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Quebec's New Electric Car Network: Therapy for Range Anxiety

2012-02-01T14:24:00.001-05:00

Electric cars have always seemed like a natural for Quebec. Nearly all of the province's electricity comes from hydro, and 40% of its GHG emissions come from transportation. In a jurisdiction where electricity is coal-fired things are less straight forward and you end up debating the merits of running cars on coal. In Quebec electric vehicles (EVs) are a clear win. But the province had been lagging behind other spots like Oregon, California, British Columbia, or New York.

What sense does it make that a city like Portland (where 44% of the electricity comes from coal) has electric car charging points and Montreal doesn't? That question had been irking me for years.

But that all changed two weeks ago, when the province announced what will be the largest public electric car charging network in Canada.
Established in collaboration with Hydro Quebec (the provincial power utility) and a variety of other partners, the network will manage 90 charging stations spread around Montreal and Quebec City. Drivers will be able to start charging their vehicles as of March.

But what is really interesting about the project is the "how" and the "why” of it. It turns out to be more about psychology and bureaucracy than vehicles and volts.

Range-Anxiety
It's winter. You are still a long way from home and the little battery icon on your dash starts to blink: “Low Charge.” Nightmare.

Statistically, by far the majority of electric car charging will take place at home. The time it takes for a full charge, combined with the considerable range of electric vehicles (EVs), means that you won't often need to charge up while you are out on the road. But the fear of being stranded without enough juice to get home (also known as 'range-anxiety') has been identified as a serious barrier to the growth of the EV market.

According to early coverage, one of the primary goals of Quebec's new charging network is to dispel that fear. Electric motorists can head out knowing that, in a pinch, they will find a charge-point within a reasonable distance. The network also has a special partnership with the Canadian Automobile Association (CAA), to bail-out drivers with battery problems.

Beyond delivering power, the network is designed to deliver confidence. It's a perfect example of the mixture of technological and social design involved in transitions to greener ways of living.

St-Hubert BBQ, Yes. St-Catherine Street, No.
The location of the charge points is also interesting. Along with major public transit hubs, the majority of them will be located on the grounds of the Metro major grocery store chain, St-Hubert BBQ (a privince wide chain of BBQ chicken restaurants) and Rona Hardware stores.

Where they won't be (so far) is on city streets.

Now there's a logic to coupling charging with shopping or eating. And the provincial reach of the partners means that they have many locations available around Quebec's major cities. But look at the network map and you see that there are next to no charge-points within the downtown cores of Montreal or Quebec. Surely one or two might come in handy?

The reason, I've been told, is that current municipal regulations can't accommodate the charging stations on public streets. The rules, designed long before EVs where on anyone's mind, simply don't allow for them. I've got few details about this right now (if you know more, get in touch!). But it seems like another example of something I've written about before: the barriers that outdated regulations pose to the adoption of new practices and technologies.

But if Montreal managed to figure out how to integrate BIXI stations onto city streets, I'm guessing it won't be long before they sort out EV chargers as well.

Republicans and Democrats Together on Climate Change...in Florida

2012-01-20T15:40:00.001-05:00

It's easy to forget that climate change hasn't always been such a partisan issue. This is Mitt Romney, current Republican front-runner, in 2003: “I think the global warming debate is now pretty much over and people recognize the need associated with providing sources [of energy] which do not generate the heat that is currently provided by fossil fuels.”

Good luck trying to get him to say anything remotely similar today. The closer he gets to leading the Republicans in the next US election, the more he is distancing himself from climate policy.

But an article by Micheal Lemonick on Yale's E360 shows unlikely partnerships forming between Republican's and Democrats in the US as lower scales of government begin to tackle the need to climate proof their cities and counties.

The piece, which focuses on Florida, is interesting in its own right. I've included some excerpts below.

But the question that it leaves me with is: what will the start of local adaptation planning mean for the politics of climate change at the federal level? Can Republican politicians in the House and the Senate continue to block climate action, while their colleagues at the state and county level are working to protect coastal properties, and deal with declining agricultural yields, and shrinking water supplies?

Looking into this a bit more, I was hoping to find a map overlaying different climate change impact scenarios. No dice. (If anyone has , please send it my way). What I did find was a though-provoking piece by Jim Tankersley over at Slate's Climate Desk. Working with a 2010 report from The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Tankersley looks at how the US political landscape could shift as changes in climate become more significant. Among other things, he summarizes:

“Both major political parties could see their power bases erode as Americans, responding to warming temperatures and rising seas, flee the Republican-dominated South and Democratic-friendly coasts. Drought in the Southwest could reignite water wars between California suburbanites and Rocky Mountain swing voters. In Iowa, where floodwaters will rise more often and corn yields could suffer from heat waves and insect plagues, wanna-be presidential contenders could end up talking FEMA as much as the farm bill.”

The Slate article looks all the way out to 2035, and the shifts it discusses are massive. What's interesting to me is that we are already seeing a political shift around climate change in areas that are on the leading edge of feeling its impacts. If Republican and Democrat politicians at the county level are working together on climate – when will the pressure mount of their federal counterparts to do the same? As it happens, Florida is a swing state. So real attention to climate change there could have an impact well before 2035.

---
From: Florida Counties Band Together To Ready for Warming’s Effects

[Faced with inaction at the State and Federal level] the four county commissions — two dominated by Democrats and two by Republicans — signed on to what would come to be known as the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact. They began holding their own annual summits starting in 2009, working toward the goal of a unified action plan to limit local emissions of greenhouse gases and, because there’s no good reason to believe worldwide emissions will slow down any time soon, to protect themselves against the changes that are already happening.

It didn’t hurt, says Murley, that “we live under constant climate events.” Much of South Florida is crisscrossed with drainage canals, built to turn swampland into solid ground. The canals were built at a time when sea level was lower; now, during particularly high tides, or in the aftermath of heavy rains, the canals can’t drain properly into the ocean. “We get water backing up along the beaches,” he says. “People see that and they ask officials, ‘What’s going on?’”

Rising seas have also begun to have an impact on drinking water, as the salty ocean forces itself into underground aquifers. City planners all along the coast are now laying out plans to retreat from the contamination by drilling new wells further inland. “The point,” says Murley, “is that you can do all sorts of adaptation [to climate change] without using the term” — raising coastal roadbeds, for example, in the name of highway improvement rather than climate adaptation, even though that’s what it really is. The pumps installed by the South Florida Water Management District on some of the region’s canals to handle backups during high tide or torrential rains are another good example.

image: huffington post

New Sustainable Cities Research Program - New Job, Exciting Prospects

2011-11-24T22:17:00.000-05:00

Vancouver-based NGO Sustainable Cities International is an excellent outfit that runs a network of cities focused on green urbanism that spans the globe. The research that I've been able to do in South Africa, Canada, the States, Senegal (and many other spots in between) has been in part thanks to their help.

I've been working with SCI for six years now, and in 2009 we started having conversations about increasing the amount of research going on in the network. SCI-affiliated cities include many international leaders in green-city-building like Curitiba, Durban, and Portland. It seemed to me that taking a closer look at their successes, and communicating that research to a broad audience was important work. But it was also well beyond what one researcher could do.

SCI agreed, and earlier this year I started work in earnest creating the outlines for a research initiative inside the organization. Those plans have been under wraps until now. But it's a real pleasure to announce that this week marks the official start of SCI's new research program, and my new position as Research Director.

The full announcement came out earlier this week on the SCI blog. You can find more details there.

Like just about everything these days, the program is being run on a shoestring. It depends in large part on partnerships, in particular with graduate students beginning their own research on urban sustainability. So please pass the word around. Over the coming year I'll be looking both for young researchers who might like to get involved, and the funding we will need to keep building on the exciting work that is ahead.

Green Democracy and Urban Agriculture in Montreal

2011-11-18T12:17:00.006-05:00

We are all still trying to figure out what a sustainable city is. Yes, we've got some good ideas. But to go beyond marginal changes and begin retrofitting, or building, cities in a way that truly responds to the challenges ahead requires ambitious changes.

What type of neighbourhoods do we live in? How do we get around? Where does our energy come from? How about our food? For questions like that, no one has all the answers.

Tackling them means starting broad-based open conversations that help us determine the course for our collective futures. This week, making use of a new bylaw on public consultations, a coalition of community and environmental groups in Montreal has shown one face of what that process might look like.

In 2010 Montreal passed a bylaw, which allows anyone to trigger a public consultation process on any subject – provided that they can collect at least 15,000 signatures in support. Urban Agriculture was the focus of the first campaign under the new law. Led by a working group composed of 50 different local organizations, the campaign collected a staggering 25,000 signatures. They were presented to the city earlier this week, and city-wide consultations are expected to begin next year.

Montreal has recently established itself as a hot-house for innovation when it comes to growing food in the city. NGOs and community groups have led the successful transformation of sections of local university campuses into food gardens and established a network of rooftop gardens that supplies produce for a meals-on-wheels programs. The city is also home to two of the world's largest commercial rooftop farming operations. I've been to see many of these projects, and they truly are impressive. But overall the city – like most cities – has yet to produce any overall urban agriculture strategy.

Urban Conversations
As a representative of the city's Urban Ecology Centre explained on CBC earlier this week, there are many open questions that need to be addressed. Should Montreal follow cities like Portland and Vancouver that now allow citizens to raise small numbers of poultry and livestock? How should urban agriculture stack-up against other residential or commercial uses in areas still open for development? Is urban agriculture limited to balconies and community gardens? Or can it be part of larger strategies to increase food-security and reduce food-miles by protecting productive agricultural land in and around the city?

Walk through a city and you are walking through a conversation. Streetscapes, zoning, architectural styles ... all are the outwards signs of many different opinions about what a city is, and what it should be, jostling up against each other. Since the horrendous failures of top-down neighbourhood clearance and social housing of the 1960s, there has been a concerted effort to make sure that citizens – and not just planners, politicians, and developers – have a voice in that conversation.

Democratic Innovations
Over the past half century, participatory urbanism has taken on many forms, some successful others not. By giving citizens the power to determine the issues that merit consultation, Montreal's new law makes an interesting addition to that search for better ways to run our cities. Urban agriculture is a particularly fitting way to begin that new democratic experiment.

We are used to talking about the kinds of changes that green cities will mean for infrastructure and technology, at least in general terms (think public transit, or renewable energy). But sustainable city-building requires democratic innovations just as much as technical ones. The far-reaching changes involved in reshaping our cities go well beyond what our existing are accustomed to dealing with. Putting in place effective collective decision making processes is necessary if we are going to find the innovative solutions we need in a way that is both just and democratic.

Consultation is, of course, only a first step. But it will be interesting to see what Montrealers have to say about urban agriculture – and what they and the city then do with that vision.

Photo: Montreal Gazette

Is Toronto Lost?

2011-11-09T11:30:00.005-05:00

Has Toronto lost its way? That's been the word on the street, and pretty much everywhere else, since Mayor Ford took office a little less than a year ago.

But as colourful as his first 11 months have been, it's a bit disingenuous to lay all the city's woes at his feet. In this month's issue of The Walrus, John Lorinc has written a detailed piece on the roots of T-dot's troubles. Beginning in the early 1970s, Lorinc tells a story of dysfunctional municipal/provincial relationships and “race-to-the-bottom” competitions between municipalities in the GTA. Above all, he argues, Toronto suffers from a culture of cheapness that has prevailed over municipal decisions for decades holding back necessary investments in transit, parks, urban design, and the public realm more generally.

Cities are more than a patchwork of private property held together by some roads and sewer pipes. Neglect the common infrastructure of public services and spaces, and they begin to come apart at the seams. That, Lorinc argues, is the case for Toronto. It is an interesting article, and has some powerful lessons for anyone interested how we can build and sustain greener and more equitable cities. After reading it, I pulled together a few of my own thoughts about the city's trajectory.

Doing Things Differently
“Innovation” is one of those words that gets sprinkled like salt over just about any article on green cities these days. But over the past two decades, Toronto truly has come up with green projects that pushed well beyond what other cities were doing at the time.

I'm thinking of the Tower Renewal program, for example, that is tackling the decay of the city's many monolithic apartment complexes with a suite of retrofits to both the buildings themselves and the grounds around them. The Toronto Atmospheric Fund has helped deal with the financial disincentives to increasing the energy performance of rental properties – something that has long been a tough nut to crack (why invest money, if it's your tenants that are going to benefit?). And the cooling system that uses water pumped from deep in Lake Ontario to reduce replace AC systems in downtown buildings.

Transit Trouble
But the interesting things going on in Toronto are more than offset by some significant roadblocks, notably in public transportation. Expanding public transit infrastructure and coordinating transportation and land use planning are two of the most powerful tools that cities have to bring down their carbon footprint. (On average about a third of urban emissions come from moving ourselves and our stuff around.) A good transit system also makes a city a safer, healthier, and more comfortable place to live.

But they aren't easy things to pull off. In Toronto, Lorinc charts a discouraging history of four decades of plans made, then stalled, abandoned, and forgotten. Again and again promising strategies were scuttled by the inability to get provincial, municipal, and communities to work together on a coherent transit strategy.

Twice key provincial funds are pulled just as lengthy transit planning process are set to start laying tracks. Conflicting visions between different levels of government see available funds going into misguided experiments with new technologies. Metrolinx, the only agency in a position to coordinate transportation and land use planning in the GTA, is hamstrung by a lack of stable funding. And, most recently, Transit City – an ambitious city-wide light-rail network that had both municipal and provincial support – was canned by Mayor Ford shortly after he took office.

City-Builders
Ford may be the period at the end of that sentence – but he's hardly the sole reason for Toronto's transit woes, or the overall decay of its public realm that Lorinc chronicles in some detail. At its core are two problems that extend well beyond Toronto – and beyond the inane pan-Canadian pastime of rooting against our biggest city.

The first is the temptation to forget that city-building is a collective project – and that to be successful we need to invest in the public good. That means transit, as much as it means affordable housing, parks, or social services.

The second is that the challenge of building thriving green cities is not a challenge of funding or of technology. It is a challenge of coordination. From that perspective, the most valuable types of infrastructure are the social and institutional ties that make is possible for different agencies and groups to work together towards common goals. Formal agencies that coordinate transportation and land use planning, like Vancouver's Translink or Metronlinx in Toronto, are one example of what that can look like. But so are less formal partnerships between siloized public agencies, or between municipalities and community groups.

Everyone who lives in a city is, in some sense, a city-builder. Even in an economic downturn, we can build exceptional cities. But for that we need to be motivated by bigger visions that just “stopping the gravy train.”

[this post is also running over at Sustainable Cities Canada]

Open Access Research: Cities and Climate Change

2011-10-26T14:08:00.002-04:00

It may be an urban legend, but they say that the average academic article is read by a grand total of 6 people. That's not an inspiring thought, especially for those of us who spend our time writing those articles!

You can pin low readership on all kinds of factors. But my longstanding gripe has been the fact that many academic journals keep articles cloistered behind pay-walls and inaccessible to anyone without a costly personal or institutional subscription. In my area of climate policy research, it seems to me that it borders on unethical to keep policy makers and the public from accessing the most recent research as easily and quickly as possible.

So it was great to see this week that both UN-Habitat and Routledge have put up a small trove of open access publications.

Until the end of the year, Routledge is providing public access to over 45 articles on urban climate policy, green building, sustainable transportation and other green city related themes. It's an interesting (if a bit uneven) selection that reaches back to 1999. The bulk of the articles are drawn from Planning and Architecture journals. But anyone with a serious interest in green urbanism will find something of interest there. The whole collection is listed in this pdf, which links out to full-text versions of each article.

There were many articles I hadn't come across earlier, and I'm just perusing two that caught my eye: “The Recession, Environmental Policy and Ecological Modernization – What's New about the Green New Deal?” and “Architecture and the Survival of the Planet.”

For its part, UN-Habitat has put up the full text version of the most recent annual report “Cities and Climate Change: Global Report on Human Settlements 2011.” These reports are a huge undertaking, and pack together research from all over the globe in a readable format. I've covered some of its high level conclusions in an earlier post.

The report was released in March, but initially the full version was only available for a hefty $58. The open access version includes the full 300 page report, as well as separate downloads for the featured city case studies. Among them you'll find my overview of the interesting by difficult road that climate policy has followed Durban, South Africa.

In the same spirit, I have also put up PDF copies of my other research publications, with a few more on the way for 2012.

It's not everyone who will be interested in reading the more detailed and theoretical work that goes into academic research. That's part of the reason that I keep this blog. (Now that I have submitted my dissertation, I hope to get back to writing here more regularly.) But for those of you who were interested into looking at these issues in more detail, they are there for you!

Climate Reality

2011-09-15T22:22:00.014-04:00

I should confess that when it first came out, I dozed off during the Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. That's not the kind of admission you'd expect from someone who spends their days (and many nights) working on urban climate policies. But, influential as it was, there just seemed to be something missing from that first effort to communicate the urgency of responding to climate change.

What ever it was, Gore's new Climate Reality presentation figured it out. The worldwide marathon of presentations that began in Mexico yesterday and concluded in New York tonight was a true success. 24 hours and 24 presentations in 13 languages later, over 8 million viewers tuned in. Andrew Revkin, over on the NYT's Dot Earth blog makes some good points about what the broadcast doesn't do.

But while it may not solve the politicization of climate science, or our dependence on fossil fuels, it does do two simple but important things.

First, it makes abundantly clear the cumulative worldwide impacts that rising greenhouse gases are beginning to have. In a world of rapidly moving news cycles, having a production pause to take stock of the multiple climate calamities that have hit over the past year is a powerful exercise in an off itself.

Second, it presents the reality of climate change -- and the concerted corporate campaigns to cause confusion around it -- in a way that empowers people to take action. Two motto's run through the presentation: "Win the Conversation" and "Change laws, not light bulbs."

Winning the conversation, means pushing past the debate past questions over the reality of climate change. Yes there are some uncertainties, particularly when it comes to specific local impacts. But we know enough to justify much more ambitious action. Changing laws (and not light bulbs) is the next step.

Pricing carbon would be a good place to start. But it is not the only place. The real debates we need to have now are about how to ween a carbon dependent world off of fossil fuels. Those will be hard discussions. But they are the ones that are worth having.

Climate Reality is no silver bullet, it won't magically create consensus around climate policy. But it may help focus debates (especially in the United States) on the real issue of "what to do" rather than whether we should be doing anything at all.

You can see all the videos and highlights from around the globe here. As well as Gore's closing presentation, I've also embedded one other interesting short video from the event below.

Video streaming by Ustream

EcoCity 2011 - Networked Urban Sustainability: Breaking the Integration Barrier

2011-09-13T23:27:00.007-04:00

September hit with the usually flurry of activity, which means that I'm only now putting up this version of one of the two talks that I gave at the 2011 EcoCity World Summit. The Summit was hosted in Montreal this year, and was a huge success all around. This presentation is something I put together for a general audience. It's jargon free, and aims to get across a few key points that have emerged in my research over the past four years.

It all centers around one question: "How can we go from small scale changes in urban processes, to large scale sustainability shifts that take place across a city as a whole." Or, to say it another way, it is about how an English/French Dictionary, Bowling, and Duke Ellington can help citiesr espond to the enormous challenges posed by climate change. The full text is below, or you can listen to a Slidecast with slides and audio on the embedded player below.

Networked Urban Sustainability: Breaking the Integration Barrier

Good afternoon everyone. My name is Alex Aylett, I'm the Research Director at Sustainable Cities International and I'm also in the last stages of a PhD at the University of British Columbia. Sustainable Cities International is an NGO that works with cities on four continents to support integrated longterm sustainability planning. Our head office is in Vancouver, but we also have staff here in Montreal (myself included), and project level staff in Durban (South Africa), Dakar (Senegal), and Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania) were we are currently running a variety of CIDA funded urban sustainability projects.

We also run the Sustainable Cities International network, whose members you see on the screen here [slide 2]. The network uses regional and international events, training, and one on one exchanges between cities to advance urban sustainability planning and projects.

Drawing on my work with our cities, particularly Vancouver (BC), Portland (OR) and Durban (SA), I want to look at a question that's easy to ask but difficult to answer: how can you take climate change and sustainability planning from being the responsibility of a “sustainability coordinator” or small “environment branch” and make it the business of the whole municipality. How – in other words – can we go from small scale changes conducted from the margins, to large scale shifts taking place throughout a city as a whole.

There are a variety of ways that you can go about this, and formal processes of institutional reform (creating new departments, modifying performance management criteria, or running integrated climate planning processes, for example) all play an important part. But for today I want to focus on three more subtle aspects of institutional change.

"The You Are Here Moment"

It might be worth spending 60 seconds to say why I am asking this question at all. It's about potential, performance, and problems. I call this the “you are here” moment [slide 3 & 4]. Cities as we all know have huge environmental impacts and with that comes the potential to make positive changes with equally huge impacts take this quote from former London Mayor Ken Livingstone for example [slide 5] “Urban areas are responsible for over 75 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, so the battle to prevent catastrophic climate change will be won or lost in cities” (London Mayor Ken Livingstone, 2007).

The problem is that they aren't living up to this potential [slide 6]. A resent survey conducted by the ICMA (the International City/County Management Association) in the United States shows that out of 2,176 municipalities polled, only 18% have any form of climate or sustainability plan. Only between 1% and 3% of them have set targets for reducing community greenhouse gas emissions.

Overall a majority of municipalities are simply unconcerned with environmental issues. Even among the ranks of the supposedly committed (cities that have signed on to the US Mayor Climate Pact, or joined ICLEI's CCP program for example) performance is poor.

But that's not our biggest problem [slide 7]. Our biggest problem is that while temperature's continue to rise and the impacts of climate change become increasingly clear, we are using more energy then ever before, burning more coal than ever before, and releasing more GHGs then ever before. And more worryingly, we are increasing our consumption of energy and production of emissions at rates that have never been higher.

This is despite the biggest global recession since the great depression and concerted efforts by a variety of international organizations to curb emissions. Looking at these trends, the International Energy Association's chief economist recently described the prospects of keeping temperature increases within a safe range below 2°C as “a nice Utopia.”

"Getting From Point A to Point B"

That is point A. [slide 8] We need to be on a path to point B (reducing global emissions by 80% below 1990 levels by 2050). If cities are going to be a significant part of that journey we need to stop celebrating marginal successes, like high efficiency streetlights, and start talking about integrated systemic change. We need to stop focusing on technical solutions, and start looking at the institutional dynamics within municipal governments that determine whether good ideas ever make it into practice.

Now I'm a geographer, and the work that I do goes back to a long line of institutional analysis that has also had an important influence in Sociology and Political Sciences. But – much to your relief I'm sure at 5:30 in the afternoon – I'm not going to talk about theory. At least no directly.

"An Unlikely Trio"

Instead I want talk to you about [slide 9] what an English/French Dictionary, Bowling, and Duke Ellington have to do with putting cities in a position to help respond to, what is – if we are honest about it – the single biggest collective challenge the human race has ever faced.

I'm using each of these as images as a symbol for a few of the larger concept that's emerged from my research over the past four years.

"Translation"

Let's start with this English/French dictionary [slide 10]. I think the first thing that needs to be said is that urban sustainability policies and the small teams that are usually responsible for them are doomed unless people in other departments truly see the value of working with them. The process of getting that support is a process of translation [slide 11].

Sustainability teams need first and foremost to work at translating environmental issues into the language, priorities, and culture of the major capital departments that shape our cities. The term “translation” is used in actor-network analysis to describe the process through which multiple different players come to back the same project, even through they may have very different objectives.

So right away I should point out that the metaphor of a dictionary isn't quite right – because it is not so much about changing the words that you use to describe the same thing ... rather it is about recognizing that climate and sustainability policy will mean very different things for different departments. It's not about getting other departments to understand your vision of why climate policy is important, it's about facilitating a process whereby they come to reach their own understanding and be motivated to pursue it for their own reasons.

Take the example of Portland's Green Streets program [slide 12]. Over the past few years, the city has integrated thousands of street level rain gardens, like the one you see pictured here, into sidewalks throughout the city. These rain gardens – or bio swails – catch and remediate rainwater that would otherwise have gone into the city's storm sewers and provide a growing medium for a variety of plants, shrubs and trees. From a climate and sustainability point of view these have one very important benefit, they cool city streets, reduce the urban heat island effect, and therefore decrease the need for energy guzzling air conditioners.

