Looking at the Paris Negotiations from a City Perspective

Avenue de Bretueil in Paris

Over 190 nations are now in Paris negotiating protocols to stem the slide toward catastrophic climate change.  At the same time, entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates are in Paris pledging billions of dollars toward finding new technologies to limit the carbon emissions from energy production.

I wish both efforts success, a wish with which few would disagree.

But neither effort quite aligns with the perspective that cities bring to the climate change conversation.  And that’s because cities are looking at a different segment of the carbon reduction curve than countries and entrepreneurs.

The nations and philanthropists are looking for ways to continue generating energy to grow economies, but with fewer or no carbon emissions.  Conversely, cities are looking for ways to live with less energy.  Entrepreneurs are looking for ways to power cars with fewer emissions.  Cities are trying to have people live more of their lives on bicycles.

Some may argue that the two paths lead to the same destination, so why quibble about the route?  But there’s a downside to solving problems with cutting edge technology.  We often fail to foresee unfortunate side effects.  The rule of unintended consequences always bats last.

Refining crude oil into lamp oil to light more homes and to reduce the hunting pressure on whales seemed a good plan.  Surely it couldn’t be a problem to drain the unusable fraction, now known as gasoline, into the nearby Cuyahoga River?

Harnessing the power of the atom to replace dangerous and earth scarring coal mining in feeding energy grids seemed a good plan.  Surely we could agree on a safe way to store the spent fuel, right?

I’m not predicting that the clean energy concepts to be brought forth by Gates and friends will result in environmental harm such as burning rivers or mounds of spent uranium awaiting a final home.  But it might.  Because stuff happens.

To the extent we can, making do with less energy is the safer route, the route with less potential for distressing surprises.  Thus, it’s worth observing the attention being given to cities and their responses to climate change, most of which focus on reduced energy usage.

Writing in Next City, Feargus O’Sullivan describes the efforts by host city Paris to reduce carbon emissions by limiting the use of private cars while enhancing the transit, pedestrian, and bicycle opportunities. 

Writing in CityLab, Laura Bliss provides a broader overview of city initiatives around the world, with many of the same points of emphasis as Paris along with better electrical grid management, improved building energy performance, and energy efficient appliances.

Finally, Alex Morales in Bloomberg Business describes some of the specific goals set by cities.  Morales also notes that cities can more easily innovate than countries.   He quotes Shelley Poticha, Director of Urban Solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who offers “Cities are centers of adaptation and innovation, and they don’t have to wait for international negotiations or congressional action.”

However, the Bloomberg article concludes with the note that not all municipal citizens may yet be on board.  From Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker, “The pushback comes when we make changes that disrupt people’s everyday lives.  There will always be people who will say, ‘We like the idea of adjusting to the impacts on the climate, but don’t change my world.”’

I’m not suggesting the city route of reduced energy usage is the only option.  Previous climate change negotiations have stumbled over the suggestion that less developed countries cut energy usage along with everyone else, which they perceived as forcing them to remain behind in the fight for better standards of living.  Less developed countries deserve the opportunity to join more developed countries, so the technological ideas put forth by Gates and other s are important. 

But as the Paris gathering moves toward a conclusion, we should be paying attention to what cities are saying about battling climate change.  They may have the more pertinent message.  And we should be willing to accept the logic they put forth.

We should also be looking to position all of our communities to follow the lead of the cutting edge cities in creating land use patterns that can benefit from better transit, bicycling routes, and pedestrian opportunities.

Which means we should all be urbanists.

A young planner with whom I chat regularly recently made a comment about the Petaluma street on which he grew up.  It was a commonsensical, but nonetheless insightful, point that many would have missed about the connection between street configuration and driving speed.  I’ll dig more deeply into his observation in my next post.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Becoming a City-Centric Traveler

A few months back I wrote about a sudden insight.  After a lifetime of measuring travel by number of states and countries visited, I realized that counting cities was more meaningful.

In retrospect, I’m disappointed that I was so slow to get that point.  Much of my travel history had been city-centric.

When I first crossed the Atlantic, the immediate destination was two weeks of golf and sightseeing in Scotland, but there was no doubt that my wife and I would extend our trip to see London.

