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News Feature: The quest for the sustainable city
Saturday, 2019/08/31 | 08:25:05
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M. Mitchell Waldrop PNAS August 27, 2019 116 (35) 17134-17138
Figure: Los Angeles is among the many cities pursuing an aggressive sustainability plan–one that aims to, among other things, recycle more wastewater, use more renewable energy, and accelerate reductions in carbon emissions. Image credit: Shutterstock/IM_photo.
Cities have become epicenters for confronting climate change, harnessing renewable energy, and mitigating pollution. The city plans striving for sustainability are many. Easy solutions are few.
On April 17, Los Angeles (LA) Mayor Eric Garcetti used his annual State of the City address (1) to announce a major update of LA’s four-year-old Sustainable City pLAn (2). Going forward, he said, LA would commit to recycling 100% of its wastewater by 2035; work toward 100% renewable electricity by 2045; mandate that every home, store, and office be carbon-emissions-free by 2050; and much more. At the same time, he pledged, the city would grow its economy; create 300,000 clean new jobs by 2035; and aggressively fight poverty, discrimination, pollution, and the other ills of society.
Garcetti described the updated plan, which was formally released on April 29, as “L.A.’s Green New Deal”—a not-so-veiled reference to the nationwide Green New Deal that had been introduced as a congressional resolution in February. That document laid out similar aspirations for the nation as a whole, albeit with far fewer specifics, and immediately stalled out, with various sides praising or vilifying it as visionary, naïve, essential for civilization’s survival, ruinously expensive, or a nightmarish example of government overreach.
But that impasse may well have been Garcetti’s point: whatever nation-states do or don’t do, the cities of the world aren’t waiting around. Under the banner of “sustainability,” they have been pursuing that same set of aspirational goals for a decade or more. And they’ve been doing so in a way that is strikingly concrete, pragmatic, collaborative, and nonpartisan.
New York, London, Copenhagen, and most of the other large cities in the developed world are now following sustainability plans, many of which are just as ambitious as LA’s version. In fact, LA joins at least 19 other cities worldwide that have set a target of zero or near-zero net carbon emissions by 2050—a goal they hope to attain by promoting fully electric vehicles, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, and buildings that meet stringent energy standards.
These big cities, along with several smaller ones, are acting because they have no choice, says Anu Ramaswami, an environmental engineer at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and head of a multi-university research consortium known as the Sustainable Healthy Cities Network. Every day, she says, local officials are forced to deal with the human costs of crumbling infrastructure, plant closures, poor health, racism, poverty, and pollution. And now cities are having to do it all in the context of climate change. When the floods come, she says, and the droughts, wildfires, rising seas, and all the rest, “the cities are going to be at the front lines, and they need to figure out how to respond.”
The good news is that cities are embracing new technologies and new ideas—and are eagerly sharing what they’ve learned through a host of national and multinational organizations. Among the resources is a 2016 National Academies report titled, “Pathways to Urban Sustainability,” (3) that offers a guide for sustainability efforts, from planning to implementation.
Cities certainly have their work cut out for them. Staying on the sustainability track that they have set for themselves will require a healthy dose of money, innovation, political will, and resourcefulness, notes Luis Bettencourt, a physicist who directs the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago. But right now, he says, “if you ask, ‘Who are the organizations with the agency to move this forward?’ it’s the cities.”
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