But the program didn't succeed because the bureau responsible for storm sewers became concerned with summer heatwaves, it succeeded because to them this is, first and foremost a cost effective alternative to increasing the capacity of storm water sewers. Other departments within the municipality also support it, but again for very different reasons, for some it is a tool to revitalize streets in neglected neighbourhoods, for others it is a way to increase urban green space and protect biodiversity, for other's is about reducing heat-stress among vulnerable populations, for some it is simply about enhancing the city's green public image.

All of these players have very different objectives, but they can align their interests behind the same project through a process of translation that has made it relevant to their core concerns.

What makes this process of translation doubly important is that:

It means the that departments are doing the work themselves, rather than a small “sustainability team” getting stuck with an impossible workload, and
if it is successful, it can naturally lead to large scale implementation. It is only at a large scale that green projects will also deliver results for the core mandates of other departments.

In Portland, for example they are intentionally building a $1.4 billion dollar expansion of the storm water system under capacity, because they have committed to using green infrastructure at a large scale to handle their storm water needs as the city grows.

"Engaging the Middle"

Which brings us to bowling. [slide 13] I'm not a serious bowler. I'm not really a bowler at all the be honest. But the few times I've been out, my technique has been pretty simple: you just try to hammer the ball down the lane straight into the first pin hoping that it will plow through everything in its path. Not surprisingly, real bowlers have a different technique. They use what's called a “hook shot” - illustrated on the diagram you see here – to ark the ball along the lane so it hits, not the lead pin, but just behind it. Statistically, aiming just behind the top of the pyramid increases the likelihood of a strike.

Now you flip this pictured around and a pyramid of bowling pins looks like a simplified organigram for any hierarchical organization. My ham-handed bowling technique of aiming for the top pin is also the general approach to trying to mainstream climate change: you aim to win over department heads and then assume that they will be able to cascade attention to climate change and sustainability throughout their organization.

But this overlooks the fact that senior management often have little time for new ideas: they are already overburdened with the need to juggle decisions about daily service provision issues and the pressures of being directly responsible to elected officials. More often then not, they simply don't have the bandwidth for new ideas. Just below them though, in the band of middle management, you've got something different.

It is here that, in my research, I've seen some of the most innovative work going on. [slide 14] Middle management are highly skilled, highly knowledgeable about the working of their departments, have direct influence over departmental staff and resources, but are not under the same kinds of daily decision making and political pressure as senior management. They have both the skills and the flexibility to be more creative.

I had a managing water engineer in Durban South Africa, a man by the name of Speedy Moodliar, tell me “I can design a storm sewer in my sleep, in life you need more than that you need something that excites you and gets you up in the morning.” [slide 15] So, when he got up in the morning he helped design a hydro and micro hydro-electricity generation system that is going to be built right into the city's water distribution pipes to turn excess pressure there into enough electricity for 20,000 homes.

Last year, Portland released one of the world's most ambitious Climate Action Plans. And it was middle management who were most helpful in the processes of translation that took place to ensure that Climate Action Plan had broad support among all the big departments. To tap into that potential you have to use a “hook shot” that engages with both senior management, but also focuses attention on those just below them.

"Exceptions that Change the Rules"
That brings us to “The Duke” Mr. Duke Ellington [slide 16]. Ellington led the best jazz big band in the world, bar none, from 1923 until his death in 1974. He's been called the most important American composer of the 20th century. Now Ellington started his career in a deeply racist society which simply did not consider black people capable of creating true art. They were strictly excluded from anything even approximating high culture.

But Ellington's talent was irrepressible, he won over audiences both white and black. And rather than being the “exception that proved the rule” as the saying goes, Ellington became the exception that changed the rule [slide 17]. After finding the spotlight himself, he and his musicians opened the door for Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Miles Davis and all the other great black musicians that came after them.

In that way, Ellington is the patron saint if you will, of the last principle that I want to cover today. Every sustainability or climate related project that a municipality pursues will run into obstacles. The more innovative the project, the greater the number of barriers it is going to have to cross.

One response to this is to try to find ways around those rules, to create small exceptions to them that allow the project itself to go ahead, but leaving municipal regulations themselves unchanged. Your LEED certified building gets built, but the system overall hasn't learned anything. Future projects have to negotiate the exact same barriers. The other approach is to treat any sustainability related project as an opportunity to create an exception that changes the rules.

I'll give you one short example of what I mean: [slide 18] Vancouver, while preparing to build it's LEED Gold Olympic Village realized that many of the green building technologies and design principles that it wanted to use were held back by elements of the zoning and building codes. When I was talking with Brent Toderian, Vancouver's Planning director, he explained how instead of just making exception for the village, they were using it as a living laboratory to pilot new approaches that would quickly be integrated into business-as-usual regulations in the city.

For Vancouver this meant both small scale revisions, like removing code barriers that formerly blocked passive solar shading; or hight restrictions that unintentionally stood in the way of roof mounted solar panels, green roofs access. It's also meant larger scale shifts, such as requiring all rezoning applications to achieve LEED Gold Standards, and any development over two acres to do a feasibility study for district energy.

What could have simply been an exception to the otherwise unsustainable ways in which the city was developing has instead become a catalytic project that helped change the rules of the game and spread the practices it represents across the city as a whole.

"Summing Up"
[slide 19] So, Translation, Engaging the middle, and creating exceptions that change the rules. These are all some key dynamics that link back to the larger point I want to make in this presentation that truly mainstreaming climate change planning within a municipality isn't a technical problem, it is an institutional one.Dealing with it means engaging creatively with the multiple organizational cultures of municipal departments and generating an approach to climate change that enables profound shifts in the practices of the institutions that create, maintain and shape our cities.

Working internationally has given me a unique perspective on this I think, and it is interesting to see how similar institutional barriers stand in the way of green urban policies. This short overview has – obviously – left a lot out, but I'm looking forward to going into more detail during our discussion here or by e-mail. Thanks very much. [slide 20]

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This post is also running over at Sustainable Cities Canada.

Pop-Up Planning: Toronto, New York, & Vancouver

2011-07-15T10:04:00.000-04:00

"Pop-Up Planning", temporary experimental transformations of urban space, gets a good profile in today's Globe and Mail.

"Pop-up" projects let cities try out new ideas without the expense - or the risk - of making permanent changes to infrastructure. The most famous recent example is the pedestrianization of Times Square in NYC by Janette Sadik-Khan. The Globe traces the practice of using pilot projects to test out unconventional planning ideas back to Copenhagen in the 1950s (back when cars still ruled it the cities streets and before it had become the global darling of pedestrian and bike friendly cities).

If you read the Globe article, I'd recommend also reading this post that came out in the New York Times last month (I've put an excerpt below). It gives a grittier view of the way pilot projects have been used in NYC.

Mayor Bloomberg has been accused of using pilot projects to skirt red-tape and public consultation. While in the end the Times Square experiment may have won over the skeptics, the same quick and dirty approach to issues like education are more problematic and have some communities fighting back against the city.

One obvious answer, it seems to me, is to use pilots in collaboration with local residents and businesses, not to impose them from above. One civil liberties lawyer interviewed by the NYT talks about "good-faith" pilots, and I think that term is key. Communities - as much or more so than the Mayor - have good ideas that get blocked by red-tape and bureaucratic inertia. Collaborative "Pop-up" planning could be a great way to empower people to make their community visions a reality.

Is any of this really new? In general, I think the answer is "no." "Pop-up" is a trendy label for something that has been happening for a long long time. For many cities, like Montreal where I'm now living, festivals, markets and other activities have temporarily converted streets from one function to another depending on the seasons. And people have been bending rules for as long as we have had them. As one NY City Council member summarized her thirty years in politics: “The way things get done in New York City is figuring out a way to get around the rules.”

But how and why those temporary transformations take place changes from one era to the next. What is new currently is the more targeted use that cities seem to be making of "pilots" to break the dominance of cars on city streets.

This can be a difficult transition.

Pilots give cities and communities the flexibility to find arrangements that are good for cyclists, pedestrians, and businesses. But even more important, they give large areas of public space back to the people who live and work there, and show all of us that positive rapid change is possible.

From:‘Pilot’ Label Lets Mayor’s Projects Skip City Review

The Bloomberg administration has taken a tack that could be called “do it first, answer questions later.” And the key to the strategy is to start small, and to use the word “pilot.”

The pilot has emerged as the mayor’s signature policy weapon. Admirers see an innovative way around red tape. Critics see a blunt tool that undermines democracy by minimizing the public’s role in scrutinizing the ideas of government.

“If they announce the program as permanent, and with all the pizazz and hoopla, they’re going to get strong negative reactions,” said Norman Siegel, the civil liberties lawyer and a frequent Bloomberg critic. A good-faith pilot, Mr. Siegel said, can allay critics’ fears.

“It’s masterful,” he said.

Montreal discovers it's not easy going green: New Economist Green Cities Index

2011-07-09T17:06:00.002-04:00

An article that I wrote on the new Green Cities Index (.pdf) released last week by the Economist Intelligence Unit is out in today's Montreal Gazette. It was an interesting one to write. The focus of the piece was Montreal's poor performance, and the fact that it has everything it takes to become a much bigger player on the urban sustainability scene. You can read the full piece here, or after the jump where I've reposted the full text.

Near the end I make a point that I think is worth emphasizing -- regardless of whether you are in Montreal of Minneapolis.

This index, like all indexes of this sort that I've seen, grades on a curve. It tells you which city is in the lead, but doesn't give you any sense of whether the leaders (or the rest of the pack) are moving at the right speed.

To be blunt: that's not good enough. The problems are serious enough, and current rates of emissions and energy use are rising fast enough, that I think it is time for high profile research houses (like the EIU) to design indicators that give us an idea of how cities' efforts measure up to the challenges they aim to address.

There is value to rankings like this one. They give top performing cities a boost, and they create a sense of friendly competition that can increase performance across the board. They are also packed full of interesting data. But there is also value to putting that data, municipal efforts more generally, in perspective.

Leading city's are already starting to acknowledge that their efforts have yet to reach the scale needed to make a dent in the combined challenges we face. There is also work being done by the World Bank and the Clinton C40 that could help cities expand their carbon inventories (and corresponding policies) to address emissions associated with the energy, good and services that cities consume (known as scope 2 and scope 3 emissions - see here for some discussion of this).

This is what is needed if cities are going to have a real impact. But it will also mean much more ambitious urban policies and programs. Having a metric of some kind that compared the impact of current municipal programs to what would be needed to reach (say) 80% by 2050 would be an valuable way of engaging both policy makers and the public in setting the bar at the right height.

The EIU's green cities indexes are a wealth of great information. There really isn't anything else like them. As they continue to refine them, here's hoping they add something that gives us a sense, not just of relative performance, but of scale.

[here's a video interview with Tony Nash, head of the EIU]
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Montreal discovers it's not easy going green:
We're last among Canadian cities on an index that measures how well we treat the environment.

MONTREAL - Loving Montreal in the winter takes practice; loving it in the summer is easy. Festivals crop up everywhere, café tables spill out onto the streets, and parks overflow with people taking in the beauty of the days. This is the season when we show off our colours to the world. But according to a new Green Cities Index produced by The Economist, one colour that is not on display is green.

Released last week, the index evaluated 27 North American cities in nine key areas ranging from carbondioxide emissions to how they govern environmental issues. Montreal ranked 19th overall, and last among the four Canadian cities in the index - trailing Calgary by four spots. Other Canadian cities fared much better. Vancouver was ranked second overall, and Toronto also finished in the top 10. That a city as dynamic and creative as Montreal should have ranked so low raises important questions.

It is not all bad news for Montreal. We earned high marks in transportation, thanks to our high rate of non-automobile commuters (second only to New York,) and investments in public transit and cycling infrastructure. In total 29 per cent of us leave our cars at home when we head to work every morning. That's more than double the index average of 13 per cent, and well above Detroit's laggard four per cent. Our ranking was also bumped up because of our low per-capita carbon-dioxide emissions (thank Hydro-Québec for that one) and our high recycling rates.

You could probably have guessed that Montreal would have done well in those areas. They are all the result of decades of municipal and provincial investment. Where we've ranked poorly is more telling: Montreal has among the fewest per-capita LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)-certified green buildings in the index; we use more energy per capita than the index average; and the carbon and energy efficiency of our local economy is abysmal. For every dollar of local gross domestic product, Montreal uses almost three times more energy than the index average.

The municipality could address these issues individually, but that would miss a key point. The areas where Montreal is weak (green building, environmental certification, and measures of carbon and energy intensity) are all indicators of a new integrated approach to urban sustainability that has become standard practice among leading green cities. Cities that topped the index, like New York and Vancouver, have stopped seeing environmental issues as things that can be dealt with independently. Instead they are integrating them into decision-making and project design across the entire city. And they are doing it on a large scale that is only possible if cities creatively expand the reach of the tools at their disposal, and build strong partnerships with communities, non-governmental organizations, and businesses. The days when cities could get kudos for installing a few energy-efficient traffic lights are rapidly coming to an end.

Let's look at some realworld examples.

--In Vancouver, developers applying for rezoning (say, to build a taller condo tower) now need to meet LEED Gold standards. This will help cement the city as a leader in the green-building sector while bringing it closer to its goal of having all new construction be carbon-neutral by 2020.

--In Portland, Ore., the city's Clean Energy Works program is retrofitting residential buildings on a massive scale. This will generate 10,000 stable jobs over 10 years, train a workforce within marginalized and low-income communities, and help reduce the 46 per cent of the city's emissions that come from non-industrial buildings. Energy Works exists thanks to clever use of the municipality's financial tools and a partnership with Green For All, a national NGO that uses green-collar jobs to lift people out of poverty.

Similarly ambitious projects may be on the horizon for Montreal. The city is currently drafting a new Climate Change Action Plan, and has already committed to reducing its emissions by 30 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. A new Urban Development Plan is also due out in 2013. Those are both high-profile opportunities for the city to position itself as a real innovator in urban sustainability.

There is no question that we could. The kind of energy and creativity that have earned Montreal recognition as a UNESCO "City of Design," and our healthy hightech, manufacturing and research sectors, give us all the ingredients that we need. So does the exceptional work being done by locally based NGOs like Équiterre, Santropol Roulant and the Urban Ecology Centre (something, incidentally, that The Economist's Green Cities Index overlooks).

The question is whether the city will give the same kind of resources and support to the green portfolio as it has to building our reputation as a centre for the arts and culture.

There's also something important that needs to be said about green cities rankings - any green city ranking, not just this one. They always grade on a curve. They tell you who the greenest city is at the moment, but not whether that city is doing enough to meet the challenges we've got ahead of us. In fact, even among top performers, few cities are enacting policies ambitious enough to address the environmental problems we face.

The most recent research, for 2010, shows that greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing faster than ever before, temperatures are at their highest in recorded history, and these stresses are starting to jeopardize ecosystems and food supplies around the world. Closer to home, the flooding, droughts and fires that have hit Canada and the United States this summer have given us a taste of the impacts of a more unruly climate.

Cities control the lion's share of world energy use and carbon emissions (up to 70 per cent, by some estimates). They are also the places where the majority of people now live. But to turn that potential into action means dramatically stepping up our game. The severity of the challenges only makes it more important that cities like Montreal - that have all the ingredients needed to find innovative, unexpected and brilliant solutions - take the lead in integrating sustainability into the fabric of our cities.

Alex Aylett is a Montreal-based urban sustainability researcher. He is also Trudeau Scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, and senior research associate at Sustainable Cities International in Vancouver.

Kunstler on The City of the Future and "Yesterday's Tomorrows"

2011-06-29T11:36:00.002-04:00

I'm no apocalypse junkie; visions of the end of days don't do much for me. But I am going to recommend James Kunstler's most recent article anyway.

Kunstler is a major figure in discussions of both Peak Oil and New Urbanism. In the July/August edition of Orion Magazine, he lays out a nightmarish scenario of derelict skyscrapers, massive human mortality, and suburbs turned into burnt out salvage yards. (I've pasted a few excerpts below.)

I don't usually spend much time looking at grim scenarios for the future. Dwelling on catastrophe tends to shut down people's ability to think and act creatively – exactly the opposite of what this blog hopes to do.

But in a “know your enemy” kind of way, there is value in checking in with the possible future to see if what we are doing today measures up to the real scope of the challenge. And Kunstler, one of the few people writing about the combined impacts of Peak Oil and Climate Change, provides a convincing depiction of what we are up against.

Re-Localizing and Downscaling Cities
The article reads like a memento mori for the modern world. It's dire predictions give you pause for reflection. Shock value aside, it's worth reading for two reasons. First, as I've argued recently, much of current urban sustainability policy is falling far short of the kind of action we need to be seeing. Kunstler does a good job of poking holes in our conviction that novel new design meansures (vertical highrise farming, for example) will save the day. It's something I've pointed out before – glossy images from blogs like Inhabitat aside – pinning our hopes on “star-chitect” dreams and new technologies is a false hope (more on that here).

The other thing that makes the article valuable is Kunstler's challenging, but plausible, scenario of how cities could adapt to their new circumstances. Cities will continue on, he argues, only if they can find a place in a localized world based around regional trade, local production, and New Urbanist walkable communities linked by rail and water transit.

Cities of the Future: Networked, Not Centrally Planned
The one thing I truly dislike about the piece though, is the triumphalist celebration of New Urbanism that Kunstler can't resist throwing in at the end. Since the early 1990s, New Urbanism has established a check-list of sorts for creating walkable mixed-use communities.

Their principles are sensible. But one of the ironies is that New Urbanist developments are often the result of the same kind of top-down centralized planning behind the Robert Moses's inspired freeway connected dormitory suburbs that they seek to replace. Disney's New Urbanist paradise of Celebration, Florida is the most extreme, but not the only, example of this.

If there is one thing that is certain, it is that the future will not be centrally planned. The city's that we live in in 2050 – like the ones we live in now – will be shaped by many hands. The cities that adapt most smoothly to the coming changes will be those that go out of their way to facilitate meaningful civic engagement and action, innovative local businesses, and open political processes.

You could talk about emergent cities, participatory planning, Transition Towns, or P2P Urbanism. All share the idea that we need to see cities – and city making – as an organic and networked process where communities are empowered to make changes themselves and in partnership with their municipalities. This is even more relevant in an era where municipal resources are being overwhelmed by the needs of expanding, maintaining, and protecting existing infrastructure. People: citizens, experts, business owners, families, will be the fuel for successful urban transitions in resource strapped times. Learning to bring them together is our challenge.

Yesterday's Tomorrows
Kunstler begins his article with a somewhat amusing jaunt through “yesterday's tomorrows” - jetsons-esque visions like the one the one in the image above (click to enlarge) from 1925 of New York complete with blimps and buried pneumatic shipping tubes.

His point is that today, like then, we are putting too much hope in the power of technology to save us. I think he is right. What he hasn't let go of though is something equally outmoded that he shares with that technotopic vision of the future: the idea that cities can be run like machines, guided by small groups of expert planners.

[image courtesy of the ever excellent Retro-futurism]

---------------------------
From "Back to the Future: A Roadmap for Tomorrow's Cities"

On THE COMING CRISES

I see our cities getting smaller and denser, with fewer people. Skyscrapers will be obsolete, travel greatly reduced, and the rural edge more distinct. The energy inputs to our economies will decrease a lot, and probably in ways that prove destabilizing. The first manifestations of climate change will be food shortages, one of the reasons I think super slum cities will be short-lived. ... Food shortages will quickly bend the arc of world population growth downward from the poorer margins and inward to the “developed” center—with stark implications for politics and even civil order.

On SUBURBS

All suburbs have a problematic destiny. Some will do better than others, based on idiosyncrasies of politics and geography. A few will be retrofitted into towns... . I expect many suburbs will become squats, ruins, and salvage yards.

On PHEONIX AND LAS VEGAS

Phoenix’s fate is sealed: without mass motoring and cheap air conditioning, it will collapse. You can’t grow food in the desert without heroic irrigation, and all their water comes from elsewhere and at great expense. In Las Vegas, the excitement will be over for the same reasons. ... Given its likely isolation, whatever happens in Vegas will likely remain in Vegas in the future as well.

On NEW URBANISM

The Congress for the New Urbanism coalesced as a formal organization in 1993 to offer an alternative to suburban sprawl. As a battle of ideas, the New Urbanists eventually won by default when the housing bust put an end to further suburbanization. The New Urbanism is now simply urbanism. There is no other body of coherent principle that can produce human habitats that have a plausible future. Still, sheer human perversity manages to generate opposition from predictable interest groups.

On THE CITY OF THE FUTURE

I don’t think there’s any question that we have to return to traditional ways of occupying the landscape: walkable cities, towns, and villages, located on waterways and, if we are fortunate, connected by rail lines. They will have to be connected to farming and food-growing places. ...

The requirements for this will be pretty straightforward. It doesn’t call for “critical theory,” as the grad schools refer to metaphysical thinking these days, but rather practical skill and common sense.

Solar Map of New York City

2011-06-22T08:29:00.005-04:00

New York City's new Solar Map has gone live, and it's a beauty. With a googlemap style interface, you can zoom into any building in the greater NYC area. Click on the building and up pops an estimate of the solar power you could generate on its roof, and what that would mean in terms of monthly savings on your energy bill and carbon emissions.

[If your city has, or is planning, a solar map please let me know by e-mail or leave a the comments below]

Playing with the map is addictive. (So far my high score is two thousand kwh from the roof JFK airport – if you find something bigger put it in the comments below!) But maps like these - already being used in other cities - are also gateway technologies helping building owners to understand and take advantage of the potential that is right over their heads.

Even though solar technology has been around for years, it is still relatively uncommon. Large organizations and developers have jumped on board recently. Take Walmart's much celebrated installation of solar on their stores. But there's usually no easy way for smaller property owners to easily get an idea of what solar could do on their buildings. The solar map takes down that barrier.

Killer Data
The map's estimates are based on an incredible amount of data. The jewel in its crown is a detailed topographical profile of the city that was produced by researchers at the City University of New York.

Using aircraft-mounted lasers, researchers flew low-altitude late-night flights back and forth across the city. Their lasers sent out pulses of light that bounced back registering the height, slope and size of all of NYC's roofs, as well as how they are shaded by neighbouring buildings and trees. Last year's NYT has a great description of this process.

Huge Potential
Just mapping the city at that level of detail has yielded interesting results: 66.4% of New York's roofs are suitable for solar, with the potential to generate up to 5,847 megawatts of power, or 49.7% of the city's of the current daytime peak demand, and 14% of its total annual electricity use.

Using this info, the city has identified three “solar empowerment zones” with large solar potential that will receive support from the city to encourage solar installations. More generally, following the federal Department of Energy's Rooftop Solar Challenge, the city is cutting red tape, relaxing regulations, and streamlining the permitting processes to help building owners get their solar on.

That's all great news. But to get to even half of the solar potential revealed by the map you will be looking at hundreds of thousands of installations. The map's real genius is that it takes high quality data and puts it in the hands of every single New Yorker (and anyone else who wants to look at it). Built into the map is also information on the specific zoning codes, and amounts of federal, state and city incentives that your site would qualify for. (I put $1.5 million worth of solar onto the Statue of Liberty, but thanks to incentives, it only cost me $420,000. What a bargain!)

Where Next?
The combination of open data, and elegant interface, and a supportive municipality could make for big changes. I only know of two other maps like these currently in use, one in Portland and the other in San Francisco (although the NYT reports “more than a dozen” cities with similar solar maps). In San Francisco the number of private solar installations has gone from 551 to 2,300 since 2007 when their map was inaugurated. Well see how long it takes New York (which currently has 400 installations) to top those figures.

It's worth noting as well that the map was very affordable, even cheap, from a municipal perspective. In total it cost just over $650,000. Most of that ($450,000) went into paying for the LIDAR mapping. As far as I know there are no similar maps (with or without the advanced mapping technology) existing for cities in Canadian or elsewhere outside the USA.

If your city – wherever you are – has or is planning to put out a solar map let me know.

Montreal Guerrilla Gardening: "Tour de Guerrilla" Silent Film

2011-06-13T10:24:00.000-04:00

OuVert is an open urban sustainability lab that I'm helping to start here in Montreal. Below is an occasionally Chaplin-esque video of our first event - a seedbomb workshop and guerrilla gardening ride - that we ran a few weeks ago.