A later honeymoon, with a different wife, was spent exploring the nooks and crannies of Montreal.

I once took an east coast trip, traveling by train from Boston to New York to Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., and back again, just to walk the downtowns and to visit the ballparks.

And one of the best trips of my life was two weeks in a walk-up apartment a short block from the Grand Canal of Venice.

And yet, despite all those fine trips, I continued to monitor my lifetime of traveling by counting the number of states and countries I’d visited, while also strategizing how to keep increasing those tallies.  Looking back, I find myself barely worthy of the sobriquet “urbanist”.

Having ritualistically whacked myself on the head a dozen times with “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, I’ve now begun rethinking my travel bucket list.

But how is a good urbanist to proceed with city-centric travel planning?   I began by searching for the book “Fifty Cities that Urbanists Should Visit before They Die”, but it hasn’t yet been written.

There are books about the best cities for travelers to visit, but those books are about sight-seeing and nightlife.  I want a book that lists the cities that have done the most creative things with transit systems, mixed-use, door yards, and the like.  And that book doesn’t yet exist.  (I’d love to be the author, but find myself underfunded to do the necessary traveling and underqualified.  I lament both deficiencies.)

Without an urbanist travel bible, I began my city-centric travel planning with a list of the largest U.S. cities by population.  It was an imperfect source of the information I desired, but it was a start.

Looking at the top fifty, I find that I’ve yet to visit thirteen of them.  (For comparison, I’ve not yet visited eight of the fifty states.)  I’ve now moved those thirteen missing cities to the top of my vacation wishlist.  Which is mostly a good thing because it means that travel to Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Fort Worth has replaced travel to the Dakotas.  I’m not a big fan of Texas urbanism, but I’d rather visit Austin than Fargo.

Some may argue that merely setting foot in a city doesn’t really give one a complete sense of the city, a point on which they’re certainly correct.  I’ve lived in cities for years and still been surprised by little neighborhoods or shopping districts.  So the goal of visiting a city should be to hang around for a week or longer, riding the subway, wandering about mixed-use neighborhoods, and exploring alleys for little known diners.

But I’ll argue that even a visit of a few hours can give a sense of the place.  As noted above, I once took a trip that involved riding Amtrak up and down the Atlantic seaboard.  Exiting the Amtrak stations in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. were all distinct experiences, with the unique ambiance of each city quickly evident.  So while a visit of a week or more is preferred, even a half-day of eyes-wide-open exploring can be insightful.

As another example, the three photos above were taken from spots I reached within thirty minutes of arriving in each Italian city and yet each captures a fundamental municipal character which I had no cause to question over the remainder of my visit.  (Venice is of course obvious.  Il Duomo in Florence overlooks a city full of bustle and pride, while the public market in Padua bespeaks a town more comfortable with itself and its daily enjoyments.)

I also find that the default mode for travel agents isn’t urban-centric.

A year ago, I began preliminary planning for a 2015 Irish trip.  My plan was for a bus tour around the island, with time to explore Dublin on both ends of the countryside time.  The travel company suggested spending my Dublin time in a converted castle a long bus ride from the downtown core.  When I asked about less historic and more urban options closer to the action, an American chain hotel with a concierge was suggested.  I was trying to explain that all I wanted was a simple room over a pub favored by the locals when other events forced me to suspend trip planning.

If I’m able to resume planning for a 2016 trip, I’ll start with a different travel agent and will describe my goal as two weeks in downtown Dublin with a break in the middle for a bus tour.  I suspect that approach will get me closer to what I want.

Or perhaps I’ll switch over to two weeks Vienna with day trips to smaller Austrian towns.  Either works as long as the city is understood to be the focus.

On the subject of city travel, I recently spent a vacation touring many of the larger cities of the South.  Montgomery, New Orleans, Memphis, and Nashville all had urbanist lessons to impart, some of which have already begun finding their ways into this blog.  But one city in particular thrilled me with its growing tally of urbanist elements.  Details will follow in my next post.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Getting Seconded with Authority

A few posts back, while poking fun at my habit of tallying the states I’ve visited, I suggested that counting cities was a more appropriate measure of travel because cities have been more important to civilization.

