The Guide to Greening Cities

Philadelphia

Preface and Acknowledgments

Sadhu Aufochs Johnston

Sustainability has been part of my consciousness since I was a kid growing up in communities in India, Europe, and America, where our school without walls program allowed me to work in our community’s construction recycling facility. There it was laid out before me, as clear to my ten-year-old self as it is to me today: materials can be reused to build our community rather than going to the dump. I went on to start the recycling program in my high school; then, as a college student, I worked for the city’s recycling program.

During my first few years in city government, I found myself quite frustrated trying to figure out best practices and to learn from other places. I spent hours searching the web and then got transferred from office to office after cold-calling other municipalities to learn more about how they were greening their practices. I struggled to figure out how to structure our internal greening efforts, which initiatives to prioritize, and how to shape particular policies. It was so rewarding when I did finally connect with a peer, but often the pace of working in city government meant that there wasn’t time to do a bunch of interviews and new research to learn how they put together their programs, what worked, what didn’t. I was relatively new to the municipal sector, but the green city movement was new as well, and people were interested in learning more. I received many inquiries to provide advice to cities that were kicking off their efforts, programs that were struggling within cities, and groups wanting to influence and work with cities.

Largely out of frustration, in 2008 Amanda Eichel, who worked for Steve Nicholas in Seattle’s Office of Sustainability and Environment, and I began working with Julia Parzen to start the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN). Our intention was to develop a network of municipal staff to build relationships, share best practices, and even collaborate. I quickly realized that we weren’t the only ones struggling to connect with others in the green city field, and we weren’t the only ones struggling to learn about best practices from our peers. At the first USDN meeting in 2009 in Chicago, with about eighty city staff from across North America, it became clear that it was really important that the first generation of green city leaders be given opportunities to share with one another and with others entering the field. Thankfully, Sharon Alpert from the Surdna Foundation and Darryl Young from the Summit Foundation, among others, saw the opportunity and helped to fund our gathering and network-building effort. It was amazing to connect with other staff struggling with the same issues that I was and to share our lessons and stories from in the trenches. Now, on a daily basis, dozens of municipal staff from over 120 cities share reports and experiences or connect directly over the phone to learn from one another. We’re able to help people new to their position steepen their learning curve and hit the ground running, while also helping veterans of the field quickly find leading practices to keep their work moving.

So, when Island Press expressed interest in publishing a book on how cities are doing this work, it felt like a great opportunity to share my own experiences and the lessons from USDN members with others working with, or within, city government. All of the royalties from the sale of the book will be donated to USDN to support further collaboration and network development among city staff across the continent. Additional information, cases in point, and current green city news are available online at www.guidetogreeningcities.org.

I’d like to thank my wife, Manda Aufochs Gillespie, whose work on www.thegreenmama.com is an inspiring example of what can be done in the home and in our daily lives to raise our children in a conscious way. I’d also like to thank my two girls, Zella Rose and Zada Maela, for the inspiration of life and for putting up with a distracted father for the past year. I’m also thankful to the many municipal leaders involved with USDN for their work and for sharing it with us for this book. Without Darryl Young at the Summit Foundation’s support of the green city movement and his encouraging us to undertake the task of writing the book, this field wouldn’t be where it is today, and we wouldn’t have taken this on. Finally, I’d like to thank Steve and Julia for agreeing to spend their precious time writing this book with me and to thank Gloria Ohland for her extensive work in helping us with the writing process.

Steven S. Nicholas

I first got hooked on the idea of sustainable development back in 1991, during a one-day conference in Seattle designed to gather input for the 1992 Earth Summit. This is so clearly right, I remember thinking. "Of course our economic, environmental, and social health are intertwined parts of the same whole. Of course we should be pursuing these goals in integrated ways and thinking well beyond the next budget and election cycle." I was a senior environmental planner for the City of Seattle at the time, relatively early in my career, so this came as something of an epiphany. And since that day, I’ve been on the easier-said-than-done journey of putting the principles of sustainable development into action in my life and career.