Before the ride, we used facebook to crowd-source targets. Connecting the dots gave us a route (mapped here) that wound it's way through the Mile-End neighbourhood, and then focused on a series of semi-derelict spaces that border a freight rail line.
The whole area is perched precariously between decay and renewal.
Condos are going on one corner; rubble and trash sprawl out across the street. Through it all are the organic patterns that people, animals, and plants have woven into the landscape:

Pedestrians and cyclists have worn desire lines through the vacant lots and across the tracks. Birds nest in the hollows left where bricks have fallen from an old factory wall. Vines engulf old iron fences. An untended by well used space, it was the perfect target for some well placed seedbombs.

Seedbombing is an interesting way to game the urban landscape. And I'm a big believer in the idea that games can do serious work.

Going out with some seeds in hand is a transformative thing. Almost without meaning to, your eyes start hunting for forgotten spaces where things could grow. And you find them. Many of them.

All your habitual ways of relating to a city street get replaced by one question: "Could something grow here?" For days after I found myself making mental notes of overlooked areas along my daily walks. A kind of Easter Egg hunt in reverse, it is an unusual way of relating to urban space. But beyond just the fun of it, it gives you an entry point into larger questions about how cities would be different if they were designed to work in synergy with nature and the ecosystems that exist within and around them.

Post C40 Summit Cities Need to "Go Big or Go Home" on Climate Policy

2011-06-04T16:52:00.005-04:00

[I've got a new piece running over at The Mark News. The latest Clinton C40 urban climate summit just wrapped up in Brazil, and as always there's been a flood of optimistic news coverage. I'm all for optimism. But I wanted to provide some perspective on what it will really take for cities to have an impact on climate change.]

If you haven’t already, you'll probably see some version of the headline “Cities To Save Global Climate” at least once over the course of this week. From May 31 to June 2, representatives of some of the world's greenest metropolises were in Sao Paulo for a C40 climate-change summit hosted by the Clinton Foundation. As a result, newspapers will again be full of optimism about the environmental potential of the world's cities – and for good reason.

Over 50 per cent of us live in cities, and cities generate 70 per cent of our greenhouse-gas emissions. So far, though, few municipalities have put in place actions that are on par with that kind of impact.

Look beyond the boosterist headlines and you will find descriptions of energy-efficient streetlights, retrofitted local arenas, and showcase modifications to landmarks like New York's Empire State Building. Let's stop here for a moment. If it seems unlikely to you that energy-efficient crosswalk signals are going to do anything to curb climate change, that's because it is. [Read More @ The Mark]

When cities talk about the impacts of what they could do, they use a broad definition of “the city” that begins with city hall and runs all the way out to the upstream emissions that come from producing the energy, goods, and services that we all consume. It's only when you look at cities on that scale that they account for 70 per cent of the emissions we are pumping out. If you are serious about what cities can do, then those are the numbers you need to deal with.

But when people talk about what cities are doing, they almost always fall back on a much narrower vision – a vision that's restricted largely to the emissions produced within city limits. The scale of the rhetoric is totally out of sync with the scale of the actions. But it doesn't have to be.

Over the past five years, I’ve worked around the world looking at what is different about cities that are leading the way on climate policy. My goal was to determine what set those cities apart. You can sum up the answer in one word: “scale.”

Build one landmark LEED Platinum condo downtown and you've got window dressing. But use that condo as a test case for modernizing outdated zoning and building codes, and you open the door to scaling up from one green building to a truly green city.

That’s what Vancouver accomplished with its Olympic Village: Rather than simply creating exceptions to the rules, it created exceptions that changed them. Old regulations that unintentionally blocked rooftop solar or passive thermal design went out, and new rules that required large developments to produce district energy plans came in. That kind of thinking allows cities to go to scale with climate policies.

Travel down the Pacific coast to Portland, Ore., and you will see a similar approach at work. In most cities, about one-third of emissions come from commercial and residential buildings. But responsibility for those emissions is divided among thousands of people. It is the classic collective-action problem. To make an impact that goes beyond a few well-meaning homeowners doing energy audits, you need to find ways to make energy retrofits not just smart, but also irresistible.

That's the logic behind Portland's Clean Energy Works program (CEWP), which combines long-term low-interest financing and bulk contracting to roll out retrofits on a massive scale. Beyond reducing emissions, operating at this level has other benefits: The CEWP will create an estimated 10,000 stable jobs over 10 years. The program has now been scaled up to the state level, and is aiming to create 30,000 such jobs in Oregon. So far, there is no similar program here in Canada.

The initiatives undertaken in Vancouver and Portland are examples of what cities are capable of: taking concrete, manageable projects and scaling them up to a truly significant level. To push cities further in that direction, researchers at the World Bank are developing new guidelines for counting urban emissions. One of their goals is to ensure that cities include the emissions generated in the production of the energy, food, and gadgets that urbanites consume. By doing this, cities are able to discover areas for policy development that were previously overlooked (leading to things like Denver's recent green concrete policy). The comparison of these inclusive inventories would also show the huge inequalities that exist between cities. Take consumption into account and you will see that wealthy cities have emissions thousands of times larger than cities in low-income countries.

This week, as green cities again grab the spotlight, keep an eye on how well actions match up with words. If we've learned anything from Kyoto, it's the danger of leaders promising what they aren't actually going to deliver. Cities have an opportunity to sidestep that failure and make a significant dent on the world's emissions. But one-off “eco chic” projects and marginal efficiency gains are not going to get us there.

Many projects can be used as catalysts for significant shifts within our cities. But unless they are really taken to scale, we are all going to be let down in the end. This is a strictly “go big or go home” event.

48Hour Green Film Contest @ Cannes

2011-05-26T22:56:00.003-04:00

Cannes wrapped up last weekend with the Palme d'Or going to Terrence Malick's apparently slightly sprawling epic The Tree of Life. From what I've read, the movie looks to be a mix of personal drama and a lush celebration of the Earth's beauty (trailer). While not specifically an environmental film, it works out an evocative parallel between the evolving lives and struggles of individual people, and the larger evolution of the natural world around us.

Just as Cannes was closing, I stumbled on 5 other films that were screening as part of the festival's short-films program. All five are the winners of this year's 48hour Go Green Film competition. Embedded above is the winning film, "Charlie The Man Who Brought Back the Sea." Browsing the other films on the website is an excellent way to while away a few minutes of non-productive Friday afternoon time.

48 hour film competitions are the Iron Chef of the movie world. Teams are given a theme and 48 hours to write, film, edit, and submit their films. The quality is a little uneven, but there are inevitably a few diamonds in the rough.

Some of this year's Go Green winners were a bit too fuzzy for me. The heartwarming melodrama about recycling, for example, was a bit of a stretch. But "ER" is a slick dystopic sci-fi, and "The Land of the Setting Sun" is excellent. The 2009 entries also have some good surprises in them.

But beyond the specific films, I love the idea. I think there's real potential that events like these can help us discard some of the tired stereotypes we have about "green" issues and to help us see them in new ways. I don't think we are there yet, but we'll see what the 2012 competition has in store.

Bixi Responds to Flurry of Financial Coverage

2011-05-19T15:40:00.000-04:00

Montreal news has been awash with coverage of BIXI's financial situation. After some delay, the city has approved $108million in loans and loan guarantees for the non-profit that operates BIXI.

Those numbers, as well as BIXI management's confrontational tone when dealing with the city has and angered some and raised questions about the system's financial viability. While Montrealer's have been getting a blow-by-blow coverage, the Globe and Mail yesterday published a great overview of the situation. In response, BIXI chairman Roger Plamondon sent out an e-mail to all BIXI users seeking to clarify what is going on. I've reposted it in full below.

The Breakdown
In a nutshell: BIXI is loosing money at home, but making money on the systems it sells to other cities. Montreal has agreed to the new financing package to help BIXI firmly establish itself on the international market. If all goes well, profits from sales will allow BIXI to repay the city, and continue to subsidize the system in Montreal.

Of the various bike-share systems that are out there, I don't think there is any argument that technically BIXI is the best. It's bikes, docking stations, and data management system are all more sophisticated than their competition. (Although as I've said before - if you have to choose - basic cycling infrastructure is more important than even the best bike-share system).

But the complicated financial arrangements between BIXI, the City, and Sationnement Montreal (which involves a baroque series of loans and repayments that I have only seen clearly explained near the end of this article from La Press), delays on the part of the provincial government, and a seeming combativeness and lack of transparency on the part of BIXI management have led to the current storm.

Plamondon's letter this morning was a welcome change, and provided clarification on many issues that have been poorly explained by the media so far.

Bigger Questions
Beyond BIXI, this story raises bigger and more interesting questions about the role of cities in fostering innovation and creativity. Should cities help finance the development and roll-out of cutting edge new technologies that help provide services to urban areas? Or is that something that should be left entirely to the private sector?

Just as BIXI changes the way people use public transit, by facilitating the mixing and matching of different modes of transit, new technologies will change the face of urban energy, communications, water, and waste systems. When municipalities see the need or the potential for something new and innovative, should they look to the market to provide it, or should they step in themselves and provide something new to the market?

-------------------------

BIXI. Establishing the facts.

Letter to members and BIXI users

In the past days, much has been said about BIXI that does not correspond to the reality. Therefore it seems essential to restore the facts, particularly now that the plan proposed by the City was finally well-received by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs after more than five months of delay and waiting. The following serves as a clarification regarding some of the allegations which have been circulating in the media.

“BIXI is a financial disaster and is not profitable”: FALSE. BIXI experienced a liquidity problem which was the direct result of a five-month wait for the approval by the Municipal Affairs Minister of its agreement with the City of Montreal. BIXI is a company which experienced rapid growth and realized, after only 2 years, volumes of some $50 million. BIXI also posted results that were 40% greater than the projected budget, thanks in large part to the successful expansion of its system internationally. BIXI does not have a profitability problem nor is BIXI a financial disaster in any way.

“The Montreal operation of BIXI is not profitable”: TRUE. From the beginning, the business plan projected that the Montreal operation of the system would not derive profits in the first years of operation. The plan also indicated that operational costs would be covered once BIXI reached 50,000 members and with the involvement of sponsorship. Proud of the 30,000 members at the end of 2010, we have currently exceeded the level of 40,000 members after only one month of operation in our new 2011 season.

“Montreal is absorbing the BIXI debt”: FALSE. The City gives no money to BIXI. Montreal advanced a loan to BIXI. The initial loan to BIXI in the amount of $37 million is repayable with interest. This loan was accorded to cover conceptualization costs of the system, the patents, the manufacturing and delivery of the components (bikes and stations), the operation losses of the first years as well as the start up costs. This loan is presently owed to Stationnement de Montréal.

“The city is giving $108 million to BIXI”: FALSE. Let us take the time to properly understand the numbers that make up the whole.

$37 million : this amount is a loan to BIXI repayable with interest. The remaining $71 million, guaranteed by the City of Montreal, is comprised of a financing package negotiated with the National Bank subsequent to a tender notice.

It consists of a revolving line of credit of $6 million, as is standard for all businesses; a letter of credit facility up to $5 million for deposit guarantees for all public offerings which is a standard practice with the guarantees rescinded after the process.

A factoring facility up to $60 million offered by the Bank to finance accounts receivable which allows for the necessary liquidity to pay our suppliers while waiting for the cities with whom we do business to effect the payment of our invoices. This facility can only be used when a contract is signed by a city in good and due form.

“Montrealers are financing the export of the BIXI system to other markets”: FALSE. It is, in fact, the contrary. Montrealers fully benefit from the export of the BIXI system to other markets. Last year, it is the successes of the sales of BIXI ($8.5 million) on the international scale that covered the operational deficit of Montreal ($7 million). In this way, we were able to achieve a surplus of $1.5 million and offer a quality system to Montrealers.

“We have a luxurious bike costing $7,400 compared to Barcelona with a bike costing $75”: FALSE. BIXI does not cost $7,000, no more than it costs $3,500, heard on television. The Barcelona bike does not cost $75. The Barcelona bike costs more than 600 €, basically the same cost of our bike. How could we sell with such success on three continents if the bike costs so much? The Montreal bike is likely the most solid and best conceived bike in the world. Its reliability is greater than the bikes currently used in other cities.

“BIXI employs 450 people”: FALSE. BIXI employs 50 people and has created more than 400 employees at different suppliers everywhere in the region for the manufacturing of the diverse components of the system.

Our business plan is clear. It has been presented publically. We remain in line with the business plan and once again count on respecting these objectives again this year. The plan outlines clearly that the system will cost nothing to Montrealers. This is our commitment.

By Roger Plamondon, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Public Bike System Company

The Urban Diabetes Epidemic: Green Cities & Health

2011-05-18T08:10:00.000-04:00

I've written before about the fact that overall New Yorkers have the highest life expectancy in the United States. Sounds odd, but research has traced those added months to the walking New Yorkers do while they navigate a city where pedestrians and transit use are the norm. It turns out though, according to a piece by Lisa Rochon in the Globe and Mail, those benefits aren't evenly distributed.

Citing a series of studies on cities and diabetes she reveals a few startling facts: people living in un-walkable low-income neighbourhoods like the South Bronx will live about 20 years less. There are similar findings for Toronto. The culprit? The overlap of racial marginalization, genetics, and bad urban planning.

Hispanics, blacks and South Asians are genetically predisposed to diabetes. Poor diets and a lack of exercise make that worse. At the same time, the uncomfortable fact that affluence still follows racial lines – particularly among some groups of new immigrants – means that many of those most disposed to diabetes also live in urban environments which exacerbate the disease: stark inner and outer suburbs with little greenspace, low walkability, few recreational facilities, poor transit, and limited grocery options.

Many of the solutions Rochon discusses are also top-of-the-charts for green urbanism more generally: walkable communities with a mixture of commercial, residential, and community spaces; better public transportation; density done at a human scale; and the greening of food-desserts.

As well as promoting a more active lifestyle, these initiatives would decrease energy use, ghg emissions, and the overall eco-footprint of these neighbourhoods. These overlaps between health and ecological sustainability are often discussed, but this article gives us a tangible and urgent (they are now talking about a diabetes epidemic that will have huge social and economic costs) reason to start turning theory into practice.

The article highlights Brampton, Ont. where “double alleys of trees, dedicated bike lanes and wider sidewalks promise in the future to be written into zoning bylaws” to help address its acute incidence of diabetes. You could also mention Montreal's impressive expansion of it's bike path network, Will Allen's work to tackle food deserts in Milwaukee, or Toronto's Tower Renewal program.

When you think of headline urban health problems what jumps to mind? Mexico City's smog, or images of the poor water or the sanitary conditions around cities in India or Africa. Maybe a local struggle between residents and a polluting industry. This work on diabetes shows that the underlying shape of our cities can have as large an impact our health. The choices we make about density, zoning, and transportation, don't only shape our neighbourhoods, they shape us as well.

Beyond that, looking at our cities through the lens of diabetes points to something else: the need for smart, green, walkable communities to be available to everyone in a city, not just the affluent few.

------

I'm posting this quote from an earlier piece on Urban Agriculture genious and entreprenur Will Allen because it nicely summarizes what is in play here:

"If inside the greenhouse was Eden, outdoors was, as Allen explained on a drive through the neighborhood, “a food desert.”

Scanning the liquor stores in the strip malls, he noted: “From the housing project, it’s more than three miles to the Pick’n Save. That’s a long way to go for groceries if you don’t have a car or can’t carry stuff. And the quality of the produce can be poor.” Fast-food joints and convenience stores selling highly processed, high-calorie foods, on the other hand, were locally abundant. “It’s a form of redlining,” Allen said. “We’ve got to change the system so everyone has safe, equitable access to healthy food.”

image: inhabitat

Climate Change Slams Food Production: Agricultural Investors To Rake It In

2011-05-10T21:58:00.006-04:00

Sometimes you've just got to laugh. Tuesday's Globe and Mail led it's investment section with an article titled “Warming Trend May be Boon to Canada.” The piece focused on a new study, published in Science, which shows that since 1980 rising temperatures have reduced global yields of wheat and maize by 5.5% and 3.8% respectively. The report may be the first to conclusively show that climate change is already taking its toll on global food supplies.

The Globe and Mail's take on the situation: it's a great time to invest in Canadian farmland! If that isn't a perfect example of the situation we are in, then I don't know what is. The title may as well have been “Looming Global Food Instability A Great Opportunity!”

There may be nothing wrong with Globe's investment advice. Both the United States and Canada have been spared the temperature increases that have damaged yields in Russia, India and France (the three countries hardest hit). As prices rise globally, still productive farmland will generate increased profits.

But there is a catch.

Almost all climate models (some covered here) project that North America will be hit by the same warming trend. David Lobell, the lead author on the report and an assistant professor at Stanford University, points out in another interview that so far North American farmers have been lucky. But its unlikely that we will dodge the bullet for long. That's a risk to bear in mind before you plow your savings into farmland. For some reason, the Globe doesn't mention it in their rosy coverage of Lobell's findings.

Beyond that, there's something truly unsettling about the fact that “Warming Trend a Boon” is the only coverage that this report has received in Canada's major national newspaper. In a country with a significant agricultural sector, there are other points for us to learn. As Lobell points out (but not in the Globe), “I think the real take-home message is that climate change is not just about the future, but that it is affecting agriculture now. Accordingly, efforts to adapt agriculture such as by developing more heat- and drought-tolerant crops will have big payoffs, even today.”

Lobell's report also has implications for how we build our cities. Urban food security is becoming an increasingly hot topic on the international stage, ever since food price riots created instability in cities around the world in 2008.

In the North American context, rising food prices are something cities need to take into account as they plan their development. Protecting local sources of food is an important reason to expand both urban agriculture and the protection of farmland around our country's cities. Building dense, walkable, multi-use urban areas, not sprawling suburban auto-scape is one way to do that. Passing urban growth boundary laws is a great place to start.

Climate proofing both our farms and cities are important national conversations that have yet to happen. I'd say they are at least as important as the profits that investors can reap while turmoil hits the world's food systems.

[image: happyclippings.com]

Jane's Walk 2011: This Weekend Biggest Ever now in 15 Countries

2011-05-06T14:27:00.003-04:00

This weekend is the fifth year of Jane's Walk, and it is the biggest ever. Volunteers will lead 491 walks spread across 72 cities and 15 countries. What I love about the Walks, and what's at the core of their success, is their simple open-source approach.

They were founded on the gamble that if you give people who are passionate about their cities a platform they will help others discover all the hidden facets of local history, culture, and politics that make cities such captivating places to live. Clearly the gamble has paid off. Embedded below is the map for this year's walks in Montreal. To find your city see here.

While a lot of these walks are just good fun, for Jacobs walking had a larger purpose. Intimate knowledge of your neighborhood was for her the best foundation for decisions about how cities could grow and evolve. For Jacobs a political thing.

Some of this years even are more expressly linked to city politics and planning decisions than other. And given that for Jacobs celebrating what made communities thrive was never far away from criticizing the decisions of centralized city planners, it's interesting to see that this year also marks the first time a Walk has been held in China.

View Jane's Walk Montréal 2011 in a larger map
Also see Montreal Urban Ecology Centre for more info.

[Photo: MUEC]

Eco-Sensual: LEED certified sensual healing in Montreal

2011-05-01T08:59:00.008-04:00

“Eco-sensual design” – it's got a Marvin Gaye kind of ring to it [video] – but I like it. It's Montreal architect Owen Rose's (meme-worthy) shorthand for the relationship that exists between smart ecological design and the sheer pleasure of being in a beautiful space.

Rose, who is also President of Montreal's Urban Ecology Centre, was featured in this week's Hour (one of the city's free weekly papers). Given all the interesting projects that Rose and the MUEC are up to, the profile was disappointingly short. All the same Rose managed to get in a few thought provoking quips about what architecture is, particularly green architecture. His focus on the way people experience of sustainable design is key.

Contemporary culture links comfort to waste and overconsumption. (Think: "Bigger is Better.") But one reason that green-design is spreading is that – when it's done properly – it simply creates nicer spaces.

Check out last week's coverage of LEED office space in the Globe and Mail's business section for example. Demand for green buildings is such that, according to one real estate company director “You will never see a new building built in Toronto that is not in some way LEED certified.” And while some of us think of green building in terms of technical efficiency, what's driving demand (according to the Globe) isn't energy or water savings. It's the fact that – with natural light, better air quality, and closer amenities – green buildings are just nicer places to be.

From Architect Owen Alexander Rose: Big-time eco-sensuality

"Architects are the moderators between the objective world of building and the poetic world of living."

"It’s a way to combine the senses, the importance of pleasure with the sustainability. What we do is to propose a combination of pleasure-celebration with clean, healthy, bright and beautiful ecological and sustainable building design. I use the term ‘eco-sensual’ in my mind but I never use it with clients, because sometimes it can scare people away! It’s a philosophy for me, but I translate it in objective terms for clients."

Jay Carson, Cities, and Climate...no wait Donald Trump & Tori Spelling!

2011-04-26T21:48:00.008-04:00

I rarely read Fortune magazine. OK, that's an overstatement. But it came across my desktop last week when they ran an interview with Jay Carson, disheveled CEO of the newly formed C40 Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI).

If you've been around the block, you'll know that neither the C40 nor the CCI Cities programs are new. C40 and the CCI have been collaboratively running one of the world's largest municipal climate programs since 2006. The expanded alliance, announced earlier this month, is really more of a reorganization and streamlining of an existing partnership.

But - when I wasn't distracted by the sidebar trumpeting scandals about Donald's net worth and Tori Spelling's estate being up for sale - I thought that Carson made a few good points about why cities are such important players when it comes to climate change policy. He also gave away a few insights as to why the C40 has had only a relatively limited impact so far.

I've put a few choice excerpts below. I should say at the outset that I'm supportive of the C40's work. As usual the interview, and the C40 press release announcing the partnership, make much of the fact that cities are responsible for 70% of the world's GHG emissions. But as I've discussed before, that number only makes sense if you cast your net very broadly and take into account emissions from sources outside the city itself - sources linked to the production of energy, consumer goods, and construction materials in particular. [Update: see this new report on "outsourced emissions" over at Yale's e360]

I've long been an advocate for exactly that type of big-picture responsibility.

So far though the C40s programs have failed to address many of those issues. Many of them -- like more efficient street lighting or efficiency retrofits for municipal buildings -- are useful entry points for cities looking to get involved. But something much more ambitious is needed if they are going to really take on the type of responsibility implied by that 70% estimate.

When Carson spells out how the C40 selects its projects (by looking for big emissions that fall directly within a municipal government's control), it became a lot clearer to me why the C40 is falling short. That kind of logic only goes so far, and it overlooks many of the important sources of emissions linked to cities.

Here's hoping that with their newly doubled budged the C40 CCI will manage to boldly go where only a very few cities have gone before.

--From The Big City Fix for Climate Change

Why do you think cities should lead the environmental movement?
As Mayor Bloomberg likes to say, while nations talk, cities act. That's the fundamental principle of our organization. [Los Angeles] Mayor Villaraigosa was the genius behind this. He said I can get four or five of my mayoral colleagues and we're 100 million people. I love Montana, but instead of trying to get Montana, let's get a few like-minded mayors around the world on board to really take action.

What kind of green policy initiatives can we expect from cities?
Nothing about this is overly prescriptive. Cities can figure out what works for them. You can literally do this on an XY matrix. One axis is carbon output, ranked 1 to 10. The other, areas of control that the mayor has, ranked 1 to 10. If you get something that's a 10 on both, that needs to be a policy that you're pushing.

In New York, buildings are huge on the carbon output axis. And the mayor has a reasonable amount of control over building codes. Taxis have a huge carbon output and a reasonable amount of control by the mayor. So you go after those two, which Mayor Bloomberg has done. With a far-reaching green building code, which by the way was supported by the Real Estate Board of New York when they understood what the financial savings would be. And you have a green taxi law, which was to some extent fought by the taxi lobby but I think has been embraced by the city; people are coming around. New York has more than 12,000 taxis. Move all those to hybrids and you make a huge impact.

