and have a distinct, if indirect, influence over practices in the private community in such areas as design, construction, operation, and energy policy choices.”

As an example of that last point, the City of New York can specify how buildings are built through its building codes.  See the NYC Department of Design and Construction's Office of Sustainable Design here.  Less direct, but certainly important ways that New York affects the development of buildings is through its byzantine system of property taxes and functional zoning.

Finally, the city's role as the provider of basic environmental necessities such as clean water, clear air, trash hauling and infrastructure is so obvious as almost to be forgotten.  There are, however, numerous opportunities to improve the quality and character of the infrastructure that we all take for granted, and implicitly, opportunities to improve the overall environmental impacts of cities.

Conclusions

Cities, especially New York, have an enormous ability to alter the environment -- as I've shown above -- but I do acknowledge the fundamental and difficult question of how we shape cities.  Cities are both a product of, and a fundamental driver of, human and social systems.  So how do we begin to move them towards sustainability when (a) as I wrote in a previous post, we don't know what sustainability is? and (b) cities seem to be embedded within everything else about our society and way of life?

One way to “get started on sustainability”, however, is to take stock of our capabilities to create the world and life that we desire.  Hence my affection for the blog title WorldChanging.com, and hence my interest in cities.  Cities are an immediate and tangible scale at which we can see how we can create and shape our interactions with the built environment, the natural environment, government, economics, society and ideas -- in short, cities are a microcosm of how we choose to live.  So this blog bounces back and forth between spelling out the forces shaping cities, and how searching out how we can shape cities to shape the world in which we live.

Technorati Tags: cities, environment, global warming, politics, urban

Global Warming and Cities

The second installment of Elizabeth Kolbert's series on climate change is available on the New Yorker website. I'm very curious about Elizabeth Kolbert now, since her articles are excellently written, and in particular, manage to bring together completely disparate scientific debates about ecological change and social collapse, climate modelling, and paleoclimatology. There is also an interview with her on the New Yorker website here. Plus, I like the fact that the title of her most recent book, The Prophet of Love ironically refers to Rudy Giuliani. A Gotham Gazette interview about her last book appears here.

I'm happy to make global warming the first concern among other environmental concerns in cities, if only because of its likely catastrophic effects. National Geographic has a nice feature section that details the the current effects of global warming on the earth, as well as many emerging and previously unexpected consequences. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change, an excellent source of comprehensive global warming information, also prepared a specific report last year on the observed effects of climate change in the U.S..

Disruption of the earth's weather, climate, ecosystems, and food will certainly affect all aspects of human society, but particularly immediate and onerous consequences for cities include:

1. Rising sea levels: The melting of the Greenland ice sheet would drastically raise sea levels, swamping the coastal cities that house a majority of the world's population. Look at this terrifying (and great) animation of the effects of rising sea level on Florida and other regions of the United States and world, courtesy of the University of Arizona Geosciences laboratory. Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sketches out some fairly dire impacts on coastal zones. A conference on the impacts of global climate change on transportation and infrastructure also features a number of papers on regional impacts here, including first the flooding of, and then the subsequent alteration of transportation patterns.

2. Extreme weather events: Weather, as the short-term state of the atmosphere, is not the same as climate, the long-term patterns of weather and precipitation in the atmosphere. This distinction is lost in particular in awful articles like this one from the Fox network from last fall, that points to the relatively cool summer of 2004 as proof against the existence of global warming. A fairer and more balanced assessment of the effects of climate change on hurricane frequency -- such as the likelihood of the four hurricanes that struck Florida last year -- can be found here. Computer models of local climate have predicted increased temperatures and precipitation, though as far as I know, not frequency. Another good review article on this particular subject is Goldenberg et al., "The Recent Increase in Atlantic Hurricane Activity: Causes and Implications", Science 2001 293: 474-479.

Though a major hurricane hasn't yet struck Miami -- at least for the near future in which it is not underwater -- people in both finance and science have started to calculate and visualize what the prospective impacts might be. Another good source to consider the likely direct financial impacts of global climate change on cities is the insurance industry. As noted in a discussion group here:

Anyone interested in the truth on the issue of climate change might be interested in looking at the reports from the reinsurance company Swiss Re. For years, this 140 year old Swiss insurance company has had scientists studying climate change and other human-caused risks to our environment.... go to their website and do a search for "climate change". There are 90 reports listed. Everything is from the financial risk point of view of a conservative insurance company.

3. Disease: As ecosystems are disrupted by climate change, this will also shift disease vectors and ranges, as described in articles by Paul Epstein, a Harvard Medical School researcher, in this article in the Encyclopedia of Energy and in this article in Scientific American. Disease has always been a fundamental concern in cities, which I will be writing about next week.

Finally, I feel compelled to mention sources to help combat skepticism about global warming in the media, which is heavily distorted by industry funding. The May/June issue of Mother Jones featured an article on the funding of global climate change skepticism by Exxon Mobil here, including the author of the article from FoxNews above, Stephen Milloy ($90,000). Another good sources is Ross Gelbspan's The Heat is Online, an extension of his book The Heat is On, about industry-funded disinformation in the media.

[Update 5/20/05: A new article here on storms and climate change on Realclimate.org, and a new post on this website to links predicting impacts of climate change on cities.]

I Made a List!

I've recently resolved to make this blog clearer and more accessible. I will make an occasional effort to refocus this blog on how we understand the systems and forces that shape cities. Of course, cities have everything to do with everything, and so there will be relatively long stretches of posts that are concerned with a particular topic. This past month, and year, I've been hashing out my thoughts on how cities interact with the environment.

I did write a post last week on whether or not we should establish environmental priorities at all, and for the sake of clarity and discussion, I decided to make a Top Ten list. Since lists are made for checking, I'm also hoping to provoke an outcry about any omissions. Everyone should have a pet environmental issue! Here's my list:

Top Ten List: Environmental Priorities in Cities

Critical concerns:
1. Global warming
2. Disease and public health
3. Crime and security

Operational goals:
4. Equity
5. Limits to consumption
6. Integrated planning processes

Physical needs:
7. Water quality
8. Materials
9. Transportation
10. Air quality

I will annotate each of these entries in the future, but let me explain the structure of my selections a bit further. This list would also probably change substantially depending on what country, profession, institution or class you belong to. This is also more of an argument about cities in general (today), rather than about any particular city (yet). Different economies, geographies or histories all lead to different cities, but for our purposes we can discuss features common to most cities, such as the scale of municipal government, economies, technology & infrastructure, and culture. This preliminary list loosely groups urban environmental concerns according to their criticality, that is, critical limits that fundamentally threaten their existence, operational goals or concerns -- that is, what are we planning cities for? -- and, finally, the specific physical needs of people in cities.

One could argue that to conduct urban planning at all, we must decide what we're planning for. However, in my humble yet frustrated opinion, this is precisely what we lack: a timeless vision for what the sustainable city might look like, how it might function, and how it might be both resilient and open to inevitable change.

For those of you looking for alternative global lists, the World Resources Institute wrote a report on the Urban Environment in 1996-7, portions of which are available online, and the World Bank wrote an urban environmental strategy paper in 2001, available here in pdf format.

For lists specific to particular cities, the NRDC put out a New York list on last week on Earth Day. The EPA has a specific urban environmental program for Boston, Hartford and Providence here. There is a Los Angeles list of urban environmental priorities by Progressive LA, and Seattle spells out their sustainability priorities here.