A few of us who attended that conference in Seattle began scheming about what we could do to harness the blend of inspiration and urgency we were feeling and to advance sustainable development in the real world, starting with our own community. From those discussions emerged Sustainable Seattle, a small nonprofit organization that continues, to this day, to find creative and effective ways to increase awareness of, and action toward, sustainability in the Puget Sound region, beginning with its influential and much-emulated Indicators of Sustainable Community project.

Since then, I’ve spent most of my career in local government, including eight years as sustainability director for the City of Seattle. I quickly grew to believe in what is a central thesis of this book: that local government leadership is a critical and powerful leverage point for advancing sustainability. I came to the Institute for Sustainable Communities in 2008 to help advance its mission of building capacity for sustainable development at the community scale, with a growing focus on cities here in North America as well as in fast-growing, carbon-intensive regions such as China, India, and other parts of Asia. For me, this book is very much an extension of my day job, which is all about helping communities actually do sustainable development by offering training and peer learning, providing efficient access to high-caliber information and expertise, and showcasing and accelerating the transfer of promising practices in local solutions to the global challenges of climate protection and sustainable development.

Shortly after I became Seattle’s first sustainability director in 2000, coauthor Sadhu Johnston took on a similar role with the City of Chicago. At the time, we were part of a very small and largely invisible club—there were maybe a dozen or two of us across the country, and until the Blackstone Ranch Institute brought us together in 2005, we barely knew one another. The Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN)—which under the servant leadership of coauthor Julia Parzen has quickly become a high-impact learning and doing community of sustainability directors from about 120 local governments throughout North America—was not yet even a glimmer in anybody’s eye. Today, there likely are thousands of people in these positions in towns, cities, counties, and provinces throughout North America, toiling away in institutionally and politically complex—and largely uncharted—territory, armed with copious amounts of commitment and creativity but very little in the way of resources and formal authority. My mission and my hope in coauthoring this book, having done my share of toiling in similar trenches, is to share some insights, ideas, inspirations, and stories that might help this growing cadre of green city leaders toil away even more efficiently and effectively, while at the same time helping all those who work with local governments to create the healthy, strong, fair, and prosperous cities that can be—that must be—the building blocks of a sustainable future.

I deeply appreciate the support and encouragement I’ve received from the Institute for Sustainable Communities, in particular the inspiration, leadership, and counsel I get from our founder, Madeleine Kunin, and president, George Hamilton. In addition, a great many of the examples and insights featured in this book are drawn from the research and reflections of my team at ISC, which includes Steve Adams, Nathaly Agosto Filión, Mike Crowley, Chris Forinash, Josh Kelly, Deb Perry, and Becky Webber.

During my years with the City of Seattle, I was very fortunate to work with many outstanding leaders, mentors, and colleagues whose ideas and inspiration also undergird my work on this book. In particular, I want to thank former Seattle mayors Greg Nickels, Norm Rice, and Paul Schell; Diana Gale; Denis Hayes; Ray Hoffman; Gary Lawrence; Dennis McLerran; Diane Sugimura; Tom Tierney; and, especially, my former colleagues at the Seattle Office of Sustainability and Environment, including Jeanie Boawn, Charlie Cunniff, Amanda Eichel, Richard Gelb, Tracy Morgenstern, and Jill Simmons.

In addition, I want to thank the other colleagues and friends who contributed to this book by sharing their experiences and insights with me: Susan Anderson, Lucia Athens, Rob Bennett, Vicki Bennett, David Bragdon, Scot Case, Michelle Connor, Laurence Doxsey, Jason Edens, David Fairman, Pat Field, Katherine Gajewski, Carlos Gallinar, KC Golden, Jason Hartke, Jeremy Hays, Marty Howell, Jim Hunt, Jennifer Jurado, John Knott, Dean Kubani, Joel Makower, Anita Maltbia, Dennis McLerran, Stephanie Meyn, Aaron Miripol, Dennis Murphey, Melanie Nutter, Shannon Parry, Rob Phocas, Fred Podesta, Gayle Prest, Julian Prosser, Matt Raker, Jonathan Rose, Laura Spanjian, Gus Speth, Paula Thomas, Susy Torriente, Maggie Ullman, Andrew Watterson, Brad Weinig, Dace West, Chris Wiley, Nicole Woodman, and Larry Zinn.