Some Fortune readers might say that what you're describing -- leverage, impatience with rhetoric, a focus on results -- fits business better than it does politics at any level, even cities.
Businesses tend to look at what works, at what will affect the bottom line. And by the way, smart companies around the world see that reducing their carbon emissions actually helps their bottom line. There's this great nexus at Wal-Mart between shrinking its packaging and saving money in terms of transport costs. Fewer trucks on the road, less paper used in packaging, more money saved for Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500). Everybody wins.

Just like a business, a city can't implement a policy that ultimately doesn't work. Green building codes, for example. You cannot pass green building codes that ultimately bankrupt your developers because cities need developers. You have to make sure that your building codes save energy to a degree that, while it may cost slightly more to build, the savings over the long run will benefit developers and building owners.

image: Fortune magazine

Railway Opens Tokyo's Largest Rooftop Farm

2011-04-21T16:15:00.007-04:00

JR East railway, one of Tokyo's largest railway operators, has opened a 535 sq.m. (5758 sq.ft.) rooftop farm on top of the company's Lumine Ogikubo Building.

Part of a series of buildings linked to the Ogikubo railway and metro station, the garden is being billed as the largest rooftop farm on a commercial building in Tokyo. Althoug calling it a "farm" gives the impression that it will house commercial agriculture (like this one in Montreal). In fact, the "Soradofarm Lumine" is more like a rooftop community garden where Tokyoites who want to get their hands dirty can rent out plots. (So far I've only found this architects illustration, but I'm hoping for some photos before long.)

JR East has opened up similar Soradofarms on two other buildings in Tokyo, aiming to reduce heating and cooling costs, cut back on the urban heat island effect, and provide green space for local residents. Rental community garden space may seem odd to westerners used to large lawns and yards, but in space starved Tokyo the opportunity to have a large plot is something many gardeners would jump at.

One of the things that is striking about Tokyo is the length that people go to to green it's narrow streets with micro gardens and potted plants. In a skyline of towering glass and steel buildings, the streets are lined with hundreds of small green oasis. I was there this past Fall for my brother's wedding and I've really never seen a place where people take such care to bring some greenery to an otherwise narrow and grey streetscape. The photo below is typical of how some store and home owners make use of every conceivable plantable space (even the base of a traffic sign!).

[via JapanForSustainability]

Small-Scale Water Systems take on Drought, Urban Decay, and Climate Change

2011-04-18T23:02:00.002-04:00

By 2025 two-thirds of the global population will live in conditions of at least moderate water stress. According to an interesting piece by Howard LaFranchi in last weekend's CS Monitor, community-scale systems -- not mega-projects -- may provide solutions for a thirsty world.

I've written about the value of decentralized neighbourhood or community scale infrastructure before. When it comes to renewable energy, talking about the efficiencies that result from generating energy closer to where it's used is becoming old hat.

There's interest both in North America and Europe – where nearly 10% of electricity vanishes as line-loss as it travel from plant to plug – and in Africa and Asia, where local renewable energy systems transform lives by bringing affordable reliable power without the costs of energy mega-projects. Many of the same arguments apply when it comes to water.

Access to water availability is being progressively limited by climate change, pollution, and the increasing number of people living in urban and peri-urban areas with little or no functional water infrastructure. Simultaneously neither national governments nor foreign aid have enough money to fund large dams and other mega-projects that characterized the twentieth century's approach to water. So what to do?

The article focuses on Arlington, VA based International Relief and Development (IRD), which is running community-scale water projects in both Mozambique and Zimbabwe. If you take a look at IRD's website, you'll see that we are talking very simply technology here: gutters, pipes, and tanks to harvest and store rainwater from rooftops, and a solar water purification system that uses little more than bottles and a hot zinc roof. But the impact is significant.

In Zimbabwe it means that during the rainy season, when cross-contamination between sewage and freshwater in Harare's decaying reticulation system is at its worst, families have access to clean safe drinking water. Stored properly, the city's densely packed roofs can harvest enough rain to provide year-round drinking water. As with the renewable energy in similar settings, the benefits particularly affect women who otherwise spend large amounts of time obtaining and transporting water and fuel.

The success of these projects seems to have a lot to do with the types of partnerships that IRD has created to roll them out. As IRD head Arthur Keys explains, “The project has flourished...in large part because the materials for the systems – the gutters and pipes and collection tanks – were integrated from the outset by having local small entrepreneurs develop and supply the parts.” So along with water comes jobs and income.

What the Monitor article doesn't mention is that these approaches aren't confined to developing countries. As any reader from the Southern US, California or Oregon will know, increasingly American states and cities are either requiring or encouraging home owners to capture and use rainwater for non-potable use.

Rainwater harvesting became mandatory on all new commercial or residential buildings in Queensland (Australia) in 2007, in 2007 and the number of households with rainwater systems doubled every year between 2005 to 2008.

With water shortages set to become one of the defining problems of this century, in countries both north and south, community or household scale water systems are going to become more and more common.

[image: blue granola]

Cities Running Huge Risks by Ignoring Climate Change II: UN Habitat Report PDFs

2011-04-14T13:53:00.002-04:00

I've been amazed at how little attention UN Habitat's Report on Cities and Climate Change has garnered since its release at the end of March.

The report (which I contributed to) makes some important points, summarized in an earlier entry, both about the risks that cities face, and the areas where municipal policies can have significant impacts. The report also targets Canadian cities for missing the boat in key areas, especially land-use planning.

I decided to repost on the report and include a link to the PDF of the abridged version, as well as the full case study that I wrote on Durban, South Africa. I think the Durban example is particularly relevant, for cities North and South, because it highlights the negative impact that institutional inertia can have effective climate policies. It shows what can happen when cities, or departments inside of cities, really encourage innovation and creativity.

Go Big or Go...
I was at an excellent presentation last night by Whistler (BC) Mayor Ken Malamed. At one point - given that he's a big mountain skiing kind of guy - he used the metaphor of taking sustainability out of the terrain park (or the practice hill) and "going big" on the dramatic peaks of the back country. I think that's the challenge that a lot of cities who have begun engaging with climate and sustainability now face: the need to take the jump from small scale projects to large scale systems level change.

"Go big or go home." That's the cliché. But in this case if we don't go big, home may be a much less comfortable place to go back to.

Here, again, a few highlights from the report:

As many as 200 million people will be displaced by climate change by 2050.
In coastal North African cities, a 1-2 degree increase in temperature could lead to sea level rise exposing 6-25 million residents to flooding.

“Few Canadian cities appear to be prioritizing climate change-related action in land-use planning. While most cities do not acknowledge the emission reduction benefits of growth management and increased density, Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto are making explicit connections between land use and emissions. Yet, even in these three cities – which are leading climate change action in Canada – few specific initiatives address these connections.”

Bixi Sighting: New Ads Mark Roll Out of 2011 Bikes

2011-04-14T08:34:00.002-04:00

Here are some of the first bixis of 2011, notice anything different? New ads, mounted above the wheel and on the baskets, have raised a lot of criticism on Twitter so far.

Most of the docking-stations around town are still empty. But bixis are starting to appear, here in Mile-End outside Café Olypmico, ahead of Friday's launch. (Andy Riga of The Gazette, has more photos.)

When it launched in 2008, Bixi was proud of the fact that it wasn't funded by advertising. But that changed, first with ads on the docking stations and now on the bikes. I have to say that I'm disappointed, but not surprised. London's bixi system launched last year with identical ads. Once I saw those I knew it was only a matter of time.

There is already more than enough advertising in public space, and the new ads clutter up the bikes elegant simplicity. That said the new revenue is allowing BIXI to keep prices low and expand services to four new neighbourhoods on the island (Notre Dame de Grâce, Verdun, Ahuntsic and Westmount.) But given that last year BIXI was been reported to be running a $1million profit, are the ads really necessary?

As I've mentioned in an earlier post, Bixi had an excellent year last year. But there still plenty of tweaking and tuning that could make it a really transformative part of a broader multi-modal transportation system on the island. Let's hope that this third season has more in store than just ads.

Canada's Crumbling Intrastructure - The Big Non-Issue of this Election

2011-04-11T22:26:00.001-04:00

It's no secret that Canada is running a massive infrastructure deficit. Four years ago the Canadian Federation of Municipalities pegged the price tag for renewing aging bridges, roadways, transportation and sewage systems at $123 billion.

Writing in the Globe and Mail today, Barrie McKenna does something I've been meaning to do for a while now: add to that number the costs for major upgrades that need to be made to keep up with increasing demands for transit and sewage treatment facilities, as well as modernizing our outdated electricity grid.

All told, he estimates we are looking at $531.8 billion in work that needs to be done to keep our cities, and our economy, running the way we expect them to. Makes you wonder why this hasn't been on the election radar so far in Canada, and why the Conservatives economy stimulus spending didn't do a better job of targeting these areas.

Looking back to the 2008 elections, you can see that overlooking cities - especially among Conservatives - is nothing new. A few excerpts after the jump, or read the full article here.

Here’s a number to ponder: $123-billion. That’s what the Canadian Federation of Municipalities estimated it would cost, four years ago, to renew aging municipal infrastructure. Roughly 60 per cent of the money is needed for transportation, water and sewage treatment.

That’s just part of the story. As the country grows and expands, new demands emerge, such as transit expansions and new sewage treatment capacity (cost: $115-billion). Now we’re at $238-billion and counting. And that’s just for municipal infrastructure. ...

And the electrical grid needs $293.8-billion in improvements, according to a Conference Board of Canada report.

The Conservative government’s $60-billion Economic Action Plan is all but gone, and the legacy is underwhelming....

In its eagerness to get the money out the door fast to “shovel-ready” projects, the money was sprinkled across the country on mainly small, local projects. The Action Plan website highlights transmission lines and waste-water projects. More typically, the money went to hockey rinks, park benches and planters. Small-town thinking applied to big-world problems.

Bixi Rolling Out for 3rd Season In MTL

2011-04-08T22:16:00.001-04:00

If you are in Montreal right now you've seen it: the Bixi docking stations are popping up all over the city. Sitting empty they have a strange sci-fi ghost town look. But the bikes are supposed to be back on the streets by April 15th. Ottawa has also added itself to the constantly growing number of cities using the Bixi system - the launch there is scheduled for May.

Bixi had an excellent year last year, and there still plenty of tweaking and tuning that could make it a really transformative part of a broader multi-modal transportation system on the island. Let's see what this third season has in store. (This pic taken in front of one of Mile-Ends many coffee establishments.)

America's Smallest Apartment: Walkable Micro-living in NYC

2011-04-06T09:43:00.002-04:00

New York-based writer Felice Cohen lives in an amazingly small apartment -- 90 sq.ft. to be exact. Since it was profiled in the Daily Mail, this video of her micro-abode has gone viral. Cohen's Manhattan apartment isn't breathtaking in terms of design. Tiny homes I've covered before (here, here) definitely take the cake on that front. I also can't help thinking that it must be pretty hard to have... what should I say ... “company” ... in that low cielinged loft bed. But Cohen's reasons for going small are what I find most interesting.

Cohen started her experiment in micro-living as a one year thing. That morphed into three and she shows no signs of tiring.

Overall, she's been happy to trade space for proximity. To have Central Park as her backyard, to be able to walk out the door into Manhattan, and to be walking distance or a short commute from just about every attraction NYC has to offer, Cohen scaled way back on her living space. She's the ultimate example of someone driven by what green planners call “access by proximity.” (As opposed to the more common "access by traffic jam".)

Admittedly 90sq.ft. may be a bit extreme, unthinkable for most of us. But it's interesting to try to find yourself on the spectrum from long commutes+big backyards to short walks+smaller bedrooms. What do you take into account when you balance the tradeoffs between location and space?

Perusing through the most recent edition of the WorldChanging book, I came across a few related factoids:

The health benefits of walking add three minutes to your overall life expectancy for every minute spent strolling thhe streets. (New York is a perfect example. High numbers of pedestrians, low car use, and fast walking speeds means that New Yorkers actually live longer than the average American.)
Living in dense walkable urban areas is almost always cheaper compared to car-oriented suburbs when you take into account both transportation and housing costs.
You would need a 40% increase in salary to offset the reduced quality of life resulting from a one hourr morning and evening commute.

Cities Running Huge Risks by Ingoring Climate Change: UN Habitat Report

2011-03-30T00:15:00.004-04:00

I'm one of the many contributing authors for this year's UN Habitat Global Report on Human Settlements, launched in London on Monday (see also BBC). This is the first time that the report, one of the most authoritative sources for analysis on urban issues, has focused on climate change. The picture it paints isn't pretty.

Looking to the middle of this century, and overlaying our understanding of climate change on top of the rates and locations of urban growth, the report invokes a world of “unprecedented disaster, wide-scale disruption and loss face many of the world’s cities.”

The report tries to balance this dire news by highlighting the leadership and innovation shown by some cities. My own section of the report looked specifically at how Durban (South Africa) has developed an ambitious approach to reducing their emissions. But overall, the message is that cities are simply not doing enough. We are not reducing our emissions or our vulnerabilities enough to avoid serious problems in the future.

Rising Risks
Much of the findings are already part of our popular understanding of climate change. We all know – for example – that coastal cities are in for a rough time. What is new here is the increased precision with which we now understand those risks. That, and the uncomfortable feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when a publication like this makes you consider them all at once. A few highlights:

As many as 200 million people will be displaced by climate change by 2050.
In coastal North African cities, a 1-2 degree increase in temperature could lead to sea level rise exposing 6-25 million residents to flooding.
By 2070, almost all cities in the top ten exposure to flooding risk category will be located in developing countries (particularly in China, India and Thailand).
Today around 40 million people live in a 100-year flood plain. By 2070 the population living at this risk level could rise to 150 million people. The estimated financial impact of a 100-year flood would also rise from US$3 trillion in 1999 to US$38 trillion in this time.
In Latin America, 12-81 million residents could experience increased water stress by the 2020s. By the 2050s this number could rise to 79-178 million.

Rising Emissions - Lagging Action
On the emissions side, the report highlights both a lack of effective action among wealthy cities, and the spike in emissions resulting from the developing world following the same car-centered patterns of urbanization perfected in North America. Canadian cities also specifically come under fire:

“Few Canadian cities appear to be prioritizing climate change-related action in land-use planning. While most cities do not acknowledge the emission reduction benefits of growth management and increased density, Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto are making explicit connections between land use and emissions. Yet, even in these three cities – which are leading climate change action in Canada – few specific initiatives address these connections.”

Radical Inequality
Combine the disproportionately high risk faced by cities in the developing world, and the slow pace of action among wealthy cities and it's hard not to notice that with climate change comes a serious issue of inequality and injustice. The people who are going to be hit hardest are those that have benefited the least from the growth that has fueled climate change.

The "TO DO" List
So what to do? If addressing climate change was easy, we wouldn't be talking about it anymore. But there are a few easy to understand issues that are key to creating truly green and climate resilient cities. (Whether we managed to do anything about them once we understand them is another question.):

Create dense walkable, multi-use neighbourhoods that allow people to meet most of their daily needs without have to rely of transit or car use.
Link transportation and landuse planning to prevent sprawl, cut down on car use, and create neighbourhoods that can easily be served by high quality public transit. (Transportation accounts for 13% of global emissions)
Include in our measures of urban greenhouse gas emissions, the emissions that are produced making the goods that urban residents consume. That kind of consumption-based inventory is essential to any real discussion of how we can cut emissions and reduce global inequalities.[more on that here]
Go beyond narrow inventories of the municipality's own emissions, and develop measures of and programs to reduce residential and industrial emissions that take place within the city. (Residential and Industrial energy use account for 8% and 19% of global ghgs, respectively.)
Takes climate risks seriously, asses them for your city, and begin building them into infrastructure and development plans now. Early action is much cheaper than retrofitting later. (see this and this for more on adaptation planning in the North American context).

image: BBC

New Landmark Greenroof for Montreal

2011-03-26T13:24:00.004-04:00

Montreal is set to build a new landmark green roof on it's eccentrically colored convention center. This summer the Palais des Congrès de Montreal – better known for being clad is huge swaths of neon multicolored glass – will be inaugurating a $200,000, 536 m2 (5 770 sq.ft) rooftop garden.

Compared to the 217 000 sq.ft. greenroof on the Vancouver convention centre, this project is still small potatoes. But at its full extent, the Palais hopes to green 13 378 m2 (144 000 sq.ft.). If they reach that level they would be in the ranks of some of the largest non-industrial greenroofs in North America.

Unlike it's bigger brother in Vancouver, the Palais' roof garden will have portions that are open to the public and will produce organic spices and vegetables for use in the Palais' kitchen. The Vancouver roof is home to honey bees, but doesn't produce any other crops.

Interestingly, a significant portion ($40,000) of the roof's budget is being covered by Quebec's Ministry of Health. The provincial body has a climate action plan that includes provisions for reducing the urban heat island effect. Vast expanses of tarred black roofs are one of the causes for temperatures in cities that can be as much as 10c higher than their surrounding areas. If you've ever been in Montreal in August when it's 37c with 90% humidity, you know that's no joke. Following the lethal heatwaves that swept Europe and parts of North America in 2003 and 2006 it's good to see public health officials looking at green ways to cool things down.

I haven't seen the plans for the roof. From the photo being used as part of the press coverage for the new roof garden, it seems to be an intensive garden that makes use of greenhouses as well as contained planters, but that still leaves large areas of the roof uncovered. Those unplanted spaces will still trap heat, but that may be the tradeoff for wanting to have the roof open and accessible to the public. To cover the full 144 000sq.ft. potential of the site, I think it's likely that future stages will opt for an extensive green roof design, that is cheaper to build and requires less maintenance.

The project, being managed by Montreal's Urban Ecology Center (MUEC), is an expansion of a pilot project that they ran last year. While the MUEC has hopes that the success of the Palais' roof will help greenroofs spread throughout the rest of the city, this has proved difficult in the past. Montreal lacks any targeted greenroof incentives or an overall greenroof strategy, like the kind made famous by Chicago. Earlier this month, the city received $1.8m from the province to revamp its climate change programs, so perhaps something is in the works.

Carbon Zero: A Short Tour of Your City's Future - Kickstarting A New Book

2011-03-23T20:33:00.000-04:00

Alex Steffen, the founding editor of the excellent worldchanging.com (who I wrote for during the blog's seven year run), has announced an interesting new project. His new book-in-the-making "Carbon Zero" is being crowd-funded over at kickstarter. If he can raise $10,000 to cover production costs by mid-April, he's promising to put out a short readable ebook on how cities can re-design themselves to go beyond the traditional limits of piecemeal urban sustainability projects. The ebook will be release in time for Earth Day (April 22nd). In under a week he's already raised $7,500.

Alex is one of North America's most dedicated and insightful public thinkers. You can see kickstarter for a full description of the "Carbon Zero" project, and to kick in a few bucks. I like many things about the project, but I think he's really nailed it when it comes to explaining why a book like this is needed - not in general - but right now.

From CARBON ZERO: A SHORT TOUR OF YOUR CITY'S FUTURE

WHY NOW?
Earth Day is typically full of messages about do-it-yourself, small acts and ways to "go green." But this year, with a sense of malaise in the progressive community, a climate-hostile Congress and the oil, coal and chemical companies lobbying, spinning and greenwashing as never before, we need something more than a few simple steps.

But we can't build what we can't imagine, and we usually have a hard time imagining what we don't understand. Carbon neutrality is complex, but it's not rocket science: there's no reason why everybody can't understand its basics. But most people have never heard carbon neutrality explained, much less explained clearly in a book they actually have time to read.

This is a chance for us to not only create a resource for those people, but to push forward the larger debate as well, shining a light on the kind of change it will take to build a planet with a future.

image: treehugger

Flying Car Not Included: Getting Real About Urban Sustainability

2011-03-13T23:33:00.003-04:00

I've got a short opinion piece running in the new March/April edition of Water Canada magazine.

Water infrastructure is a favourite of mine. It tends not to be as glamorous as energy or transportation, but those pipes buried under our streets can be the building blocks for some truly amazing projects. All the more so because that potential is so hidden from view. The piece also gave me a chance to rant a little bit about far-fetched eye-candy projects that get announced with a lot of fanfare, but little follow through.

You can read the PDF of the published piece here (.pdf). I've posted a slightly longer version after the jump.

Flying Car Not Included: Getting Real About Urban Sustainability in Water Canada, March/April.

You've seen them, those elegantly rendered computer images of the hyper sustainable cities of tomorrow. They've always bothered me. Wrapped up in them is the idea that deep urban sustainability – the kind that makes profound changes in infrastructure design an operations – exist only in some Jetsons-land of the future. Sustainability becomes liked flying cars: always tomorrow, never today. As if to prove that point, developers for two of the most high-profile proposals for hyper-green cities, Dongtan City in China and Abu Dhabi's Masdar City, have backed away from many of their projects most ambitious goals.

But over the time I've spent working on urban sustainability, I've seen something very different: cities that are building deep green infrastructure right into the fabric of their streets. And often, water systems are a nexus for important innovations that bring to light many of the opportunities that lie hidden just under our feet.

Hot Sh@!t
If you are reading this in Canada, you don't have to go far to find an example of what I'm talking about. The strangest announcement in the lead up to Vancouver's 2010 Olympics was that the Athletes' Village was going to be heated with sewage. Or with heat recovered from sewage, to be precise. It turns out though, the city was on the money. After almost a year of operation the heat pump system, which is co-located with a sewage pumping station, is running so well that it is now charging clients less than they would pay if they were heating with electricity bought from BC Hydro, while generating 64% fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Operating costs are down by 40% and the system still has capacity for an addition 4.4 million sq.ft. of future development.

Sewage isn't any hotter in Vancouver than in Montreal, or Minneapolis. The difference is that they are one of the few cities to look at that heat as a resource. All in all, there are only 4 of these systems operating worldwide (two more in Oslo, and one in Tokyo). But if municipalities can make a profit while still charging consumers less than they pay for electricity, I'd guess that number is going to grow.

Big Pipes + Little Gardens
Travel down the coast, and you can see another innovative project in action. Portland (OR) is in the final stages of a $1.4 billion dollar expansion of it's storm water system (affectionately known as the East Side “Big Pipe”). And while it is big (22 feet in diameter and close to 10km long) it's smaller than it might have been. Rather than meet all future demand with pipes and pumps, the city has rolled out a “green streets” program that has built small wetland-like vegetated swails into the city's streets.

900 have sprouted up around the city, with another 500 slated to be installed over the next 4 years. In total 35% of storm water in the combined sewer area will be dealt with through “green” non-standard approaches, increasing to a projected 43% in 2040. This eco-structure system is also significantly cheaper than further expanding the combined sewer overflow system.

Many cities have experimented with these kinds of engineered natural systems. They look nice, increase water quality, provide species habitat, and reduce the urban heat island effect. What's not to like? What sets Portland apart is it's decision to build them up from an interesting experiment to an integral, and cost-effective, part of its storm water system.

The Water Electric
Another innovative water infrastructure project was playing out on the sidelines of last year's World Cup in South Africa. While most people where riveted on the soccer, I went there for the sewage. The coastal city of Durban, whose elegant stadium made headlines, is also in the process of building hydro and micro-hydro generation turbines directly into its freshwater pipes. These will harness excess pressure that is generated in the system as water descends into the city from an inland reservoir. They will yield enough power for between 10 000 and 30 000 low-cost houses (7 – 22 megawatts) depending on the roll out. Targeting another usually overlooked opportunity, the Water Department is also looking into ways to generate bio-diesel from algae grown on its settling ponds.

Think Smart, Build Different
We are standing at an interesting juncture. Around the world, in cities old and new, a period of massive infrastructure investment is beginning. At the same time, a changing climate will place new and unpredictable demands on our cities, and the systems that keep them running. We have an opportunity to build systems that will not just “get the old job done”, but truly serve our changing needs during the rest of this century.

Often the biggest challenge isn't technology, or money, but mindsets. It isn't always easy to reassess how we do business, or to see the opportunities and synergies that are hiding, sometimes in plain sight. But thinking that innovative green design and infrastructure is something for the future, is one of the most dangerous mistakes we can make. Tangible projects around the world give us a taste of what can be done when we move from fantasy into reality and get real about urban sustainability.

DIrt! The Movie: Montreal Green Drinks Feb. 22

2011-02-21T10:54:00.003-05:00

For my Montreal readers, the local Green Drinks event tomorrow will be screening the movie Dirt! I haven't seen it yet, but the trailer looks excellent. Particularly the urban gardening and depaving section near the end. Reminds me of a project I was part of in Portland this past summer. All the details are after the jump.