The heart of my argument was “The history of civilization begins with Babylon, Athens, Sparta, Rome, and Carthage before continuing onward to Venice, Vienna, London, Paris, Philadelphia, and Boston.  Cities are where learning, government, and culture all took root.”

Thus, it was with delight that I came across an article by another writer starting with this phrase, “Although history is not usually taught this way, one could argue that cities have played a more important role in shaping the world than empires. From Athens and Rome to Paris and Venice to Baghdad and Beijing, urban ideas and innovators have left indelible marks on human life.”

We must have been working from the same syllabus.

The other writer was Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, writing in Foreign Affairs magazine.  Wow, my motion was seconded with authority.  (Yeah, that may have a bit too much hubris.)

The Foreign Affairs article can perhaps be found here.  However, the link, no matter how many times I copy it, doesn’t seem to work for me, for reasons I can’t discern.  Foreign Affairs must use some kind of cloaking device.   But a Google search on “foreign affairs city century” seems to work just fine.  Free registration is required to access the article.  Going through the multi-step registration is worthwhile.  The article is that good.

Building on his great start, Bloomberg goes on to make assertion after assertion with which I bobbed my head in enthusiastic concurrence, so many solid assertions that I had to restrain myself from copying the entire article and smashing the “Fair Use” standard.  So I’ll limit myself to just a few points.

Bloomberg argues that some authority will move back toward cities in the future.  In his words, “Influence will shift gradually away from national governments and toward cities.”

And that’s a good thing because cities like to experiment, “Mayors are turning their city halls into policy labs, conducting experiments on a grand scale and implementing large-scale ideas to address problems, such as climate change, that often divide and paralyze national governments.”

And cities are also better at experimentation than nations, “cities tend to be more nimble than national governments, which are more likely to be captured or neutralized by special interest groups and which tend to view problems through an ideological, rather than a pragmatic, lens.”

Bloomberg goes on to offer a list of ways in which cities can tackle climate change, from bike sharing to better solar policies, that are beyond most national governments.

Seriously, it’s a great article.  Go through the hassle of the free registration and read with enthusiasm.  You’ll be rewarded.

Before closing, I should make a couple of observations about what the Bloomberg/Alden hypothesis about the coming power of cities (once again, too much hubris) means to the cities of the North Bay.

I foresee a future where San Francisco sets the tone for the Bay Area.  Sacramento would still have power; civilizations can’t function without nations and their subdivisions.  But here in the North Bay, we would be satellites of San Francisco, not Sacramento.  (Sorry, Oakland and San Jose.  Yes, you may have more people and land than San Francisco, but you lack the geographical authority of the city that guards the Golden Gate.)

But even though North Bay cities may look to San Francisco for guidance, we would also have our own urban power.  Much as Bloomberg write about the accumulation of intellectual power in large cities, North Bay cities would have their own local accumulations, committed to building vibrant local economies, to addressing local problems, and to formulating solutions that can be promulgated elsewhere.

And urbanism would be a key element of that power, both as a solution to local issues and as a way of creating intellectual ferment through daily interactions on the sidewalks that are the marketplace of ideas.

To illustrate the sea change, I predict that the mayor elected by Petaluma in 2052 will come not from a single-family neighborhood, but from a downtown mixed-use community, such as Haystack Landing.  And that will be a good thing.  (For the record, I’ll be 99 in 2052, so am not planning on running for mayor.  But I am planning on voting for the Haystack Landing candidate.)

Thanks again to Mayor Bloomberg for having my back.

A few posts back, in recounting some final moments of insight from the annual meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism, I noted the creative tension between the structure required for the coherence of an urban plan and the anarchy in which creative fringe of urban concepts can be explored.  It’s a topic which I’ve long pondered.  I don’t have any grand conclusions to offer but, in my next post, I’ll expand on the question and on my evolving thoughts.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Acting Independently from Sacramento and Washington

A consistent theme of this blog is that drivable suburbia is largely the result of top-down directives.  I argue that cities, more so than states or nations, have an intuitive understanding  of how civilization should be organized, an understanding that was ignored during the post World War II building boom.