Thanks to Island Press for believing in this project, to Heather Boyer for being our editor extraordinaire, and to Gloria Ohland for her work to sharpen and synthesize the three authors’ respective styles and contributions.

Last but most important, thanks to my wife, Sarah McKearnan, for her sharp insights and endless encouragement, and to Sarah and our children, Dillon and Shea, for tolerating many early-morning, late-night, and weekend stints away from home to work on this project.

Julia Parzen

Four and a half years ago, Sadhu Johnston asked me to help found the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN), a peer network of municipal sustainability leaders who exchange information, collaborate to enhance individual practice, and work together to advance the field of urban sustainability. Since we started USDN, its membership has tripled, the network has developed strong peer connections, and members have pursued a variety of exciting collaborations aimed at advancing urban sustainability across North America. Today USDN, a project of the Global Philanthropy Partnership, is a preeminent network of municipal sustainability leaders from 120 cities and close to 400 staff members. Sadhu has cochaired USDN’s Planning Committee, and I have been the network coordinator and weaver since the network’s inception. I met Steve Nicholas soon after we launched USDN. Through his leadership, the Institute for Sustainable Communities became a partner in many member initiatives.

I would like to thank all of the past and present USDN members who contributed their stories for this book, including Michael Armstrong, Roy Brooke, Cori Burbach, John Coleman, Leslie Ethen, Larry Falkin, Adam Freed, Katherine Gajewski, Marty Howell, James Hunt, Jamie Kidwell, Dean Kubani, Anna Mathewson, Doug Melnick, Nils Moe, Dennis Murphey, Matt Naud, Shannon Parry, Gayle Prest, Stephanie Smith, Laura Spanjian, Matt Stark, Beth Strommen, Paula Thomas, Maggie Ullman, Andrew Watterson, Catherine Werner, Nicole Woodman, Jo Zientek, and many others.

Contributing to this book provided me with the unique opportunity to step back and synthesize decades of work exploring the connection between environment, economic development, and equity. I believe I have been working on advancing sustainability since my first job; in 1978, with the US Environmental Protection Agency, I helped develop a plan for a venture fund for environmental solutions and a program to help small companies meet environmental requirements. I then developed renewable energy financing programs as deputy director of the Office of Policy, Planning, and Research, Department of Business and Economic Development, State of California. Then I cofounded a social venture named Working Assets, which helped thousands of people to do good by doing well by investing in mutual funds that embraced environmental quality and fair labor practices. When I was a program officer for the Joyce Foundation, my focus was on integrating the economic development and conservation programs. I really came to understand the way cities pursue sustainability through my two-year stint as outside advisor on the development and implementation of the Chicago Climate Action Plan (City of Chicago), and it was while working on this project that I met Sadhu.

The Guide to Greening Cities is the fourth book I have coauthored. Credit Where It’s Due: Development Banking for Communities (Temple University Press, 1992) showed how financial intermediaries could successfully advance community development. Many of the community development financial institutions that were new at that time are now the leaders in energy efficiency lending described in chapter 5 of this book. In 1990, I coedited Enterprising Women: Local Initiatives for Job Creation for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a book that explored the potential for self-employment in addressing a variety of community needs. Chapter 5 of this book also speaks to the potential to create new jobs through sustainable development. Finally, in 2004 I coauthored Financing Transit-Oriented Development, a chapter in The New Transit Town: Best Practices in Transit-Oriented Development, edited by Hank Dittmar and Gloria Ohland (Island Press). Transit-oriented development remains an important framework for holistic redevelopment (described in the Denver case in point in chapter 5) that has been joined by other district-scale frameworks for sustainability, such as eco-districts.

This book demonstrates the critical importance of boundary-jumping brokers and problem solvers to the advancement of sustainable development. Writing the book reaffirmed how grateful I am to actively play these roles. Thank you to my husband, Daniel, and sons, Jonah and Simon, for believing in me as a weaver and change agent. Thank you also to Pete Plastrik and John Cleveland of the Innovation Network for Communities, who have advised me on networks and much more.