Upcoming Green Drinks Montreal events:

Tuesday, February 22 : Mix at 5 PM, followed by a screening of the Movie "DIRT!"
Tuesday, March 29
For more information and/or to be added to our email list please contact us at greendrinksmontreal@gmail.com

Cities, Green Development, & Politics: Passing the Buck or Jumpstarting Change?

2011-02-18T11:06:00.003-05:00

I've been meaning to write about Steve Cohen (director of Columbia Universty's Earth Institute) Valentine's Day piece in the Huffington Post since it came out on Monday. It's an interesting juxtaposition of the savage grilling that Climate and Sustainability policy is getting at the Federal level in the U.S., versus the political support it's gotten in New York City.

If you've ever wondered why (some) cities seem to be able to move faster on the climate and sustainability issues it's worth a look. Cohen's point is that New York has joined the magic dots between environmental sustainability and economic wellbeing in a way that still eludes Federal politicians. At the same time cities are better placed to feel the negative impacts of declining environmental quality and climate change.

"In Washington," Cohen argues, "our environmental leaders are subject to hostility and an outmoded understanding of the connection between environmental quality and economic growth. In New York, it is clear that both the Mayor and the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Commissioner understand that economic growth requires environmental quality."

He goes on to argue that the EPA needs to learn from New York's example and "connect its goals of environmental protection to economic well-being at every turn" especially when it comes to promoting renewable energy.

The Power of Talking in $$$
I couldn't agree more - up to a point. With certain audiences, when you start talking in terms of dollars and cents something magic happens: looks of rapt attention suddenly replace yawns and paper shuffling. Whether its the value of green sector jobs to the local economy, or the value of local wetlands in terms of the storm water functions they provide, economic calculus has a way of opening up the decision making process. And cities, where both the costs of failure and the benefits of success are so apparent, are particularly well place to make that case.

But then there is a question of pace: how far, how fast, does focusing on the economic benefits of environmental policies get you? Cohen goes on to say about the EPA, "it is no longer necessary that EPA's traditional flexibility and willingness to negotiate be hidden from view. Accommodation with short term economic interests has always a part of EPA's approach to regulation. The agency has accepted compromise as long as it has been accompanied by slow and steady progress."

That appeal to "slow and steady progress" is a hallmark of many economically driven approaches to environmental policy. But while economic models reassure us that the tortoise will win the race, environmental studies aren't so sanguine. This is the really interesting debate around environmental policy that is happening these days: not the lumbering zombie-like missives of climate change skeptics, but the differences of opinion that exist between scientists and economists about how best to deal with the uncertain future we are facing.

David Roberts and Eban Goodstein both had excellent posts on this over at Grist earlier this month.

Passing the Buck?
I'm not doubting the value of building environmental considerations into the core of our approach to economic development. It's an essential move. But if we rely on it as a silver bullet, we are asking for trouble. Over the past 15 years, the first phase of climate policy debates revolved around scientific certainty. Expectations were high that definite scientific knowledge would get us out of having to make sticky political decisions in the face of uncertainty. Eventually, the story went, science would reduce political risks by making the right path obvious. We've seen where that has gotten us.

There's a real danger that now that we have more realistic expectations of science, we are again going to pass the political buck - only this time to we'll hand it to economic models, instead of climate models.

Building environmental considerations into economic development strategies can act as a motor for change. But we also need to keep our eye on the speedometer. To get get where we need to go, we need to turbo charge our efforts. That means making strong political commitments, driven not just by economic calculations, but by an understanding that something much larger is at stake here than economic growth, and that people know it.

Here again cities, as the place where most of us live and breath, will play and important role in finding ways for us to set and achieve goals that go beyond the strictly economic. In cities that are truly leading the way, a large part of the momentum comes from people, communities, and organizations motivated by a holistic view of the challenge we face, and excited about the opportunity to participate in a truly world changing moment in history.

I think there is something in that for higher levels of government as well: People can understand more than numbers, they welcome a chance to be part of making history, and that motivation -- if some structures are in place to support and nurture it -- can lead to real actions and give politicians the support they need to make difficult decisions. As Cohen points out, polls show that that support is already there. Federal politicians in the U.S. just haven't really connected with it yet.

Sustainable Systems as if People Mattered - WEBCAST

2011-02-16T16:20:00.000-05:00

The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) is hosting a fascinating sounding lecture next week called "Sustainable Systems as if People Mattered." Not in Vancouver? No worries the full proceedings will be webcast here. The full details are after the jump.

Invitation: Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS), SFU and UBC Free Public Lecture

Lecture #5: Sustainable Systems as if People Mattered

Changing behavior—especially the ways we use energy and water—is an essential part of any climate solution. Yet, our urban systems often preclude people from understanding and controlling them to improve efficiency. Dr. Stephen Sheppard from UBC, and Dr. Lyn Bartram and Dr. Woodbury from SFU come together to present two multi-university research projects—the Greenest City Conversations Project and Human-Centred Systems for Sustainable Living . These projects explore the interaction of technology and people, at both individual household and community scales, in making better decisions on energy and resource use. Free registration for this event is encouraged, but not required. Register online at www.picspubliclecture5.eventbrite.com .

Dr. Sheppard is a Professor in the Faculty of Forestry and Landscape Architecture, UBC, and Director for the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning at UBC.

Dr. Bartram is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Art and Technology at SFU, where she is a cofounder and Director of the Humans, Visualization & Interfaces Lab.

Dr. Woodbury is a Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU, and Director, Art and Design Practice of the Games, Animation and New Media Network in Canada.

Date: Thursday, February 24, 2011, 7pm - 9pm

Location: Room 420, SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, 580 West Hastings Street, Vancouver

Webcast: www.pics.uvic.ca/events.php

Register: www.picspubliclecture5.eventbrite.com

We hope that you can make it, either in person or by accessing our webcast.

The Big Picture Approach to Cities and Climate Change

2011-02-09T10:57:00.005-05:00

It was former London Mayor Ken Livingstone who started the ball rolling in 2007 when he announced that “Urban areas are responsible for over 75 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, so the battle to prevent catastrophic climate change will be won or lost in cities.”

That figure – “75%” – became the urban climate factoid of the decade. It spread like a virus popping up again and again in newspapers, mayor's speeches, and government reports. The thing was, no one knew quite where it came from. What was the math behind the meme? Was Climate Change all cities' fault – or were they going to be the new climate heros?

A year later the number got some closer scrutiny (see here) and last month a new paper (.pdf)came out that does an excellent job of sorting out how to understand cities' responsibilities and what they can do about them.

The paper, by the World Bank's lead urban specialist Daniel Hoornweg, delves into the difficulties of counting urban emissions. For every greenhouse gas molecule released directly in a city (say from a car's tailpipe, or a local factory) others are released making the energy, food, and commodities consumed by urban populations. If you don't count consumption related emissions, then the high estimates of ghg emissions don't make any sense. Instead of 75% you end up closer to 30%. So which figure is right?

Hornweg and his co-authors Lorraine Sugar and Claudia Lorena Trejos Gomez, argue for the big numbers and call for an international standard for urban ghg inventories that takes into account both consumption and production based emissions. Their point is an excellent one: even if these emissions take place outside of cities, urban policies are in a position to do something about them.

Cities are more politically nimble than national governments, more able to demonstrate the the multiple benefits of climate policy for overall quality of life, more able to cooperate with each other and their citizens, and have there hands on policy levers that can have large global impacts.

But crucially – I think – if cities are going to talk the talk, then they have to walk to walk. Organizations like the C40 have used the 75% figure to carve out a space for cities on the international stage, but so far their programs fall short of addressing the truly holistic approach to climate policy that these figures represent. Leading cities like Portland, Vancouver, and Denver have begun adopting targets for upstream emissions linked to things like building materials and food supply.

Now that inclusive inventories of urban impacts are part of our collective consciousness, it's time that policies to address them went viral as well.

[See here for most on why we need to think big about urban emissions. image: Vincent Laforet]
----

Below are a few excerpts from the article, which has excellent data on the wildly different emissions from cities around the world, as well as the striking differences that can occur within cities themselves. It also contains a good summary of a variety of urban climate policies and tools.

From "Cities and greenhouse gas emissions: moving forward"

While data can be difficult to obtain, the reporting of upstream, consumption-based emissions provides the most comprehensive view of the greenhouse gas emissions arising from an urban system for decision makers. Upstream emissions may be used to inform systemic consequences of climate change actions. Some actions that reduce climate change in cities may increase emissions in rural areas; for example, exporting cement manufacturing to rural areas removes emissions from cities but increases emissions associated with transportation. The Scope 3 analysis of Denver led to the adoption of green concrete policies, reducing upstream emissions in new construction projects. As cities create strategic plans for mitigation, it is important to consider these upstream impacts as they can provide indications of what is driving emissions.

The city of Toronto, for which some of the most comprehensive spatial data is now available, provides an important observation: in the total emissions per capita value for citywide (9.5 tCO2e) and metropolitan (11.6 tCO2e), residential contributions account for approximately 68 per cent and 57 per cent, respectively. The “low” and “high” neighbourhoods vary by as much as a factor of 10. This suggests that what you buy is important, but what type of housing and neighbourhood you live in is much more important.

Cities and countries that enacted complementary policies for waste management practices have had the most success at solid waste diversion, for example: local tipping fees; bans on products and materials, such as limiting packaging materials and banning organics from landfill; extended product responsibility; and clearly articulated local and national waste diversion targets.

Reducing GHG emissions will be achieved through a similar suite of policies and actions, for example: local “emitting” fees and emissions trading systems such as there are now in place in Tokyo; local and national targets; extended product responsibility; and local
provision of practical alternatives such as improved public transport, more energy-efficient homes and more low-carbon city forms. With both GHG emissions and solid waste, the disparities within and across cities are striking; the poor generate little but are often severely impacted.

Jane Jacobs in Cowtown

2011-02-07T11:29:00.002-05:00

Calgary's new Mayor Naheed Nenshi seems intent on shaking things up, and the Globe and Mail this weekend has a snapshot on some of the green shifts that he is pushing in the city formerly known as Cowtown. Walkability, denisty, transit oriented development are all on his agenda. But in Canada's most sprawling large city he's got a bit challenge ahead. The Globe does a great job of catching the conflict interests that will influence the city's direction, as well as Nenshi's drive to really make Clagary into a thriving city.

From the article:

Mr. Nenshi wants to charge developers higher fees for building on the city's edges, arguing that the city effectively subsidizes suburban development by charging too little to supply infrastructure and services.
None of this will be easy. Developers, a powerful force in Calgary and big contributors to local political campaigns, say they are already paying plenty in taxes and fees.
....

Michael Flynn, executive director of the Urban Development Institute, an industry lobby, says it would be "social engineering" to try to change the housing choices of Calgarians. Like it or not, "Calgary is very much an auto-oriented city. People like to go skiing in the mountains on the weekends."

"The mayor has a very significant challenge in front of him," says Doug Cassidy, an executive with Canada Lands, which developed Garrison Woods. "The majority of development here has been based on the suburban sprawl model. Turning that around will not be an overnight order."

Another snippet on the competing priorities Nenshi has to juggle can be found here.

Canadian Cities Begin to Assess Climate Risks

2011-01-31T11:48:00.001-05:00

Writing for The Montreal Gazette this weekend, William Marsden had an excellent front page article on the challenge that Canadian cities face to adapt to climate change. All I can say is that its about time! In the early days, discussions about climate change – at least in wealthy northern cities – focused on reducing emissions. There was a sense of optimism, or at least invulnerability.

That started breaking down a few years ago as cities like New York and London began assessing the impact that an unstable climate would have on them. Just before Christmas, that culminated in the release of planning guides in both the US and Canada to help cities identify vulnerability and plan was to adapt to new conditions. But while the American guide was released by ICLEI with some fanfare and press attention, the updated guide produced by Natural Resources Canada didn't make a ripple in the media landscape.

The impact that climate change is going to have on our cities is one of the big conversations that Canadians are waiting to have. Marsden's piece focuses on Montreal, but it provides a good overview of the risks faced by Canadian cities. He goes into what can be done to address them and how we are entering into an era where low-carbon, climate adapted cities will have a clear edge when it comes to attracting both residents and investment. The piece also bring together some interesting quotes from World Bank officials and city councilors.

We have got a big issue here. One that cities haven't done nearly enough yet to address, and they are being let down by a federal government which itself hasn't produced a coherent national climate change strategy. Here's hoping that the Canadian media will help us keep our eye on how it develops. [Some excerpts after the below]

“Natural Resources Canada reports that cities in British Columbia's interior have to adapt to the increased risk of wildfires because of a drier climate; Vancouver has to improve its storm sewer systems because of increased rains and violent storms; Edmonton has lost 30,000 trees to drought and pest infestations; Regina is running out of water; the increased intensity of rainfall is causing more flooding in London, Ont.; Toronto has the country's worst heat island effects; Montreal and Quebec City experience more intense snow storms, wind storms, heat waves and torrential rain than ever before; and east coast cities like Halifax and Annapolis Royal face problems relating to sea level rise, storm surges and increased extreme weather events such as hurricanes.”

“Quebec law now requires the cities establish a perimeter beyond which the city cannot expand. DeSousa said the idea is to develop around transportation hubs so that as many people as possible can be within walking distance of a metro or commuter train station.
In the United States, it's called Transit Orientated Development (TOD). The rationale is simple: Denser cities use less energy. The problem in Quebec, however, is that the politics around restricting development is fertile ground for corruption as developers and landowners vie to have their land included within the development area.”

"If we are going to make a dent and if we are going to be able to supply a coherent series of reasons to the population, we need the federal government on side," Montreal city councillor Alan DeSousa said.

"You can imagine how much simpler our lives would be if you have a coherent, cohesive message being sent by all levels of government to the population. Not only would people better understand the impact of climate change on their daily lives but there would also be a series of integrated measures across the board that are coherent. That definitely handicaps our efforts, particularly at jurisdictions at senior levels of government where we don't have any particular role, for example in industrial emissions."

[see more adaptation related posts here.]

Climate Change & Social Strife: Tales of Tree-rings

2011-01-25T09:42:00.003-05:00

Today in Nature's new Climate Change journal a paper has come out linking climate change to dramatic social upheavals in the early centuries of the last millennium. A team of Swiss researchers, led by paleoclimatologist Ulf Büntgen, analyzed tree-ring data to create a year-by-year profile of Europe's climate from 500BC until today. They then looked at how those climatic trends related to periods of social change. Here's what they found:

From the middle of the third to the sixth centuries, Europe experienced barbarian invasions, political turmoil and economic dislocation. In general, rapidly fluctuating climate, combined with population declines brought about by frequent epidemics, dramatically trimmed crop yields produced by the region's largely agrarian societies during that period.

This is not the first time that the link has been made between changes in climate, declines in key resources, and conflict. But the mixture of social history and tree-ring analysis is interesting and unusual. What it means going forward into another period of climate instability is of course the key question.

The authors point out that while we may be more able to adapt to or reduce the severity of changes in our climate, we are also cut off from one of the most common responses to a changing climate: migration.

The other main difference of course is that we are now an urban species. What impact will that have on our ability to weather the storm? On the one hand, well designed cities can protect inhabitants from the worst impacts of a changing climate. On the other -- as another article in today's Nature Climate Change makes clear -- urban populations may also feel the heat far more than they do today with drastic increases in heatwave frequency and mortality (among other types of environmental stress).

Building cities to cope with these types of variations in climate is often framed as a technical challenge: more shade trees to cool the streets, better water recycling processes to make the most of a scarce resource, local agriculture and the restoration of watersheds to preserve ecosystem services. Those are all parts of the puzzle, but we can't forget the social component of our cities. The culture of our cities -- how we govern ourselves, make collective decisions, and reduce inequalities -- will have a huge influence over how prepared our cities are, and how resilient human society is to change.

NYC BigApps 2.0: Submissions Close this Wednesday

2011-01-24T10:26:00.000-05:00

More and more levels of government are opening up their vast stores of data to the public. Apps competitions have quickly become a popular way to crowdsource interesting applications for all the information that we now collect. New York city started one of the world's biggest apps competitions last year, and this coming Wednesday is your last chance to get your submissions in to this year's bigger and better "BigApps 2.0".

The city has put up a $5,000 grand prize and a total of $20,000 in prize money to encourage developers to come up with creative web and mobile applications using city data. All the info and contest rules are here. You can expect to read more about some of the submissions in a piece on urban sustainability apps that will be coming out later this Winter.

How Big Can Cities Get? A look at the ecocities of the future

2011-01-11T10:51:00.003-05:00

Sometimes we spend so much time looking at the challenges that cities face today, that we forget to look forward into the future and imagine what cities could be.

This week What Matters, is running a series of interesting thought pieces under the banner "How Big Can Cities Get?" Contributors include Richard Register, founder of Ecocity Builders; Dr. Dickson Despommier, from Columbia University and president of the Vertical Farm Project; and Stewart Brand, co-founder of The Long Now Foundation. Not all of their ideas will be entirely new - we've all heard about "global cities" for example - but extrapolated 50 years into the future even old ideas open up interesting questions. Some of the best moments in these essays are the glimpses they provide of how cities could become - not just "less bad" - but truly positive forces both socially and ecologically. [An idea that I explore in my earlier entry on The Living City Challenge.] I've posted a few of my favourite excerpts after the jump.

From Let’s build cities for people (not cars)
By Richard Register

Today’s cities have dense urban centers ringed by ever-expanding, car-dependent, undifferentiated miles of inefficient urban and suburban sprawl. This structure is environmentally unsustainable and not conducive to pleasurable human activity. We need to break up that sprawl into a galaxy of cities, towns, and villages. Doing so would free up vast swaths of land for parks, agriculture, and wildlife, all of which would be easily accessible to people without having to resort to long, slow, polluting car rides.
....
Welcome to healthy shrinking cities. We in America may be at the turning point in that wave of urban sprawl that began to engulf the countryside after the Second World War, powered by US government policies including subsidized single-family housing, massive highway-building and very cheap gasoline. Over the following decades, cities sloshed ever outward, in California for example, right up against the Sierra Foothills.

....
A city that is designed around the dimensions of the human body [rather than those of the private automobile] and its need for clean air and water as well as healthy food holds tremendous potential to improve the lives of its citizens as well as the health of the planet. Most environmentalists believe the best we can do with cities is to make them less damaging. In fact, well-designed cities could be net contributors to soil building and biodiversity, making them a benefit to people and nature simultaneously.

From Cities alive!
By Dickson Despommier

What is needed, in my opinion, is a radical change in urban philosophy; one that is based on natural processes and mimics the best that nature has to offer with respect to balance. The balanced ecosystem is often referred to as a “closed loop” entity: everything the system needs to thrive—water, food, energy, et cetera—already exists within it (rather than being trucked in!) and is constantly recycled. I would encourage all city planners and developers to take a long, hard look into the ways in which ecosystems behave. It is the model for how we should be handling things like water management, energy utilization, and the recycling of waste into usable resources.

In an ecosystem, assemblages of plants and animals are linked together by a common thread: the sharing of nutrients, the transfer of energy from sunlight to plants and then to animals, and the recycling of all the elements needed to ensure the survival of the next generation of those living within the boundaries of that geographically defined area. With available technologies, we can now bio-mimic an ecosystem’s best features. If cities learned to take advantage of these new technologies, then we would be well on our way to sustainability into the next millennium.

From In the markets of the meta city
By Robert Neuwirth

Most of the urban centers in these fast growing meta-cities have one very visible trait in common. Each is ringed by dense, ever-expanding squatter communities where large portions of the city’s population—and economy—reside. Squatter communities and shantytowns are now home to 800 million people and are projected to grow by 16,000 people every day for the foreseeable future.
....
Is this a vision of a planet gone haywire, of cities grown so big that they cross over to the dark side? What will the quality of life be like in these high-density, low-infrastructure environments? How will these increasingly dense and unnatural cities allocate resources, define development, or manage the environment? How big can they grow?

To answer these questions, it’s important to understand that it’s not size, density, or material conditions that are the true issue. The future will be determined by the extent to which these massive agglomerations take the idea of democracy seriously. Squatter cities and informal markets will represent an increasing portion of the population and the economy. It will simply not be possible to ignore them as in the past.

As S’bu Zikode, leader of the courageous South African squatter organizing group Abahlali baseMjondolo put it in a recent speech: “One cannot begin any meaningful discussion of the urban crisis while the poor continue to be excluded form the conversations that are meant to build the very new urban order that is for all. This discussion can only begin once the dispossessed, those who do not count, count.” In a DIY environment, the urban future calls for deep democracy. Only then will the slipknot issues of development, land, and the environment be confronted with diligence, justice, and equity.

Bixi Wraps Up An Excellent Year: But What's Behind the Numbers?

2011-01-05T16:19:00.003-05:00

[In the spirit of ushering out the old and showing in the new, this week I'm going to be putting up short posts on interesting stories that got lost in the shuffle during the end of 2010.]

Bixi wrapped up an excellent year in 2010. Shortly after the last snow covered bikes were corralled into storage at the end of November a string of excellent numbers was announced:
30,000 members, 3.3million trips, $1million in profits, loan repayments to begin 3 years ahead of schedule, 7 new systems installed in major cities around the world, and $104million in loan guarantees from the municipality to help speed it's international expansion.

You can get a full breakdown of those numbers, as well as the way that BIXI (a private non-profit) works with the city of Montreal in this detailed piece by Gazette transportation reporter Andy Riga. There is no doubt, the numbers look great. But it's worth asking if they are measuring the right thing - are they telling us anything about BIXI's longterm future, or its impact on urban mobility?

Here are three things that are being left out:

- Transportation Remixed: People talk about "transportation cocktails." The term is a bit too Tom Cruise for my liking, but the idea is important. Coming up with convenient ways for people to mix different modes of transportation can help get us out of our cars, reduce congestion, and make public transit accessible in difficult to serve areas (like low density residential areas). The question is, is BIXI helping? Is it acting as a bridge to get people from, say, commuter trains to work? Or from their homes to the metro?

The answer is "It doesn't look like it. But we aren't sure." You can see more on this here. But the short story is that more work needs to be done to weave BIXI into the way people use other forms of transportation, and BIXI itself needs to open up its rich collection of user data so that Planners and Researchers can help figure out how that could happen.

- Money Talks: If you are interested in BIXI more generally - not just BIXI when it is at home in Montreal - then the financing of the system is crucial. Montreal's system is largely subsidized by the sale of the BIXI system in other cities around the world. That's great. But what about London, say, or Minneapolis?

Public transportation generally is not a money making venture. It's a cost justified by the fact that it makes our cities livable, accessible, less polluted, and generally more enjoyable places. How does money spent on BIXI stack up against money spent on more bike paths? Or on increased bus service? A well planned public bike system has the ability to truly expand the reach and quality of public transportation. We've got to see it that way, and make sure we are really getting our money's worth.

-- Show Me The Data!: One of the secrets to BIXI's success is an elegant system of real time data collection. Currently though, that data is not being made public. That is a huge loss. BIXI should follow the lead of cities like Vancouver and New York in embracing the Open Data movement. Crowd-sourcing apps for mobile devices has become part of our everyday lives. I can't think of any easier way for BIXI to expand its effectiveness and its appeal than to let people remix its data. Could there maybe be a BIXI apps competition on the horizon for 2011? I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Heating With Sewage: Vancouver System is Hot Sh*@t

2011-01-03T11:01:00.004-05:00

[In the spirit of ushering out the old and showing in the new, this week I'm going to be putting up short posts on interesting stories that got lost in the shuffle during the end of 2010.]

In the lead up to Vancouver's 2010 Olympics, the strangest announcement was that the Athletes' Village was going to be heated with sewage. Or heat recovered from sewage, to be precise. In the flurry of hype about gold medals and snow capped mountains, Vancouverites unexpectedly found themselves pondering "just how hot was that flush anyway? Head in the clouds one moments, mind in the gutter the next.

It turns out though, the city was on the money. After almost one year of operation, the system is running so well that it is now charging clients less than they would pay if they were heating with electricity bought from BC Hydro (the provincial electricity utility). You can find more details on the Vancouver system here and here, as well the one in Oslo that inspired it. (Note: in first link, the rates should read 8.7 cents per kWh for electricity, 8.4 cents for sewage heat.)