(I’m currently reading “The Trouble with City Planning” by Kristina Ford, who puts the blame squarely on the Federal Housing Act of 1954.  Section 701 of the act required federally approved plans before releasing federal funds for local housing projects.  Planners quickly learned that plans with a separation of uses, the defining characteristic of drivable suburbia, would be readily approved by the federal authorities.)

Given my bias toward greater local control of government, I’m pleased whenever I note a municipality exerting some independence.

A North Bay case in point is a recent action by the City of Healdsburg to raise the minimum age for purchasing tobacco from the state standard of 18 to a Healdsburg standard of 21, becoming the first California city to do so.

Admittedly, changing a few numbers on the signage in convenience stores is orders of magnitude different from encouraging land uses that overcome the multitude of sprawl-incentivizing policies from Sacramento and Washington, D.C, but independence doesn’t come quickly or easily.  Restricting the access of young adults to tobacco is a worthy goal in itself, so is a reasonable first step toward land use independence.

Today tobacco, tomorrow North Bay zoning codes and impact fees that no longer discourage compact development.

In my next post, I’ll offer my thoughts on the transit-oriented development plans being offered for public comment in Petaluma.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Why Counting States Misses the Point

Like many folks, I keep a mental log of states visited, with the goal of spending time in all fifty before my traveling days are over.

Thus, I was pleased when the group with whom I take an annual beer and baseball trip (Baseball Odyssey 2015!) picked the South for this year’s destination.  I’ve been up and down the eastern seaboard, visiting the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida on earlier travels.  Similarly, I’d checked off Tennessee and Texas in recent years.  But the Deep South of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana was virgin territory for me, giving me the chance to cross off three more states.

However, it was during the trip that I realized the absurdity of an urbanist measuring travels by counting states.  Except for the multiple encounters with the Alabama police, it was still a great trip, but the tallying up of states lost its lustre.

Here’s the problem with states.  The fundamental and organic organizing unit of civilization is the city.  Nations, and their subdivisions into states, came along relatively late in human history.  A brief review of world history proves the point.  The history of civilization begins with Babylon, Athens, Sparta, Rome, and Carthage before continuing onward to Venice, Vienna, London, Paris, Philadelphia, and Boston.  Cities are where learning, government, and culture all took root.

Even the ancient places that we know today by regional names, such Mesopotamia or Phoenicia, were collections of cities where the citizens felt their principal allegiance to their towns.  The regional names were only applied by later historians.

And even when nations finally began to appear, the birthing were still difficult.  China has a legitimate claim to be the oldest nation, but its borders continued to move in and out like an accordion for much of its history.  Neither Germany nor Italy even existed until the 19th century.  Britain reached stability earlier, but that process was aided by it being an island.  And even then it took the Scots two millennia to decide to join, a decision which they continue to second-guess.

The creation of nations was probably inevitable.  It’s hard to conduct either commerce or war with vast areas of uncertain allegiance between cities.  But the slowness of nations to arise and become stable points to the fundamental superiority of cities as a form of organizing human activity.

Which leads to the question of why we’ve ceded so much of the power of cities to the later inventions of nations and states.  We have taken the birthplace of civilizations and relegated them to the back row of governance.

Using the North Bay as an example, who would we rather have setting the standards by which we run our North Bay communities, the folks in Sacramento who are trying to write rules that apply equally well to San Diego, Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Fresno, and Eureka or a city government based in San Francisco but incorporating more of the Bay Area and thereby a government better capable of understanding Bay Area lives and desires?

My preference is for a regional/city government.  There would still be an essential role for nation and states, but I suspect we would manage our affairs better if allowed to do so at more of a city level.

So, when I count states visited, I’m paying homage to a concept that I think is fundamentally flawed and continues to impede the organic growth of civilization.  I need to stop doing that.

Cities rule.

Perhaps it was being away from the North Bay for twelve days, but upon my return I began noting local absurdities with urbanist angles.  My next post will enumerate some of these North Bay non sequiturs.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)