Green Cities at Work: Sustainability plans in NYC and Philadelphia | Nov 7th at 5:46pm
New York City was represented in a conference panel on “City Urban Design” by Rohit Aggarwal, discussing the preparation and implementation of that city’s PlanYC, its sustainability plan containing some 127 initiatives. That was certainly interesting and I would get him for a longer period of time to discuss all this for hours if possible. But rather than list these in boring detail, he also made two other very interesting and somewhat unique points for this conference.
One, the average carbon footprint of a NYC resident is 29% that of the national average. This is similar to (and perhaps drawn from) the recent work of Ed Glaeser and UCLA’s Matt Kahn concluding that denser and warmer environments generate less CO2—that is, two key drivers were gasoline and heating oil. This rightly implies, according to Aggarwal and me, that one approach to climate change is simply to move more people to NYC. And by extension, other really big cities. That is, urbanization has eco-friendly implications.
Relatedly, he then pointed out that in addition to the many explicit environmental strategies mentioned in this conference, anything that gets people into NYC-like places—such as, reducing crime rates, improving schools, and generally increasing the quality of city life—has positive climate change consequences. He advised thinking of these as environmental strategies, among their other merits, and particularly feasible ones at that.
Mark Alan Hughes, a former Princeton professor, is Philadelphia’s director of sustainability. He wisely put aside what that title means in theory to emphasize his function and evolving roles within the civic bureaucracy in practice, including his efforts to make sense of environmentally progressive steps for the rank and file civil servants. For example, he had a breakthrough one day when an audience member realized—on his own—that he could bolster a budget proposal for new windows at the firehouses by including estimates of their energy savings. Word got around to the other department heads immediately, in a way that Hughes could not have done on purpose.
One of his more interesting themes, among many, was the recognition that change among civil servants is not exactly chicken soup, not least since effective environmental strategies tend to span such departments and sectors. Functions, especially environmental functions, are not integrated at the municipal level—or state or federal, it stands to reason. Plus, business as usual is based on the cheap oil model. So monitoring lighting or heating or fuel use tends to be piecemeal, and changing that goes way beyond sending memos around. It requires, perhaps, fundamental governance and organizational reform. If you think that’s easy, go try it. Or just try to draft the memo.
Something that is easy—too easy—is for policy analysts to announce “solutions” to a given sustainability problem, and then leave it for an underfunded, politically vulnerable civic servant to implement. Sensitive to that, Hughes saw his job as “maturing” policy questions to the stage where people such as the mayor can make informed, credible decisions. Put another way, Hughes sees his job as making his advice both helpful in theory and in practice.
Randy Crane (PhD, MIT) is professor and vice-chair of urban planning in the UCLA School of Public Affairs, an associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, and coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning.