These types of systems are both cheaper and easier to install than geothermal heating. Also -- although it isn't a very inspiring thought -- large volumes of sewage may also be one of the few truly urban energy sources out there. Another interesting facet to the story is that Vancouver had originally hoped to have biomass generation as well, but residents objected due to air quality concerns. Sewage heat on the other hand may not be very glamorous, but it is also unlikely to rouse any public opposition.

There are only 4 of these systems in operation world wide. But if municipalities can make a profit while still charging consumers less than they pay for electricity, I'd guess that number is going to grow.

[While working in South Africa, I blogged about another approach the sewer pipe power.]

The Story of Co2: NYT Feature of Charles Keeling

2010-12-22T15:46:00.002-05:00

Justin Gillis, writing in yesterday's NY Times has a captivating profile of Charles David Keeling, the American scientist who first designed methods for measuring atmospheric Co2. It's a fascinating glimpse of the meticulous man whose observatory -- perched high up on the edge of a Hawaiian volcano -- has made our understanding of the earth's changing climate possible.

Gillis uses Keeling's personal and professional life as the foundation for a larger review of the science and politics of climate change. There are also brief moments of insight and sadness that put the dry numbers of atmospheric Co2 levels (currently at 390ppm) back into their broader context. What emerges is a picture of a man with a passion for precision - not for precision's sake -- but because he understood what those rising numbers said about our relationship to the ecosystems that make our lives here possible.

The full article is here, I've posted some of my favorite excerpts after the jump.

Perhaps the biggest reason the world learned of the risk of global warming was the unusual personality of a single American scientist. Charles David Keeling’s son Ralph remembers that when he was a child, his family bought a new home in Del Mar, Calif., north of San Diego. His father assigned him the task of edging the lawn. Dr. Keeling insisted that Ralph copy the habits of the previous owner, an Englishman who had taken pride in his garden, cutting a precise two-inch strip between the sidewalk and the grass.

...

The essence of his scientific legacy was his passion for doing things in a meticulous way. It explains why, even as challengers try to pick apart every other aspect of climate science, his half-century record of carbon dioxide measurements stands unchallenged.

Some of the most important data came from an analyzer he placed in a government geophysical observatory that had been set up a few years earlier in a remote location: near the top of Mauna Loa, one of the volcanoes that loom over the Big Island of Hawaii.

He quickly made profound discoveries. One was that carbon dioxide oscillated slightly according to the seasons. Dr. Keeling realized the reason: most of the world’s land is in the Northern Hemisphere, and plants there were taking up carbon dioxide as they sprouted leaves and grew over the summer, then shedding it as the leaves died and decayed in the winter.

He had discovered that the earth itself was breathing.

A more ominous finding was that each year, the peak level was a little higher than the year before. Carbon dioxide was indeed rising, and quickly. That finding electrified the small community of scientists who understood its implications. Later chemical tests, by Dr. Keeling and others, proved that the increase was due to the combustion of fossil fuels.

Throughout much of his career, Dr. Keeling was cautious about interpreting his own measurements. He left that to other people while he concentrated on creating a record that would withstand scrutiny.
...
In later years, as the scientific evidence about climate change grew, Dr. Keeling’s interpretations became bolder, and he began to issue warnings. In an essay in 1998, he replied to claims that global warming was a myth, declaring that the real myth was that “natural resources and the ability of the earth’s habitable regions to absorb the impacts of human activities are limitless.”

In an interview in La Jolla, Dr. Keeling’s widow, Louise, said that if her husband had lived to see the hardening of the political battle lines over climate change, he would have been dismayed.

“He was a registered Republican,” she said. “He just didn’t think of it as a political issue at all.”

Many countries have, in principle, embraced the idea of trying to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, feeling that any greater warming would pose unacceptable risks. As best scientists can calculate, that means about one trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the gases released into the atmosphere before emissions need to fall to nearly zero.

“It took 250 years to burn the first half-trillion tons,” Myles R. Allen, a leading British climate scientist, said in a briefing. “On current trends, we’ll burn the next half-trillion in less than 40.”

Unless more serious efforts to convert to a new energy system begin soon, scientists argue, it will be impossible to hit the 3.6-degree target, and the risk will increase that global warming could spiral out of control by century’s end.

As he watches these difficulties, Ralph Keeling [an atmospheric scientist himself, managing the Co2 measurement program] contemplates the unbending math of carbon dioxide emissions first documented by his father more than a half-century ago and wonders about the future effects of that increase.

“When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. “ ‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.”

Cancun Climate Wrap Up

2010-12-14T11:22:00.001-05:00

Now that the Cancun Climate Negotiations are over, you might be wondering exactly what went down. Over at the Green Party Blog, party leader Elizabeth May has posted a good summary of the events and the final agreement. I've posted a few excerpts after the jump. The full entry is here.

From: "Copenhagen to Cancun: what just happened?"

The documents do not by themselves obligate governments to take any new steps. What they do is build a strong foundation for agreements to be reached at COP17 next year in Durban, South Africa.

The language is strong and unequivocal. In the LCA decision it is stated “climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet, and thus requires to be urgently addressed by all Parties.” (Kyoto Protocol text)

The decisions confirm that the science and IPCC advice is compelling. It commits to find ways to avoid allowing global average temperature from increasing to 2 degrees C, but recognizes the need to consider that the high point should be 1.5 degrees C. For the first time in a UN decision, it mandates that all nations should immediately determine the year by which GHG emissions should peak and begin to fall. It states all parties agree “that Parties should cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.” It states that industrialized countries should reduce emissions by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020.

Further it states that “addressing climate change requires a paradigm shift towards building a low-carbon society that offers substantial opportunities….

It deals extensively with the need for adaptation (creating a Cancun Adaptation Framework and Adaptation committee), for financing, it creates a new Green Climate Fund, as well as funding to help arrest deforestation. There are many detailed elements. Not all were great. Many were disappointed to see Carbon Capture and Storage added to acceptable technologies for the Clean Development Mechanism.

New and welcome elements were language recognizing the importance of human rights in implementing climate policy, respect for indigenous peoples, women, and gender-related issues, and a clear victory for labour in the reference to the need for a “just transition.” Cities and sub-national governments finally get the respect they deserve as partners.

Getting Ready for the Storm [INTERVIEW]: Missy Stults on ICLEI's New Climate Resilient Communities Program

2010-11-23T11:04:00.011-05:00

“We have to tell the international community that it's in the cities that the battle to slow global warming will be won.” That's Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard speaking before a World Mayors Summit in Mexico that concluded this Sunday. One week before the UN climate negotiations begin in Cancun, 138 mayors at the summit signed the voluntary Mexico City Pact that commits them to measurably reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

For people who follow this kind of thing, the announcement will sound familiar. Thanks in large part to work by ICLEI – an international organization that focuses on urban sustainability – cities have become prominent advocates for strong climate policies. And like the Mexico City Pact, discussions of cities and climate change have usually focused on what cities can to do reduce emissions.

But last week also marked the launch of a program of a different sort.

A few days before the Mayors Summit, the US branch of ICLEI turned a new leaf by announcing that eight cities and counties have been chosen to pilot what is the USA's first national level effort to get cities ready for the impacts of climate change. Following a growing recognition that major challenges are on the horizon, the new Climate Resilient Communities program (CRC) gives cities the tools they need to understand and plan for life in a changing climate. In an announcement yesterday, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino summed up what is at stake:

“Climate change is not a distant problem, but a threat that is here and now. We have a responsibility to protect the people, the businesses and institutions, the history and the future of Boston.”

Ebrard and Menino's comments are really two sides of the same coin: cities need to cut emissions, but they also need to brace themselves for big changes.

ICLEI has created an online list of climate impacts by region (drawn from the landmark 2009 federal Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States report). While not on par with the impacts expected for some of the world's most vulnerable regions, the picture still isn't pretty:

In Boston for example, sea level rise will increase flooding and erosion, extreme heat events and the urban heat island effect will take their toll on public health, and increased storms will test the city's infrastructure. Miami-Dade County can expect more frequent and severe storms, more flooding and saltwater intrusion into drinking water aquifers thanks to rising sea levels.

The new CRC program guides cities through the steps of assessing their own vulnerabilities, setting preparedness goals, selecting appropriate actions, implementing them, and monitoring success.

I spoke with ICLEI USA's Adaptation Manager Missy Stults about ICLEI's new push to get cities ready for a changing climate.

Alex Aylett: A large part of ICLEI's climate change work over the past 15 years -- almost all of it -- has been focused on reducing emissions. There was a lot of optimism that cities could help "solve the climate crisis." What does it say that we are now talking about adaptation?

Melissa Stults: Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are critically important and ICLEI members have been making significant strides to reduce their carbon footprints. However, we know that we have enough momentum in the climate system that even if we were able to halt emissions to zero tomorrow, we would still experience a changing climate. Recognizing this, communities need to start preparing for existing changes as well as future changes that are unavoidable. What's important though, is that climate adaptation and climate mitigation should not be viewed as mutually exclusive strategies. The more we mitigate, hopefully, the less we have to adapt.

AA: For cities already working on mitigation, what does it mean to begin addressing adaptation as well? Where does working the two link up, and what new demands does working on adaptation place on cities?

MS: Many communities are already doing things that would be considered adaptation strategies - they are just not calling them adaptation strategies. For example, efforts around energy and water conservation are both climate mitigation measures as well as climate adaptation measures.

ICLEI's Climate Resilient Communities program is designed to help communities integrating climate considerations and climate adaptation planning into existing community planning. By doing that, ICLEI will help communities leverage existing efforts and existing funding to be more effective in building community resilience.

AA: What are some of the short and medium term benefits (or cobenefits) that cities can expect from engaging with work on adaptation?

MS: Healthier, more socially just communities. Tangibly, this will manifest itself with financial savings (through avoided impacts), more resilient economies, reduced greenhouse gas emissions; significant advances in local sustainability; and safer and healthier communities.

AA: Putting together an adaptation strategy is going to include picking some low-hanging fruit, as well as dealing with some difficult trade-offs. What do you think is ripe for the picking, and what do you see being an issue where cities are going to have to make some hard decisions?

MS: This is a tough question to answer. Adaptation is fundamentally a local issue meaning that the strategies that localities will need to move forward with will very much depend on local vulnerabilities and local circumstance. One of the first things ICLEI recommends our members pursue is understanding how they are already vulnerable and start figuring out how those vulnerabilities could change in the future.

In regards to low hanging fruit; urban forestry has lots of other benefits (like stormwater management, urban heat island mitigation), so do energy conservation, water conservation, community/public awareness and education. Forming partnerships with scientists and others to get information on climate change and possible vulnerabilities, and integrating climate considerations into existing planning process (i.e. using the future 100 year flood for planning) are also strategies that can be effective as gaining momentum and building resilience.

AA: The central step in the CRC's 5 milestones is "making a leadership commitment." With mitigation, we have seen that cities struggle to truly commit to ambitious policies. [see for example this recent poll] Do you think that focusing on adaptation will increase the number of cities that are getting actively engaged with climate change?

MS: Yes. There is a hypothesis in the field that climate adaptation is the backdoor to climate mitigation --- and I very much think this is true. At some point, we realize there are things that we can't adapt to and maintain the basic services and quality of life we are use to. This information is often a motivator for action.

AA: Is that because Adaptation has a more visceral side to it? That seeing the risks that your community could face down the line might have a more immediate impact on decision makers and citizens?

MS: Absolutely. Adaptation is about making sure your community is prepared for existing and future climate and weather impacts - it's about building resilience. It's about being a socially justice, vibrant, dynamic, and healthy community.

Britain's New Green Deal

2010-11-09T09:38:00.000-05:00

The British coalition government has announced plans to retrofit the country's 26 million famously drafty homes (if you've spent any time in the UK, you know what I am talking about). Yale's environment 360 is running an interview with UK Energy and Climate Minister Greg Barker where he explains how the new "Green Deal" is going to work. I've posted a few excerpts below.

Writing from North America -- where a similar US program is under fire, and the Conservative Canadian government is irrationally opposed to any form of climate action -- it is particularly interesting to see how climate policy in the UK seems to have become a non-partisan issue.

Barker speaks with all the verve for the power of the market that you would expect from a Conservative. But then he quotes ground breaking environmental economist Herman Daly's famous zinger that the economy is "a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment." Barker's main argument is that the government needs to make judicious and dependable interventions into how energy efficiency is financed, and then let the market do the rest of the work. He also pushes the idea that the UK needs to develop a full renewable energy supply chain to establish its leadership in the sector.

I'm not convinced that the type of dramatic shift we are aiming for can be brought about entirely by intelligent market regulation. If we are going to get to zero carbon, or anywhere close, more direct government intervention is going to be necessary. Carbon based fuels have dominated our energy systems and economies for 300 years, they aren't going to give it up easily.

But smart dependable economic policies are a good way to start. And, crucially, they also seem to be something that both the centre-left and center-right can agree on. [For a surprising quote from the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher, be sure to scroll down on e360 and watch the first few minutes of the video].

From the Interview:

"What we’re going to do is go away from the stop-go, government-funded programs, and through using smart regulation, open up this market to the private sector. We believe we can create a market that will bring in billions of pounds of investment into energy efficiency for homes and businesses. We’re going to create a mechanism whereby the cost of making these [energy-efficiency] measures can all be financed through pay-as-you-save models, with the finance being repaid over a period of 20 years through the bill on each individual property.

Now, that’s a big change. To date it had to be paid upfront, either by the individual homeowner or through a grant. By pinning the repayments to the bill of the property, it means it’s not a debt. It’s not even a mortgage. It doesn’t need to be credit-scored, because if the individual living in that particular home moves, dies, ownership changes, or they cease to rent, it stays on the bill of that property, just like the conventional energy bill."

"There are three things to business, which we think are absolutely essential ingredients for long-term success of the transition to a low-carbon economy. We think business needs these three things in government policy: transparency, longevity, and certainty — TLC, if you like. And too often in the past, the short-term measures have been tinkering with policy, which has sent confused and mixed messages to the investment community. What we need to see is actually fewer interventions in the market. But when we do intervene, we need to do so in a very robust fashion that is transparent, clear, and gives real long-term certainty to business."

The Good News Paradox

2010-11-08T10:05:00.001-05:00

This year's Human Development Index (HDI) came out last week and it was full of good news. The HDI started out 20 years ago to provide a way of indexing development and progress that gives a fuller picture of human well being than GDP's shallow economic calculations. This year's report celebrates the fact that over the past 40 years “average life expectancy rose from 59 to 70 years, primary school enrolment grew from 55 to 70 percent, and per capita income doubled to more than $10,000.”

This is great stuff. But the question that the HDI asks is can it be sustained? Can we hope so see similar gains in the next 40 years?

Climate Change and Development
The main threat, which haunts the report, is climate change. By some projections, much of the already wealthy North will not directly feel the negative impacts of climate change until late in the century. But many of the areas where gains have been made in access to education, nutrition and life expectancy are also going to be the most vulnerable to climate change. As the HDI puts it:

“The main threat to maintaining progress in human development comes from the increasingly evident unsustainability of production and consumption patterns. .... The consequences of environmentally unsustainable production are already visible. Increased exposure to drought, floods and environmental stress is a major impediment to realizing people’s aspirations. .... The continuing reliance on fossil fuels is threatening irreparable damage to our environment and to the human development of future generations.”

Unrealized Urban Possibilities
Cities have an important place in all this. Beyond coastal communities that will face increased flooding, all of the world's ever growing cities are directly dependent on external supplies of food, potable water, and energy that make it possible for such a high density of people to live together in relative comfort.

With 40% reductions in staple grain crops currently expected by mid century (as well as a bundle of other climate related disasters) the spectre of resource conflicts and urban unrest is very real. At the same time, decoupling urbanization from increased energy use could play a huge part in mitigating the intensity of climate change. Unfortunately recent reports on the US and China show that this is – on the whole – simply not happening. There are some innovators. I've written about many of them here. But they are the exception not the rule.

This contrast between how good things are and how challenging they will get is a bit of a brain twister. Even if you understand the issues, at an intuitive level it all seems slightly unreal. How can things be going so well if they are really going so badly? (something Andrew Revkin also riffs on over at Dot Earth)

The Environmentalist's Paradox
Dr. Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, a close friend and recent graduate of McGill's Dept. of Geography, made waves in September with a paper (pdf) on exactly that dilemma. In the paper, which got picked up by the Guardian and a variety of other international media, she dubs this sticky situation the “Environmentalist's Paradox.” Beyond just supplying a catchy name, she and her co-author's go some way to explaining how – exactly when the HDI show that enormous gains have been made since the 1970s – reports like the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment show that the capacity of the world's ecosystems to provide key services are in decline.

Given the unprecedented burdens we are placing on the planet's resources, projecting forward from past data is tricky. But with that proviso, Ciara and her co-author's argue that on the one hand, agricultural innovations have helped increase human well being despite declines in other areas, and on the other that there is a time lag between the damage we do to our ecosystems and when we feel its impacts. In other words, it takes a bit of time before the chicken's come home to roost.

Cities of Change
Going into a century of rapid climate change with already depleted ecosystems is a frightening prospect. But, as the HDI points out, in many ways things are better than ever. To keep that going on a rapidly urbanizing globe means designing urban systems that are more resilient to climatic shocks, resource shortages (and the social tensions they create), and that also impose a lighter load on the ecosystems we depend on.

Concretely, that means more attention to technical projects like decentralized renewable energy that increase the resilience and efficiency of our hard infrastructure. It also means continued progress on social issues like education, health, and equality that build the resilience of our societies. Change happens, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Our cities need to be ready to respond to both.

US to determine Canada's Climate Change Policies...Again

2010-11-02T10:07:00.001-04:00

What can I say. At least the current Canadian government is consistent. As we all wait to see the results of the US midterm elections, Environment Minister Jim Prentice has announced that Canada would abandon work on cap-and-trade legislation if, as expected, the Republicans take control of Congress.

This "follow the leader" approach has been central to the Conservative approach to environmental policy. The fact that the leader isn't going anywhere doesn't seem to trouble them though - and that is worrying. Check out this post from earlier this year for a look at the economic, environmental, and political downside of letting the US call the shots when it comes to climate change.

World's 1st Commercial Roof Garden

2010-11-01T22:19:00.003-04:00

Montreal is soon going to be home to the world's first commercial rooftop garden. The 31,000 sqft hydroponic farm is set to open in early 2011 and is aiming to provide year round harvests. Run by Luffa Farms, crops have been selected in collaboration with plant science and nutrition from McGill university. Shorter transportation distances mean crops chosen for taste and nutritional value, not how long they can sit in a crate before they get funky.

Unlike other high profile urban agriculture projects, Lufa Farms plane looking greenhouses aren't inspirationally grassroots or eye-poppingly futuristic. But, if the project is successful, proving that farming on urban roofs is economically viable could transform our cityscapes. You've got to admire their guts too; their first harvest is scheduled for mid-February when temperatures in Montreal can dip past -30c.

One of the founders mentions that the insulation provided by a rooftop greenhouse can cut a building's energy costs by 20% to 25%. But I'd love to see how much electricity they are going to have to use to keep their greenhouses hot in the winter. Ideally, you'd want to place this hydroponic system somewhere where it could take advantage of excess heat generated by another commercial process.

The Conventional Energy Trap: Hermann Scheer [1944-2010]

2010-10-26T11:29:00.003-04:00

Hermann Scheer, pioneering German Parliamentarian and renewable energy advocate, died earlier this month. Scheer was the driving force behind Germany's Renewable Energy Act, thanks to which Germany last year accounted for half of all worldwide solar electricity installations. I recently came across one of his last ever interviews, done by Amy Goodman over at DemocracyNow.org. The interview covers everything from the Energy Act, to the impact of political corruption on the transition to renewable energy, and the importance of energy independance.

After 30 years in the German parliament working on energy issues, Scheer has enormous insight into the political dynamics that surround renewable energy. I've posted a few of my favourite quotes after the jump. Scheer's life work is a great example of how change happens, not just by fighting against how things are, but by building something new that makes the current situation obsolete.

--- From the Interview (see here for a full transcript):

"The tragedy of our present civilization is that it became dependent on marginal energy sources. The marginal energy sources are fossil sources, fossil resources and nuclear, based on the raw material uranium. The gigantic energy potential is the renewable energy potential always all coming from the sun, including its derivates, like wind and the photosynthetic-produced—photosynthetically produced materials, organic materials, plants, hydro-base. And the sun offers to our globe, in eight minutes, as much energy as the annual consumption of fossil and atomic energy is. That means to doubt—the doubtings if there would be enough renewable energy for the replacement of nuclear and fossil energies, this argument is ridiculous. There is by far enough."

"It is a fight. This is a structural fight. It is a fight between centralization and decentralization, between energy dictatorship and energy participation in the energy democracy. And because nothing works without energy, it’s a fight between democratic value and technocratical values. And therefore, the mobilization of the society is the most important thing. And as soon as the society, most people, have recognized that the alternative are renewable energies and we must not wait for others, we can do it by our own, in our own sphere, together in cooperatives or in the cities or individually. As soon as they recognize this, they will become supporters. Other—this is the reason why we have now a 90 percent support against all the disinformation campaigns. They have much more money and possibilities to influence the public opinion, but they lost this. They lost this conflict. In the eyes of the people, they lost the conflict. They are the losers already."

Future City: Portland & Networked Urban Sustainability

2010-09-28T00:50:00.003-04:00

[As part of the lead up to WorldChanging's Future City event this Friday, I put together a feature length piece looking at some of the hits and misses of climate change policy in Portland (OR). Beyond just a summary of one city's programs, the piece gave me a chance to think through what I see as an important shift in the way cities are pursuing sustainability. You can read the full post here, or reposted below.]

When cities first stepped up as leaders in climate action, a few simple projects would get you noticed. For a good 15 years, just doing anything set you apart. But, almost without realizing it, we have walked into a new phase of urban sustainability – version 2.0 – where cities are being pushed to tackle the really tough issues. Retrofitting City Hall is nice, but the real game revolves around how we plan and travel through our cities, how we build and run our buildings, and how we make and use energy. “Go big” as they say “or go home.” Or in this case “go big at home.”

Like web 2.0, bright green cities are now venturing beyond programs run by individuals working in isolation to link up players from all parts of the city. This is the age of networked urban sustainability. And where it used to be enough to create exceptions that proved the unsustainable rules that shaped our cities, leading cities are now building exceptions that change those rules.

Portland (OR) is one of a handful of American cities that is really embracing the challenges of networked sustainability.Portland's success in keeping its emissions below 1990 levels owes a lot to it having defended a 1970s-era urban growth boundary that limited sprawl and promoted compact urban development. Its other early sustainability efforts focused on modest steps like decreasing municipal building energy use, increasing office recycling rates, and running public outreach programs, but in 2009 the city committed to cutting emissions by 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

That new goal has demanded systemic changes. Going well beyond just cleaning house, Portland's recent programs show what is possible when cities commit to sparking a collective and collaborative shift in how they are built and lived.

Transforming Energy One Neighborhood At A Time
Playing on the need to both create jobs and save energy, one of Portland's newest and most successful projects is Clean Energy Works Portland (CEWP) which aims to carry out residential energy retrofits across the city on a massive scale.

Existing commercial and residential buildings account for a large portion of greenhouse gas emissions (46% in Portland's case). But even if increasing efficiency is technically pretty simple, a variety of things keep homeowners from moving enmasse to retrofit their homes. CEWP addresses that challenge on all fronts: it provides homeowners with affordable long term financing, it coordinates all stages of the work from the initial energy audit to final retrofit, and it provides a well trained certified workforce to ensure that the work that is getting done is done right. At the moment, 500 households are part of neighborhood level pilots, and after receiving $20million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding the program is being scaled up to the level of the state.

But CEWP is about more than just energy efficiency, and it is being led by more than just the City of Portland. There are huge economic benefits to this kind of mass retrofit program. It is estimated that the program will directly create 10,000 stable jobs over 10 years (something similar at a national scale could create up to 750,000 jobs). Those are the kinds of numbers that make municipal officials' eyes sparkle when they talk.

