From gloom to boom: Greening urbanization

This entry by Per Meilstrup was originally posted on Green Growth Leaders (GGL) - a global alliance of cities, regions, countries and corporations, sharing a vision of building prosperous, green economies and communities - and a better tomorrow for their citizens.

Tired of the gloom and doom of climate change conferences? Then visit any ”green city” or ”urban sustainability” event. You will meet scores of lively, enthusiastic mayors, architects, planners, real estate developers, technology providers and NGOs deeply involved in building the green economy, not talking about it. Here it is not about frameworks and compromises, but practice, implementation and opportunities. There is a real green city boom going on, and if Cancun made you sad, this is where you should be. The difference in tone and atmosphere is astonishing. And much needed. I just spent three days at the Global Green Cities conference, hosted by our partners at The Bay Area Council in San Francisco, US, and enjoyed lively, enlightening discussions about tangible, real life projects around sustainable urban development; High speed rail, new urban centers, low carbon buildings, bicycle concepts, smart work centers etc. You could, in fact, walk from panel to panel for hours and not hear anything about carbon leakage, AWG KP, COPs or frameworks.

These people don’t care that much about global policy debates, at least not if they don’t deliver. Instead they invest, plan and build to provide mobility, housing and quality of life for their citizens and clients. They are just as aware of the challenge, we are facing, but they are absorbed in doing something about it. The context around ”green cities” is mindblowing; Every day 180.000 people move from rural areas to cities globally. That is two Tokyos pr. year! In 1975 the world’s megacities were London, New York, Paris, Berlin etc. In 2015 20 out of 23 of the world’s biggest cities will be in developing economies and they all count citizens in the double-digit millions. Urbanization thus represents, as Bay Area Council CEO Sean Randolph points out, the biggest challenge for all of us – and at the same time the biggest chance to lock the economy on to a more sustainable course: If we plan smartly and build more efficient buildings, transportation and infrastructure, urbanization can be the way to shape green growth on a very big scale.

It is almost impossible to understand the scale of the transformation unless you see it. San Francisco architect Jeffrey Heller was kind enough to share with me these two slides with postcards from Shanghai 1990 and 2010. A quick look says more than hundreds of reports; Creating sustainable urban centers in rapidly developing areas in China is something we should all be very concerned about – and see the opportunities in. San Francisco architects certainly do the latter. I met many US architects and urban planners, and all of them had the bulk of current activities in China. You immediately notice that green cities is an area where puplic-private partnerships is for real. City planners, local governments, technologists, big and small, are teaming up to meet the challenge. Cities know that they cannot do the job alone, they need investments and innovation. Companies seize the market opportunities and at the same time see cities as hubs for testing new solutions. You find mayors and CEOs deeply engaged in addressing the issue in a much more open and collaborative process than in other arenas.

Public-private partnerships is not an option, it is a necessity and a fact of life. Mr. Amitabh Kant, CEO of Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor Corp., is building 24 new cities along the new high speed rail line – and aiming at making them green in collaboration with private and public stakeholders. A mega project of 90 billion dollar. A company like Cisco is building their business model on green city development, introducing schemes like ”smart work centres”, e.g. in Amsterdam, as an integrated element in planning urban centres. A smart work centre is a shared satellite office where you go to work near your home in the suburbs with your laptop instead of commuting every day to the main office in the city centre. To a large extent our cities in the west are build to make cars, not people, happy. Urbanization leads to endless urban sprawl like in many US cities where living is practically impossible without a car and where everybody everyday spend (wasted) hours on motorways between their homes to their office.

The same mistake should be avoided in the new mega cities. Instead of ending up with hundreds of Bangkoks, considered a ”failed city” by many architects, we should build cities with smart density and mobility based on a mix of light rail, bicycles and walking. ”We need to move transport from cars to elevators” was one eye opener. Another is the fact that skyscrapers are green whereas suburbia is unsustainable, due to the efficiency of energy distribution and use of space in dense city centers. Where I come from (Denmark, Europe) that is a big surprise to most people. We tend to think that houses with gardens are green and city centers the opposite, but seeing examples from all over the world it is obvious that cities can be the key to green growth. The technology and thinking is here. What we need to do is to implement and make it work. Which is a lot more fun than negotiating brackets in treaty texts in dark hotel rooms.

Watch the videos from the Global Green Cities conference here.