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.