To make sure the jobs went where they were most needed, CEWP partnered with Green For All a national NGO that uses green collar jobs to boost people out of poverty. Together they put in place a community workforce agreement that has created living wage career path jobs among local workers, with a special emphasis on employing historically disadvantaged or underrepresented communities (people of color, women, and low-income residents). In a tough political and economic climate, this emphasis on equity and jobs has helped CEWP get the strong political support that it needs to succeed where other municipal programs have faltered.

It is common to talk about the importance of “community participation” and involving citizens in municipal projects. Solarize Portland, a home solar energy program that is spreading rapidly through the city, turns that relationship on its head. Begun in 2009 by Southeast Uplift and a resident in Portland's Mt. Tabor neighborhood, Solarize began with a simple question: “wouldn't it be cheaper to install solar panels on my house if a bunch of my neighbors were doing it too?” I met some of the families who started the project and when it all began they had modest hopes: if they could get at least 20 homes to install, then bulk purchasing and contracting could bring everyone's costs down. But instead of 20 homes they ended up with 800, and subsequent rounds in other areas around the city have brought in close to 1700 homes. All together they will generate over 1MW of electricity.

In just over a year Solarize Portland has dwarfed all other attempts to install alternative energy technology in the city. Along the way, in partnership with the Energy Trust of Oregon and the City of Portland, they realized that by bringing together all the available local, state and federal subsidies and incentives, home owners only have to pay for 10 to 20% of the total installation costs. With the success of Solarize, and the large numbers of new applicants, the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability has stepped in to help out. This is no less a Portland project than CEWP, but here the municipality provides logistical and technical advice while communities lead the way.

Setbacks and Successes in Green Building
This back and forth between city and citizens defines this second period in urban sustainability. The municipality still controls key policy levers around zoning, land use planning, transportation, and economic development. But the goal now is to use them in a way that builds broad coalitions of change and enables the community not just to meet the letter of the law, but to take it to its full intent or even beyond.

Of course, it doesn't always work that way. There is a perception that, given Portland's position as a leader in urban climate policy, it must be relatively easy to pass sustainability related initiatives. That is far from true. Since 2007, for example, the city has been developing a new, community-wide green building policy. But a combination of opposition from home builders and building managers, difficult economic times for the building sector and political struggles have left the policy – at least for now – floating in the water.

Putting in place far reaching and ambitious measures may be excellent for a city's long term success, but it also takes people who are ready to do the tough work of building alliances and brokering compromises. It means meetings (and more meetings). It means mediation. It means working through conflicts until you find a way out the other side. And it doesn't always work.

There are other successes in the city's green building sector though. Since 2005, developers receiving municipal funding have been required to meet minimum LEED Silver ratings on their buildings. As a result major urban renewal projects, like the city's Pearl District, have also been proving grounds for green building practices. Large developers, like Gerding Edlen, who were heavily involved in the Pearl, have increasingly defined themselves as leaders in green building and have expanded their operations to Washington state and California. Taking a page from CEWP's book, Gerding has recently branched out and established an arm that deals specifically with building efficiency retrofits. And while Portland hasn't so far been successful in its new green building policy process, the city has been a key partner in the design of Oregon's new “reach code” that will feed into an ongoing cycle of predictable revisions and improvements to the state building regulations.

Small builders have also benefited from city policies. The removal of construction fees for secondary dwelling units has created a small surge in innovative “tiny homes” around the city. Independently built or undertaken by firms like Orange Splot that specialize in compact dwellings, these new units are some of the cutest, quirkiest and most elegant residential spaces I've ever seen. They also increase density without threatening a neighborhood's original character. That's important because, yes even in Portland, adding density can stir up real debate. The more examples there are to show that “density” isn't just a code word for “drab 1970s apartment block” the better.

This innovative environment has shaken up the structure of the city's bureaucracy itself. In December 2008, the newly elected mayor Sam Adams announced the merger of the Office of Sustainable Development (OSD) and the Bureau of Planning to create a new Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS). The new Bureau was put under the leadership of former OSD head Susan Anderson. The merger of the two offices has taken time and effort; institutional changes are never easy. But the new office has some clear benefits. By bringing the city's sustainability and planning experts in under the same roof, it has created a broad basket of tools – from zoning codes, to strategic investment, to education and outreach – that when working in concert can help build a more sustainable city.

What's Next? EcoDistricts and the 20 Minute Neighborhood.
So what's next? While established projects continue to grow, the city is planning to move on a few other key issues. The newly established Portland Sustainability Institute (PoSI), is bringing together private companies, local universities, non-profits, and the municipality to create an innovation cluster that can drive the next phase of sustainability initiatives in the metro region. They are leading the way with an EcoDistricts project that is working in five areas of the city to see how we can really “do it all.” We are used to thinking about sustainability initiatives in isolation. The goal with EcoDistricts is to see how we can simultaneously roll out sustainable building, infrastructure, and governance models within existing neighborhoods. PoSI is also heading up the Portland Metro Climate Prosperity Project that aims to increase the region's stake in the green technology and design sectors.

In the past year Portland passed one of North America's most cutting edge Climate Action Plans (CAP) and an ambitious bicycle master plan. The CAP sets out an array of targets that range from a 25% increase in the energy efficiency of existing buildings by 2030, to a 10% reduction in emissions that result from Portlander's food choices (something that, obviously, lies totally outside of the cities direct control, but which links up well with recent discussions of the impacts of our food choices).

Looking for a way to bring this all together at the local level, the CAP lays out the city's plans for what they call “20 minute neighborhoods.” Since seeing the concept being developed in community workshops in 2008, I've loved its simplicity: you should be able to comfortably meet your daily needs (education, recreation, shopping, transportation etc.) within a 20 minute walk of your house. It also has a nice ring to it, and makes a lot more sense to people than talking about “dense, multi-use, transit oriented zones” or some similarly technical definition. [You can read more on the CAP here, and in an interview with Michael Armstrong, Senior Sustainability Manager of Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.]

Networked Urban Sustainability: A New Beginning
If there is one common feature that links all these different projects together, it is that they all need the support of multiple partners to make them real. Early on, cities limited their attention to areas that they controlled directly. But as our understanding of the climate challenge increases – and the projections of future conditions continue to worsen – it is clear that cities need to do more. The name of the game in this second, networked, phase of urban sustainability is finding ways to spark changes well past what any one agency, community, or company can control directly.

Sustainability 2.0 gets at something that we have all known for a long time: the challenge of redesigning our cities isn't primarily about technology, it's about people. Creating the rapid shifts that we need in our urban systems means enabling broad based action of a kind that we haven't seen for decades. For local governments, that means being courageous enough to set truly meaningful targets, and then collaboratively building the policies and networks between multiple players that are necessary to reach them. Portland's recent experiences give some good examples of what that looks like.

Spot the Differences: Cities Lead the Climate Fight - Or Do They?

2010-09-26T23:27:00.008-04:00

I hate spot the difference games. The changes are always so arbitrary. "Look, the cat on the right lost its tail!" Impressive.

But I came across two headlines recently where the differences - if a bit easier to spot - are also a lot more significant. First, from the Guardian:

"Cities lead the way in action to halt climate change."

Second, from Digital Journal:

"Climate change not a priority for US cities, survey finds."

So, how about it -- can you spot the differences?

The Guardian piece is a familiar good news story focusing on seven inspiring projects from cities around the States. Santa Monica, for example, is aiming to be a net zero energy city by 2020 - that's stunning! The survey on the other hand looks at responses from 2176 American local governments. Their results? 14% of cities have established GHG emissions limits for local government. Programs to reduce community energy consumption are being carried out by 0.8% to 11% of cities (depending on the type of program). Those are less than inspiring findings.

Apart from being picked up by USAToday, the survey, conducted by the US International City/County Management Association (ICMA), has received no mainstream media coverage. A four page summary of the results is available here. What they show, is that while we have gotten used to hearing about cities as "climate leaders" -- and there great examples of cites that truly are pushing ahead -- it's not clear how many cities are following.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I'm a strong advocate for the role cities can play in climate proofing our collective futures. But I'm also an advocate tackling reality, not fantasy. While I love to hear about innovative projects cities are putting in place, I think we need to take a good look at why more cities aren't out in front on this issue.

Defending PACE's Financial Magic: VIDEO

2010-09-24T17:27:00.001-04:00

One of the biggest barriers to home energy retrofits or installing solar is financial: the upfront cost are high and the savings take time to add up. The American PACE program solved that riddle by integrating the repayment of the energy retrofit into the property taxes on a home. That lets you pay them off slowly, and it means the financing stays with the house if you decide to move. It's a great system.

But the program has been brought to a standstill by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The FHFA is refusing to allow PACE participants to refinance their mortgages until they have completely paid off the cost of their energy improvements. Environment and Energy TV has an excellent interview with ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability head Martin Chavez. It's well worth a look to see how the system works, what's gone wrong, and how it might be fixed. Click here to view.

World Carfree Day: TOMORROW!

2010-09-21T10:41:00.004-04:00

World Car Free Day is tomorrow, September 22nd. So ride with pride, and invite some friends along to join you.

Sure, Car Free Day is drop in the bucket: a small exception in the sprawling cities that lock many of us into our cars everyday for hours on end. But it's also a great experiment in alternative-reality building. It gives us all a chance to take the streets without noise and congestion, and to see what cities would be like if the people -- not cars -- were king.

There are events this year in over 2000 cities, and every one does it differently. Montreal this year will be blocking off a 7 block portion of the downtown [map] and running a week long "In Town Without My Car" campaign. The Montreal Gazette has a good article on how the car free challenge can be expanded beyond a single day a year and work that is being done to established new car-free zones within the city. The Montreal Urban Ecology Center has a full rundown of the week's events - including two excellent looking talks with speakers from Germany and Norway on European experiences with car-free neighbourhoods.

It's great to see organizers in Montreal coupling the chance experience a car-free downtown with events geared to help build more of these spaces into our cities permanently. That pairing is an example of something I love: creating exceptions that can change the rules rather than proving them.

BIXI Under Scrutiny: Mixing Better Transportation Cocktails

2010-09-14T23:08:00.000-04:00

I hadn't planned on writing about BIXI again so soon, but the results of a research study published last week has finally given us a more critical appraisal of the system's performance. The results generated a bit of discussion on an earlier BIXI related post, and not everyone is happy about what the research has revealed.

The study, conducted by 3 researchers at McGill's Dept. of Urban Planning, is about much more than BIXI. But it's the BIXI findings that have attracted the most attention. The main bugbear is the fact that of the over 2 million BIXI trips taken so far only 10% of those have replaced taxi or car trips. 86% of those trips replaced walking or riding personal bikes or public transit. Some have reacted to that by saying BIXI's overall environmental impact is much lower than official estimates that assume that all BIXI trips replace car trips.

That may be true. But I think that that critique misses the point, as well as other more important information that's in the study. What the 86% stat reveals, really, is that BIXI has successfully reached out to people who are already transit users and cyclists. That's not all that surprising, and providing current transit users with more options is a good way to ensure that people are satisfied with their transit system. I don't think we should be worried about competition amongst multiple modes of green transit. How to extend ridership to beyond people who already bike and ride transit is a more important question.

When it comes to transportation, shifting 10% of trips from cars to bikes is also a big accomplishment. Currently only 1.3% of all trips in Montreal are taken by bike (6% to 7% in central areas). Think what an impact you'd have if you could take the shift made among BIXI users and take it up to the level of the city as a whole. In fact, as we'll see in a second, the study has some recommendations on how to keep moving in that direction.

A more unexpected findings is that the majority of BIXI trips are not combined with other forms of transit. For a system that is supposed to facilitate multi-modal transit cocktails, that's not great news. They also conclude that more work needs to be done to provide cycling services outside central areas, especially for people using the commuter rail system. According to the survey, that is where the biggest opportunities are for getting people out of their cars are onto a mixed modes of transit.

These may be two sides of the same coin: by not providing adequate cycling infrastructure in the suburbs, cycling in general (and BIXI use in the downtown core) may not even be on the radar of many commuters. Providing good cycle paths and well designed on-site bike parking at suburban transit stations could open up a whole new ridership who would grab a BIXI as they step off the train at the other end.

But there's another issue here. This study is based on an an online survey of 1,432 Montrealers. But BIXI itself has en excellent data collection system. That data would allow for a much more precise estimate of the way the system is being used and the percentage of people who combine it with other modes of transportation. I'm not sure why we haven't seen some real analysis of that data yet, but I sure hope we don't have to wait much longer.

If you ask me, BIXI should follow the example of cities like Vancouver and implement an open data policy that allows public access to their stats and mash them up as they please. Think what a team of transportation researchers could do with that.

Conflict, Collaboration and Climate Change: New Article Out

2010-09-03T12:09:00.007-04:00

I just got word from my publishers at Wiley-Blackwell that my most recent article on urban sustainability is now out.

It's covers a good chunk of the research that I was doing while I was living in the amazing city of Durban, (South Africa). It also takes a look at some of the things we (and the UN IPCC) may be leaving out when we think about how to implement urban climate change policy. The bottom line: conflict may not be such a bad thing, it may even help urban governments and citizens take real action.

I've posted the abstract and a few excerpts after the jump. If you'd like a copy, just send me an e-mail.

From: "Conflict, Collaboration and Climate Change: Participatory Democracy and Urban Environmental Struggles in Durban, South Africa" in IJURR Volume 34.3 September 2010 478–95

Abstract
The South Durban Basin on the eastern coast of South Africa is home to both a
large-scale petrochemical industry and a highly mobilized residential community. In a conflict cemented by apartheid-era planning, the community’s campaigns to improve local air quality provide a test case for the value of conflict for participatory democratic structures. In the context of the work of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the South Durban Basin also provides an opportunity to push the boundaries of the established links between participation and the design and implementation of responses to a changing climate.

This article argues that the focus on collaboration and compromise within studies of governance and participation overlooks both the reality of conflict and its potentially positive effects. Addressing this requires particular attention to how power relationships influence processes of governance, and the role of civil society in balancing the influence of the private sector on the state. It also calls for a better understanding of conflict and collaboration as mutually re-enforcing elements of an ongoing and dynamic political process. Together, the elements of this critique help to build a more nuanced view of participatory urban governance: one that both better describes and may better facilitate the ability of urban populations to collectively, effectively and rapidly respond to the challenges of a changing climate.

"Cities are key sites where the social, the economic and the environmental come together in difficult decisions about economic growth and urban development. Struggles over urban environmental justice represent both a context and constituency that are already influencing these decisions and that need to be incorporated into our understanding of participation and climate.

At the same time, urban environmental conflicts push us to move away from an institutional view of participation centered around visions of consensus and collaboration. Far from hurting local democratic structures, resistance from civil-society groups can play important functions. Protest can counterbalance the influence of industry, and help ensure accountability, enforcement and compliance. It can be the impetus for initiatives that develop the capacity of local communities to engage meaningfully in complicated debates, and produce innovative new forms of knowledge that support the regulatory powers of the state."

"Conflict and collaboration constitute mutually re-enforcing elements of an ongoing political process. In the interviews which formed the basis for this article, members of both civil-society groups and the municipality referred consistently to the need for us all to be kept ‘on our toes’. While at times uncomfortable, conflict, confrontation and protest fill an important role in fighting the complacency that can arise from consensus-based models. It can also be a powerful counter to the possibility that governance will act as a justification or disguise for weakened regulatory action."

Climate Skeptic - Now with less Skepticism! : Lomborg Changes Tune

2010-09-01T11:05:00.007-04:00

For those who – like me – missed the news on Monday: the world's most well known climate change skeptic has done a dramatic about face.

Bjorn Lomborg's 1998 book “The Skeptical Environmentalist” has been a pillar for critics of climate science and policy. He has made a high profile for himself by taking a strip off of pretty much anyone – from the media to the IPCC – who has called for rapid action on climate change. But on Monday in an exclusive interview with The Guardian, he called climate change "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and proposed a global carbon tax to help address the issue.

If that all seems a bit fishy, it's worth remembering that Lomborg never argued that man-made climate change was a fiction. His point has been that, if you do a cost-benefit analysis, dealing with climate change is just too expensive. You get more bang for your buck by focusing policies and money on poverty, disease, and development aid. These in the end give you more immediate positive returns both in terms of human welfare and the environment.

"Energy Miracles" Part 2
Lomborg isn't the first high profile figure to shift his focus from global inequality to climate change. In February Bill Gates announced that the new mission of his foundation (whose core focus is on development and disease) would be to reduce human carbon emissions to zero by 2050. At the time that was a surprising and inspiring move. As was pointed out earlier on WorldChanging, simply by saying “zero carbon by 2050” Gates has helped mainstream what is really our only sensible target. Lomborg's new position may have a similar impact.

Also like Gates, Lomborg is calling for a dramatic investment (to the tune of $100bn per year) in research and development of new renewable energy technologies – an argument that he makes in more detail in an upcoming book. (Gates proposed a $10 billion-a-year U.S. government R&D program to pursue “energy miracles.”) And like Gates, I'd say, Lomborg has (again) got his priorities wrong.

More Results - Less Sex Appeal
Looking for a silver-bullet breakthrough energy technology is romantic and adventurous. But the boring truth is that what we need to focus on right now is market and regulatory barriers.

Not so sexy, I know. I'd rather be driving a Tesla roadster too. But as it stands, new energy technologies enter the market at a snails pace. Royal Dutch/Shell estimates that it takes “25 years after commercial introduction for a primary energy form to obtain a 1 percent share of the global market.” As Joe Romm, excellent climate blogger and energy expert, argued in response to Gates -- we just don't have that kind of time. Rapid effective action depends on getting existing technologies into the market as quickly as possible. It's from that point that practical experience drives innovation and costs really begin to drop. (See Romm's full post for a detailed look at this).

Pushing Deployment: North & South
For those of us working closer to the ground on these issue, the need to focus on getting rid of barriers to implementation is no surprise. Established technologies and established institutions can have a lot of inertia – especially in a sector like energy where the market and infrastructure already in place heavily favours outdated carbon intensive energy sources.

The extensive subsidies and financing options available in the US (but not in Canada) for home efficiency and renewable energy are one example of a way to deal with that. Municipal programs in cities like Berkeley and Portland offer other paths. Passing comprehensive federal clean energy legislation would be another.

But there is another reason why Lomborg's narrow focus on research makes little sense. Energy poverty, the lack of access to affordable reliable energy, is a key factor that keeps people in poverty world wide. Energy availability influences everything from health, to educational performance, to economic opportunities. From an urban perspective, the search for reliable access to energy is one of the factors that drives people into informal settlements around cities in some of the world's poorest countries.

A rapid roll-out of renewable energy technology is an affordable way to provide durable infrastructure to these communities. The push to deploy renewable energy in developing countries has been led both by governments and NGOs; two inspiring examples can be found in the Indian Solar Cities and Barefoot College programs.

There, just as much as in North America, what we need to focus on is doing more with what we've got -- and quickly.

Bixi in London: "Boris Bike" Growing Pains

2010-08-24T09:50:00.004-04:00

It's been just over two weeks since London opened it's version of the Montreal designed Bixi-bike sharing system. With 6000 “boris-bikes” on the street (nicknamed after mayor Boris Johnson) it's double the size the Montreal system was when it began. All the same, it is going through the same growing pains.

From comments on the londoncyclist blog it seems like things are off to a relatively good start - with one exception: parking. There are reports of people having to bike for blocks and then take a cab back to their destination because central docking stations are overflowing. Two geographers at UCL have produced this mash-up of traffic flow over a typical 24 hour period that shows the issue pretty clearly (red = full).

Parking shortages and other early problems in the London system will be familiar to Montrealers. Malfunctioning docking stations, unexpected overcharges, and minor mechanical problems with some bikes are other common issues. Londoners also seem uniquely peeved that the commemorative t-shirts given to early adopters are a bit on the tight side. All of these were quickly addressed in Montreal. (Except for the tight shirts; I think Montrealers like their shirts a bit tight.)

This year Bixi Montreal responded to complaints about overfull docking stations (similar to those happening in London) with an impressive increase in installed parking spots. I chatted with Bixi's Bérengère Thériault at the end of last week and she explained to me that the magic number seems to be 100 parking spots for every 60 bikes. They try to keep that ratio at all the stations as well: 40% of the spots free for parking at any given time. They've also added another two thousand bikes to the system to ensure availability.

Currently London is running more bikes that Montreal, but with the same number of docking stations. It's not surprising that they are having some congestion problems. But I wouldn't expect the problems to last. As a planner friend of mine noted, you can change the whole configuration of the network more or less overnight - unlike, say, a metro system. This may be slightly more difficult in London, where the stations are wired to the electrical grid rather than solar powered. (Does anyone know why that is?)

Last week BIXI Montreal logged its two millionth trip and had over 25,000 registered users. That is more than double the 10,000 users that subscribed by the end of the 2009 season. That rapid growth is made possible by the flexibility of a system that can easily expand and morph to meet the needs of its ridership. Numbers may also have increased because Montreal has made a concerted effort to tie Bixi into other modes of transportation: stations are clustered near transit hubs, and transit pass holders receive discounts on both BIXI and the Communauto car sharing network.

Here's hoping we see similar growth in London – and that people keep mashing up the data. There is something fascinating about watching a transportation system evolve right in front of your eyes.

Portugal Rocks Renewables: 45% Renewable Electricity by Year's End

2010-08-10T14:43:00.008-04:00

For the past 5 years Portugal has been pushing a dramatic shift to renewable energy. Compared to the standard “20% renewables by 2020” targets that are often brought out at press conferences, its accomplishments are impressive: By the end of the year nearly 45% of its electricity will come from renewable sources. That's up from 17% five years ago.

Elizabeth Rosenthal has written an excellent front page feature in this morning's New York Times on how they managed it.

If you think of it as a recipe, there are three key ingredients of Portugal's success:

1 part opening up of the energy sector to market forces (including the privatization of energy utilities)

1 part technological modernization (in particular the creation of a smart-grid able to handle diverse sources of renewable energy), and

2 parts savvy country-wide energy policy (including guaranteed rates for renewables, and the EU Carbon Trading System).

But like any recipe you also need a chef, in this case Prime Minister José Sócrates who came in on a landslide victory in 2005 and pushed through energy reform.
The current system is a mixture of wind, solar, hydro, small scale decentralized renewables on people's homes (see my last post), and some power still coming from natural gas generators. The Times gives a nice snapshot of the type of “plate-spinning” necessary to keep this kind of system running. (Not mind you, that a traditional energy grid is simple to run either.)

The financial costs seem to have been relatively minor. The state has not used taxes or debt to fund this transition. The costs are born by the private power producers and come out in the rates paid by consumers. Over the past 5 years, electricity costs have gone up 15%.That's not insignificant, but utilities are asking for similar increases here in North America, without providing any where near the kind of innovation taking place in Portugal. All the same, voters have been unhappy about rate increases and it seems that this is at least partially responsible for Sócrates narrow victory in 2009.

I've posted short excerpts below, but the full piece is well worth reading.
---

“You cannot imagine the pressure we suffered that first year,” said Manuel Pinho, Portugal’s minister of economy and innovation from 2005 until last year, who largely masterminded the transition, adding, “Politicians must take tough decisions.”

Still, aggressive national policies to accelerate renewable energy use are succeeding in Portugal and some other countries, according to a recent report by IHS Emerging Energy Research of Cambridge, Mass., a leading energy consulting firm. By 2025, the report projected, Ireland, Denmark and Britain will also get 40 percent or more of their electricity from renewable sources; if power from large-scale hydroelectric dams, an older type of renewable energy, is included, countries like Canada and Brazil join the list.

If the United States is to catch up to countries like Portugal, energy experts say, it must overcome obstacles like a fragmented, outdated energy grid poorly suited to renewable energy; a historic reliance on plentiful and cheap supplies of fossil fuels, especially coal; powerful oil and coal industries that often oppose incentives for renewable development; and energy policy that is heavily influenced by individual states.
The relative costs of an energy transition would inevitably be higher in the United States than in Portugal. But as the expense of renewable power drops, an increasing number of countries see such a shift as worthwhile, said Alex Klein, research director, clean and renewable power generation, at IHS.

“The cost gap will close in the next decade, but what you get right away is an energy supply that is domestically controlled and safer,” Mr. Klein said.