Introduction

The New Urban Imperative

Sitting in the backseat of a rickshaw at a complete standstill, eyes burning and ears pounding from the honking of gridlocked traffic in Mumbai or another of the world’s megacities, is an experience that certainly begs the question Can cities be green? How can you not worry about the future of humanity as people continue to crowd into cities with open sewers, burning garbage piles, and sprawling slums? Yet amid this amazing chaos of urbanization and rapid growth there is an astonishing movement to turn cities into meccas for green living. Signs of this new form of city life can been found in the urban farms of sprawling, emptied-out Detroit; on the green roofs of Chicago, where there are beehives and prairie grasses swaying in the breeze; and in New York City’s Times Square, where a plaza filled with tables, chairs, and people talking and laughing has replaced a stretch of street where cars once blasted by pedestrians packed on narrow sidewalks.

This movement is transforming how our cities are run, how residents are served, and how urban economies are growing. From New York’s separated bike lanes to Austin’s electric vehicle infrastructure, from Cleveland’s wind industry to the dense and transit-oriented downtown of Vancouver, British Columbia, our cities are evolving, and—perhaps most surprising of all—this evolution is mostly being led from within city government. The rapid change taking place in our cities isn’t without its own challenges, though, as residents and businesses try to adjust to new mandates, new programs, and new ways of building and using urban infrastructure.

The hope that our cities offer for reshaping the way we live and the impact we have on the planet offers us a new urban imperative, with cities leading the way in solving the global environmental, social, and economic challenges of our time. The new urban imperative is that cities must address the global environmental crisis. Cities are where the most people live. Cities are where the most goods are consumed and the most waste is generated, and cities are where poverty is most concentrated. Vulnerable populations living in poverty in cities are at the greatest risk as a changing climate creates havoc in fragile areas. The good news is that cities are up for the challenge. There is a new generation of city leaders who are willing to take the risks and invest the resources to create change.

While cities in the developing world are where the majority of global population growth and future environmental impact will occur, the cities of the developed world are critical at this juncture. They currently consume the majority of the world’s resources and produce the majority of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and they serve as models for cities throughout the world. The new urban imperative leaves no choice—global cities must pursue green urbanism, and cities of the developed world must lead this movement and share their experiences with their peers in the developing world. There are three main reasons why.

The first reason is the sheer number of people that our cities must accommodate. The second is the growing environmental crisis and the role that cities play—they are both the problem and the solution. The third is that cities are on the front lines dealing with the impacts of a changing climate, where the world’s poorest people are affected by heat waves, storms, and flooding. Our climate is changing, and cities are bearing the brunt of this change. As life in rural areas becomes more difficult, people with few other options for survival are making their way into cities, whether to a ghetto in Los Angeles; skid row in Vancouver, British Columbia; or a favela in São Paulo, Brazil—urban areas are on the front lines of global economic inequity as the gap between rich and poor continues to grow.

The challenges that are front and center for today’s municipal leaders include the growth in urban populations and increased need for services, the increase in homelessness and poverty, limited financial resources, breakdowns in public education, decaying infrastructure, massive amounts of garbage, increasing crime, food shortages, and the global environmental crisis—all problems that are exacerbated by a changing climate. And as national governments either deny that climate change exists or become less responsive to problems because of a lack of revenue or political gridlock, residents are increasingly turning to local government to take action. Increasingly diverse urban populations expect more from the only level of government they can actively and meaningfully participate in—often not understanding or caring whether it is the level of government that has the funding and the mandate to address their concerns.

Around the world, municipal governments are grappling with the local manifestations of global issues, and, thankfully, a new generation of elected officials is tackling these challenges head-on. From Mexico City to Copenhagen, from Philadelphia to San Jose, these local leaders are recognizing that by addressing issues involving climate, waste, food, water, air, and energy they can improve the lives of their residents and make their cities more competitive. Often pushed by their citizens and driven by opportunity—or crisis—politicians and municipal staff are leading a global transformation of urban life the likes of which have not been seen since the Industrial