Renewables In Your BackYard: On-line Tools Show Solar & Wind Potential

2010-08-06T10:15:00.004-04:00

Is it worth it? Figuring out if your home, office, or the public pool down the street is suitable for solar or wind power isn't a straightforward process. Decentralized renewable energy is expanding rapidly and will be a taken for granted part of tomorrow's smart energy systems. Thankfully a series of on-line tools exists to help you figure out what you and your community's place can be in that future.

There are two basic questions when it comes to renewables: First, how suitable is your site – how much sun does your roof really get? Second, how do the costs pencil out and what subsidies and incentives are available to make it more affordable?

In Your Backyard
For Americans, “In My Backyard” (IMBY) produced by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is an excellent tool. Working in googlemaps you pinpoint your roof, draw on the size and location of the solar or wind installation you have in mind and hit “enter”. The system then uses meterological data, local electricity rates and information on state and federal incentives, to calculate how much power you would produce and how long it will take for your installation to pay for itself at currents rates. (I confess that there is something strangely addictive about drawing solar panels all over your neighbours' roofs.)

IMBY doesn't work north of the 49th Parallel, but Canadians (and Americans) can use SolarRating.ca. SolarRating goes a step further than IMBY, letting you get more accurate estimates by adding the slope of your roof, and trees or other buildings that may shade your panels. A quick login is necessary at the end to see the report for your location.

Of Desire and Tax Incentives
While costs of solar have come down by more than a quarter since 2002, subsidies and incentives are still key to level the playing field with conventional energy sources. Incentive programs are being managed by a variety of different government agencies and non-profits. Cumulatively they can cover up to 80% of costs in some areas, but keeping track of them can be difficult. In the U.S. the aptly named DSIRE database, has federal, state and local incentives all sorted by state.

The route is less direct for Canadians. This past March the federal government cancelled their ecoEnergy program, effectively halving the amount of available subsidies. Thankfully, many provinces and municipalities offer their own incentives. Natural Resources Canada hosts a directory of those programs. The Canadian Solar Industries Association also offers a good listing of solar incentives. A variety of non-profits, like B.C. and Ontario's Sustainable Energy Association, also offer support that is not listed there.

Canada Trailing
Putting together this information, I was surprised by the difference between what is available North and South of the Canada/US border. A homeowner in Oregon can qualify for cash rebates and tax credits that can halve the cost of a $40,000 home solar electric system. In Canada, only the Northwest Territories offers direct incentives and they are caped at $5,000 for individuals (although it rises to $50,000 for communities). Ontario's generous feed-in tariff's also act as an incentive for local renewables (recent events aside). But in the rest of the country only solar air and water heating systems qualify for rebates, and in most cases they are under $5,000.

Until that imbalance gets addressed, Canadians are going to be trailing their US cousins when it comes to small scale renewables.

(photo CANSIA)

Cycling "Superhighways" Open in London

2010-07-21T12:31:00.006-04:00

I've had to be in London four or five times over these past few years. Whenever I've seen cyclists there slogging through traffic under leaden skies they've always looked like a valiant but bedraggled endangered species. Something fighting to stay alive in a hostile environment. That may be changing.

On Monday London launched two new “cycle superhighways” designed to give bike commuters secure and direct access to the city centre. Ten more will be put in by 2012 (see above link for the map). Mayor Johnson is quoted on the BBC calling for a militant “cycling revolution.” Johnson? Militant cyclist? Really?

There is no question that we are seeing a transition in the way that cities see cyclists. London is following in the footsteps of cities like Montreal, Portland, and New York City, that have been strategically expanding transit oriented bike infrastructure. London is also introducing Montreal's successful BIXI bike-sharing system this summer. In Montreal, the success of BIXI has a lot to do with a rapid expansion of high-quality bike paths throughout the city. London's plan is attempting to recreate that synergy.

But watching the initial videos of London cyclists using the new “superhighway” they still look a bit, well, endangered. The most glaring problem is that the blue painted lanes are “advisory” not enforced. There is no penalty for London drivers who cruse along in the lane; the same driver in NYC would be liable for a $115 fine (or at least some taunting from a clown).

The city's official line is that visibility and volume of riders will keep drivers clear of the lane. I'm sceptical, but there are other people better placed than me to judge. Andreas Kambanis who writes a prominent London cycle blog has given the system a lukewarm reception. He, like most of the local comments I've read, is supportive of the new routes but sees them as a modest start more than the “revolution” Johnson has been trumpeting (read his interview with the mayor).

At an ideas level, it's clear that cities are coming to see cycling as a significant mode of transportation (not just recreation). The potential for reducing congestion and increasing air quality, while also bringing down GHG emissions, is huge. Not to mention the fact that it's more fun that driving.

Cyclists don't emit anything (except perhaps early morning coffee-breath). And, after you do the slightly awkward conversion from joules of energy to gallons of gas, it turns out that they get the equivalent to 653mpg (the TGV gets 500). Currently 20% of London's GHG emissions come from transportation. To capture that potential people need to take to bikes en masse, and for that they need rights of way that are sensibly routed and properly protected. That can mean fines, curbs, or creating separate bike routes that take cyclists off of busy roads all together.

Other cities have done it. Here's hoping that that future is the real destination of London's new blue network.

(photo: inhabitat)

Parking to Paradise: Depave Portland in Action

2010-06-29T02:14:00.002-04:00

Asphalt – why do we love you so? From mega-parking lots, to medians, to that little foot wide space between the road and the sidewalk -- the black stuff has oozed all over our urban spaces. In some spaces it has a purpose. But its uninterrupted reign also leads to serious problems. The dark impermeable surface is behind both the urban heat island effect and floods of storm water that overwhelm old sewers and pump waste into waterways (or, if you are unlucky, your basement). Some cities are pioneering ways to breakup the tar-scape. But I'd also heard rumours of a community based group in Portland that was taking things into their own hands.

Earlier this month I got to see Depave Portland in action and I put together this short video of a project to they were running at a local school. Starting early one Saturday volunteers started prying loose pre-cut squares of asphalt and carting them off. By the end of the day a few hundred square feet were open and ready for the gardens, play, and educational spaces the school had planned.

If you think you'd like to try something similar, Depave has put together a 9 page guide (pdf). In this case, it was the New Day School that started the ball rolling. The school took care of getting the permits to remove the asphalt and developing a plan for the space. Depave raised funds to cover costs and coordinated volunteers. A week before the event a dozen or so Depave volunteers spent a day with concrete saws cutting the asphalt into about 2 ft x 2 ft sections (affectionately known as “brownies”) that you see being removed in the video.

What caught me was how much fun it was. It may not be the quickest way to remodel a site, but there is something amazingly satisfying about getting together, making new friends and transforming the landscape. Now every time I pass an unused and unnecessary bit of asphalt, I can't help asking myself “what else could we do with that spot?” ...

Research & Publications

2010-06-26T22:41:00.005-04:00

For those who are interested in more than what I put up here on openalex, I've finally gotten around to posting an on-line list of my research publications (with .pdf links where possible).

- Book Chapters:

Aylett, A. (2011) "Bureaucracies and Low Carbon Transitions." in Urban Transitions /Technological Transitions: Cities and Low Carbon Transitions eds. Harriet Bulkeley and Simon Marvin. (Routledge)

- Articles:

Aylett, A. (coming in 2012) "Fractured Energy and Networked Governance: Low-Carbon Transitions in Cities Under Stress (Durban, KZN, South Africa and Portland, OR, USA)" in Urban Studies.

Aylett, A. (2010) “Conflict, Collaboration, and Climate Change: Participatory Democracy and Urban Environmental Struggles in Durban, South Africa.” in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Volume 34.3 478–95

Aylett, A. (2010) “Participatory Planning, Justice and Climate Change in Durban, South Africa.” in Environment and Planning A. 42(1) 99-115

T. Rutland & A. Aylett (2008) “The Work of Policy: Actor-Networks, Governmentality, and Local Action on Climate Change in Portland, Oregon.” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 26(4) 627-646

- Reference:

Aylett, A. (2011) “Changing Perceptions of Climate Mitigation Among Competing Priorities: The Case of Durban, South Africa” in Cities and Climate Change: Global Report on Human Settlements 2011, UN-HABITAT.

Aylett, A. (2010) “Cities for Climate Protection” in Paul Robbins and Kevin Cohen eds. Green Society Reference Series Volume 4: Green Cities. (SAGE)

Aylett, A. and T. Barnes (2009) “Language,” International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography , Thrift et al. eds. Oxford: Elsevier.

Freedom + Passion beats Carrot with its Own Stick: what really motivates people

2010-06-14T23:21:00.005-04:00

It's been a busy few weeks, but I finally have a chance to break radio silence and put up some new content on the blog. I've recently been introduced to the RSA's brilliant series of animated conference presentations. These quirky hand-drawn animations are an informal way to absorb interesting ideas by some of today's big thinkers.

They have one on Jeremy Rifkin's Empathic Civilization that I blogged about earlier. But the one that grabbed my attention is an adaptation of a talk given by Dan Pink on what motivates people - particularly what motivates them to innovate and excel in challenging circumstances. Apart from general interest value, I was hooked by the fact that I've seen the dynamics Pink describes play out in much of my own research on urban sustainability (see here for a good example).

Enjoy!

.

Solar Sisters: The Avon Lady of African Renewables

2010-06-01T16:20:00.011-04:00

[This piece is also running over at worldchanging.]

Solar Sisters, a new solar entrepreneur program, has taken Avon's social sales model and is using it to spread solar powered lamps across Uganda. Avon cosmetics began as a failed 19th century book-selling venture. It's “Avon Calling” approach, where saleswomen sold directly to other women, helped it grow into one of the 500 largest companies in the USA with annual global revenues of over US$ 10 billion.

Both energy and cosmetics have a lot to do with gender.Solar Sisters -- like the Barefoot Solar Engineers that I've written about earlier -- uses the special place that women have as procurers and managers of fuel use to take on the social, environmental and economic impacts of energy poverty.

In the developing world women are primarily responsible for gathering, purchasing and using household energy: wood, coal, kerosene or gas. Smoke from using these fuels indoors causes serious long term health problems. Poor households also spend a greater percentage of their income on energy than wealthier ones, and are charged more for energy. This unreliable and costly access to energy, especially electricity, is one of the key factors that drives migration from rural and semi-rural areas to expanding cities.

Now starting their first pilot projects, Solar Sisters approach to these issues is relatively simple: they sell two different models of solar lamps (a basic model, and a larger one that also recharges cellphones). The lamps can replace both kerosene lights and long trips into urban areas to get phones recharged. In a recent ChangeMakers article, Katherine Lucey, former banker and founder of Solar Sisters, explains the multiple benefits of the lamps:

“With solar, they don’t have to breathe in tadooba toxic fumes. When they look at the black walls of their house, they realize that if the walls are black, the inside of their lungs are black. ... Economically, it makes sense because within two months, they they'll recover the cost of having to buy kerosene. This immediately frees up 20 percent of their income.”

Last year, Oxford business professor Linda Scott argued that the Avon model might even be better then microfinance when if comes to lifting women out of poverty. Initial results from research that she has been doing in South Africa show it to be more accessible than microcredit and well suited to dynamics of local communities.

Whether lessons learned from lipstick in South Africa will hold true for solar lamps in Uganda is an open question. But Lucey claims that for the female entrepreneurs working for Solar Sisters, the lamps offer a rare economic opportunity and can bring in up to $US450 a year. Solar Sisters covers the upfront costs of the women's first solar light inventory, and they then use their earnings to purchase more inventory.

The biggest hurdle may be the price of the lamps themselves. The two models sell for $US15 and $US45. That may simply be out of reach for many families. The Solar Sisters blog discusses one community that came up with a way of collectively financing their purchases (something also done for livestock and other larger purchases).

In interview, Lucey talks about the difficulty of convincing women to think of the lanterns as a long-term investment. It is about more than a change in thinking though. The same factors that stop women from saving money by purchasing larger quantities of kerosene or coal also apply to solar. A lack of savings, unpredictable finances and in some cases concerns over theft steer women to purchase energy (and many other daily commodities like rice and oil) in small amounts.

Solar Sisters is a promising project – and the image of solar “Avon Ladies” spreading across across Africa is hard to resist. Solar Sisters is addressing the same issues as the impressive Indian Barefoot Solar Engineer program. That program's success depended both a clear understanding of women's role as energy managers and a smart approach to financing. That second part seems to be the one thing missing from the Solar Sisters project. Before Solar Sisters really takes off, I have a feeling that they will take the lessons learned from their early clients' community financing arrangements and build them directly into their business model.

[images from Avon and Solar Sisters]

City Repair: (re)Building the Cities We Want

2010-05-14T10:09:00.004-04:00

[This piece is also running over at worldchanging.]

This month's edition of YES! Magazine has an inspiring short interview with City Repair co-founder Mark Lakeman.

City Repair, for those who don't know it, is a Portland based volunteer run non-profit. They earned their stripes by helping communities take intersections, parking lots and other unpromising pieces of pavement, and transform them into meaningful social places. Their Projects page has more details on “placemaking”, their excellent Depave spin-off, and other creations.

In the interview, Lakeman emphasizes the way that spaces affect how we relate to each other. Reclaiming an intersection may at first seem to be about beautifying the neighbourhood. But really, it is about building community:

"The power of what we do is we start with the idea and the belief that we can make it happen. If it has a social basis, if your primary goal is to build networks and relationships, then you attract all the other forms of capital that begin with the social. That's the magic. That's the key."

It's an elegant and empowering way of looking at the relationship between community and the urban landscape.

"Public participation” can often seem like a market survey. It's done as a way to harvest preferences and opinions from the public. But – whether it is projects like City Repair in Portland, Santropol Roulant and Rooftop Gardens in Montreal, or Green Change in Toronto – every city has examples that show how much more communities have to contribute. As always, the trick is knowing how to link and build up from individual projects to create larger shifts in how our cities are built and lived.

Below are a few excerpts from the interview:

"For most of the history of humanity, we lived and worked in the same places, integrated, and everything we did would deepen our relationships to each other. The greatest product of that way of life was our cultural cohesion and our stories – we weren’t isolated the way that we are now.

But our cities and places are no longer ours. We’re not building our own places; we’re not designing them to fit our own needs. Our lives are zoned like we’re a resource to be managed. We're housed here, and then this is where we work in order to pay for the housing we barely get to live in. Mixed use here. Monocultural use here. Parking garage. Maybe a waterfront here. Park. Park. It doesn't add up. None of them are really whole."

"There’s so much we need to change, but I really don’t think it's going to be all that hard. We just need to say, "There's nowhere to sit around here? Well, we need to create some places to sit. People aren't talking? Then we need gathering places." You look at the problem of a particular place and you address it. People start to get excited; the void starts to get filled. The projects are small, but they keep coming as revelations."

"When did we stop believing we had a say in our own reality? ...

The beautiful thing happening now is that dozens and dozens and dozens of people saying, "Yes, I have my power," and then creating these physical expressions of what it actually looks like."

Games Over: Vancouver After the Olympics

2010-05-11T22:27:00.003-04:00

[The May edition of ReNew Canada is out and running an expanded version of a worldchanging post that I did on the green legacy of Vancouver's Olympics. I had a chance to do interviews for the piece with Brent Toderian - Vancouver's Planning Director -- and Rob Bennett, the head of the Portland Sustainability Institute. The opener is below and you can download the PDF here.]

Vancouver’s Olympic Village and Convention Centre were the media-pleasing centrepieces for what was touted as the most sustainable Olympic Games ever.

But headline projects can be a double-edged sword. While they embody admirable principles, they risk absorbing enormous amounts of a city’s energy and distracting people from the fact that the city itself has changed very little.

For Vancouver, these two ultra-green developments are icons of a larger shift. Rather than being exceptions that prove the rules of unsustainable urbanization, they have helped change the rules. The city has used these two developments as a springboard to push the limits of green building practises
throughout the city.

Both developments are about as photogenic as it gets. The mixed-use Olympic Village—one of only two LEED Platinum neighbourhoods built so far—is a green
builder’s fantasy. Powered by district energy and local renewables, with a greywater system and a carbon-zero building, it’s been called the world’s greenest neighbourhood.

In the early days, when cities were just pushing their way onto the environmental stage, one or two successes like these would have been enough to establish a city’s green cred. But too often cities get stuck in the individual project stage. After having pushed their way onto the stage in frustration over the lack of climate change action at higher levels of government, cities too become better at making promises than delivering results. In fact, only a handful of cities in North America have managed to meet their emissions reduction targets.

[Download the rest of the article in PDF here.]

Digging Up The Streets in Montreal

2010-05-05T09:17:00.014-04:00

When I'm walking through a city I have a game I play, you've probably done it too: I imagine what you could do with all the open space if cars suddenly disappeared. You get a taste when you stumble onto one of the pedestrianized downtown malls that are becoming increasingly popular.

But making window-shopping more pleasant just can't be the apex of the new green metropolis. And what about spaces outside the downtown?

Yesterday here in Montreal, the borough of Le Plateau Mont-Royal announced plans to close 10 to 15 residential streets and convert them into parks, community spaces and farmers markets. The first street will be closed in the coming weeks and the rest done over the course of 2010. Here's a short excerpt from the local coverage:

"Mayor Luc Ferrandez announced the borough will close off one of the Plateau's north-south streets to cars, and next year dig it up to expand a local park.

The move is a first step toward undoing decades of urban planning that favoured cars over people."

Ferrandez and the Projet Montreal party swept last year's election by promising projects exactly like this one. Residents strongly supported a platform that focused on the environment and community space. Now that those ideas are starting to transform the city's streets, the borough has become a bit of a living laboratory for reclaiming and greening urban neighbourhoods.

I'll watching with interest to see how things play out on the ground.

(thnx Toby)

Orson Wells on Sprawl and Time-Space Compression

2010-04-30T13:55:00.012-04:00

I've become totally hooked on Orson Wells' Mercury Theatre On The Air, after discovering a trove of original broadcast on MP3. The radio show ran from 1938-40 on CBS and CBC. They became famous when their production of "War of the Worlds" convinced listeners that the Earth (or at least New York State) was under attack by fire breathing Martians.

On a recent bus ride back from Washington, I stumbled on this great clip of Orson Wells (of Citizen Kane fame) and Walter Hughston summing up both the perils of automobile centred urbanization and the concept of time-space compression. It's from a 1939 broadcast of the novel “The Magnificent Ambersons.”

To set the scene: Orson Wells – the young George who doesn't want to work -- is courting Lucy, the daughter of Mr. Eugene Morgen (Walter Huston) the automobile tycoon. But George's technique could use some work...

Even though the novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, “The Ambersons” isn't the best of the Mercury productions – for entertainment value try "The Count of Monte Cristo." But the backdrop of the melodrama is a creepy and ambiguous portrait of 20th C. urbanization and the rise of the automobile.

An uneasy prescience comes through as you listen to both Wells and Tarkington dwell on the same issues that preoccupy us now: sprawl, the seeming shrinking significance of physical distance, and the impact that cars are having on our cities and our culture. (Ask Steven Hawking, and he would tell you that Wells' was right about alien invasions as well.)

Thanks to Kim Scarborough for maintaining the fantastic Mercury Theatre website.

Living Cities for An Empathic Civilization: an Urban Take of Jeremy Rifkin

2010-04-28T09:42:00.006-04:00

I just finished listening to a podcast of Jeremy Rifkin discussing his new book "The Empathic Civilization" on CBC Radio's excellent "Ideas" program [download]. It's a sweeping intellectual quest of a book that sets out an escape route from the corner we are busy painting ourselves into.

Rifkin's project is to put the evolution of an increasingly global and empathetic consciousness in the ring with the rapdily worsening problem of climate change. His cliff hanger ending to the first in a series of Huffington Post blog post sums it up this way: "Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?"

I like the question. But what I like even better is his way of asking it. The building blocks of the book are journeys through biology, history, and the impact of energy and communication technology on human consciousness and society. He argues that we are in the early stages of a radical transition. What he leaves out is cities – the places where that transition will be felt and shaped most directly.

Wet-Wired For Empathy
Human's are wet-wired for empathy. That is to say that understanding the feelings of other people and species is built into the tissue of our brains. Inspired by that relatively recent discovery, Rifkin sets out a fundamental revision of human history. Our focus on violence, war and conquest comes from a fascination with the novel, not the norm. More important than wars and conquests are the ways that new energy technologies and communications revolutions intersect.

He argues that every great shift – from agricultural civilization right up to the industrial age – have been based on pairing of energy sources and the methods of communication needed to manage them. Print technology, for example, emerged as part of the apparatus needed to manage the industrial era. But at the same time, print – especially in the form of national newspapers – formed the basis for nationalism by making it possible for people to know things about and imagine their place in a national community much larger than their day to day experiences. (A very good book on that come out in 1983.)

A Change in Energy + Technology = A Change in Consciousness + Social Organizations

And that brings us to today, where somewhere a grade school student in Germany is playing around with Google Earth on a computer powered by solar panels on her roof. That's my example, but Rifkin argues that that pairing of interconnected decentralized energy and communication systems will transform both human consciousness and social institutions.

Rather than the Enlightenment idea that we are all rational, utilitarian individuals, the radically connected societies created by new technologies make possible a dramatic drawing together by extending our capacity for empathy further than ever before. Empathy not just for other people, but for the natural world that makes possible life on earth.

At the same time, the redrawn energy grid will make old national identities and institutions increasingly irrelevant. Instead, collaborative regional and continental webs of governance, similar to those evolving in the EU, will take their place. "In this new era of distributed energy, governing institutions will more resemble the workings of the ecosystems they manage."

Another Utopia?
I love it. Yes, the Euro is in trouble. Yes, he makes generalizations about hunter-gatherer societies that I am sure some anthropologist and historian would say are just plain silly. And yes, this all sounds a bit utopic. The Enlightenment also had its share of utopic thinkers, let's not forget. What we got in the end was the liberal economic theory, Francis Fukuyama, Stephen Harper, and the Tea Party. Hardly reason for hope.

But I love it because positive visions of the future are in short supply these days, and unlike the utopias of Thomas Moore or Thoreau, this one seems to go with the technological spirit of the times, not against it. Unlike Friedman or Fukuyama, he isn't arguing that liberal democracy and globalization will somehow make us all the same and equal. If anything, Rifkin's argument is about how we might better understand other peoples' – and other species' – uniqueness and difference.

Empathic Cities
What is Google Earth doing to your brain and your sense of place in the world? How does slapping some solar on your roof change the nature of the social contract that holds the modern state together?

Or should I say: "How *could* they influence those things?" Because if there is one thing that irks me about Rifkin's argument, it is that he makes it all seems so inevitable. Let's be real, the transition to biospheric politics and ecological empathy isn't going to happen just because everyone is using the internet and uses green electricity. Virtual communities are fine, but they need to lead to real action. Changes in consciousness need to get expressed in real changes in the way we use space and energy. And that is where cities come in.

More than any other scale, cities are where people are creating and experience those shifts. Look at the spread of ideas from transport-oriented-development, to BIXI, or from urban agriculture to decentralized energy grids. Look at the way those ideas have spread through online networks, to then be adopted and developed by local communities. Communities, often very small initally, who pushed to have them integrated into their local landscapes. Look at the amazing human and ecological diversity that make up our urban populations. Put all those together and you get a pretty good example of the kind of empathetic ecosystem Rifkin discusses, as well as the daily struggles that make them possible.

By focusing on governing institutions that mirror the natural systems they are embedded in, Rifkin is tapping into a rapidly developing conversation about what cities are and what they could be (see Brugmann and Sassen for example, or the Living Cities Challenge).

Urban spaces have the ability to make us deeply aware of our connections to the natural world. But they have historically been designed to do justs the opposite. For Rifkin we are living through a shift from Homo Sapien to Homo Empathicus. That may be, but we have already become Homo Urbanus. The way citizens, communities, and governments shape the nature of our cities (all puns intended) is going to have a big influence on if, when, and how that transition takes place.

Cómo construir una economía 'verde' - Krugman en Español

2010-04-25T11:11:00.004-04:00

Last weeked Paul Krugman published an excellent feature in the New York Times magazine on environmental economics and the possiblity (and necessity) of building a green economy.

I posted some comments earlier that started off an interesting dicsussion. Today the article has come out in a Spanish translation in Spain's El Pais newspaper (thnx Lunatrix!). (A great paper that is also the source of many of my favourite climate comix).