Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World 

Jonathan Barnett and Larry Beasley, Ecodesign for Cities and Suburbs

Timothy Beatley, Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning

Daniel Brook, A History of Future Cities

Joan DeJean, How Paris Became Paris

Richard Florida, Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History

Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives through Urban Design

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming

 William McDonough and Michael Braungart, The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability–Designing for Abundance

Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

Richard Register, Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature

Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World

Eric Sanderson, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City

Wade Shepard, Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities Without People in the World’s Most Populated Country

Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History

Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First

The post Urban Transformation Reader: A Holiday Book List appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

Before climate change arrived in the headlines in the late 1980s, the groundwork for climate leadership had been laid. The creators of urban climate innovation labs span three overlapping generations, each of which experienced its own jolt of awakening and urgent call to action. 

Those who are in their sixties, seventies, or eighties were present when the environmental movement came to life, assembling for the first Earth Day in 1970, spurred by biologist Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, which warned of the dire impact of pesticides, and by the mounting, visible crises caused by hazardous and toxic industrial processes.

City innovators in their forties and fifties, many of whom are entering positions of substantial authority in government, business, and the civil sector, were coming of age when a 1987 United Nations report, “Our Common Future”—known as the Brundtland Report after its chair, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Norway’s first female prime minister—put a new idea onto society’s radar screen. It offered “sustainable development” as an overarching concept in which the use of physical ecosystems and renewable resources would occur “within the limits of regeneration and naturalgrowth.” Brundtland called for action by all nations but also signaled the importance of cities: “The most immediate environmental concerns of most people will be urban ones.”

These two generations were joined by a third generation of innovators that arrived after the dawn of climate-change awareness. The commitment of countless numbers of twenty-and thirty-year-old innovators, many of whom are raising young children, was sparked by Al Gore’s 2006 documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, which detailed the advent of global warming, argued that the means were available to reverse the trend if only there was the political will to act, and called on viewers to take personal responsibility for solving the problem.

The post Awakening: Emergence of Climate Leadership from Silent Spring to Inconvenient Truth appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

Bob Friedman’s A Few Thousand Dollars: Sparking Prosperity for Everyone offers an elegant—and proven—way to create widespread prosperity in America and renew the nation’s fundamental promise of opportunity for all.  How uplifting and timely! But most of all, how instructive: turn the existing government budgets and tax incentives for family wealth building into Prosperity Accounts that provide families with money—a few thousand dollars a year—to get more education, start businesses, buy homes, save for the future, and pass money and values on to the next generation. And do it for everyone. No more money is needed because families will leverage the resources, but smarter public policies are. Policies that recognize the common good that is generated by investing in people.

Friedman makes the case for policy change with data, logic, and a sprinkling of profiles of individuals who in their lives got a crucial helping “hand up” from family, community, and government. A veteran of the nation’s economic-justice struggles, he writes with insight, clarity, passion, political savvy, and, most of all, a firm conviction that the change America so badly needs can happen.

Order from Amazon

The post “A Few Thousand Dollars” — How to build inclusive prosperity in America appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

A Dutch urban planner, Ovink came to the U.S.–a volunteer on loan from the Dutch government–to help rebuild New York City after Hurricane Sandy. His approach was . . . different. With the crucial buy-in of Shaun Donovan, then-head of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the help of many partners, Ovink designed and ran a unique Rebuild By Design (RBD) process. RBD fostered a massive, intense collaboration-competition among communities, local, state, and federal governments, and design teams of professionals from around the globe that resulted in the development of seven world-class projects to boost the NYC region’s resilience and attracted about $1 billion in federal investment. Now, with Jelte Boeijenga and interviews with a dozen partners, Ovink tells the inside story of the process and what was radically different about it: Too Big: Rebuild By Design: A Transformative Approach to Climate Change.

In “Too Big,” Ovink explains that the complexities of climate change–the “new normal”–require a new approach that “steps outside existing frameworks and agreements based on assumptions made in the past. . .  We must free ourselves of too common ‘cannot,’ ‘must not’ and ‘won’t work’ attitudes and embrace a ‘yes, we can’ mentality. That, in turn, means we must set aside accepted roles and challenge longstanding relationships. We need coordination between the analysis of challenges and real understandings of them, developing a comprehensive perspective that connects us to immediate action and immediate impact. in other words, we need truly inclusive collaboration that ties everyone and everything, from the first day to the last, into a new working culture.”

Ovink’s tale about how this was mostly accomplished, although not without great difficulty, in the midst of an enormous urban disaster–using a design process to “make a conscious detour around the sometimes rigid and ineffective ways that government and the whole of society works”–offers a series of lessons that other cities and national governments have already been using and that can help urban climate adaptation practitioners everywhere get further, faster, better.

Photo credit: Olivia Locher for The New York Times

The post “Too Big”–Inside an Extraordinary Effort to Cope with Climate Change appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

it’s now commonplace to observe that the city is the level of government best suited to solve the many problems of communities. Benjamin Barber’s If Mayors Ruled the World explored this theme in depth. Newly released, The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism, from urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak, provides a “roadmap” for a power shift from nation-states down to cities and regions and, from there, across to local networks of public, private, and civic leaders.

“Localism” certainly describes what the many cities we know that have aggressively pursued climate action are doing and pushing for. Much of the time, they strain against and work around policies and regulations from other levels of government. Their city-driven organizations look for ways to free them from domineering state/provincial and national governments.

But what if the problem that has to be solved is not how to cut GHG emissions, have better schools, reduce crime, or include immigrants in community life. What if the problem is a loss of faith in democracy? How can localism help with that?

Our friends Mike Hais, Doug Ross, and Morley Winograd argue in Healing American Democracy: Going Local that, in the U.S. context, the deep partisan, demographic, cultural, and economic divisions and national political stalemate, which erode confidence in democratic governance, will not be resolved by one side or the other winning an election or by bipartisan calls to “come together” as a nation. Instead, they offer a new civic parading: Constitutional Localism. in this framing, local governments should be empowered “to tackle a broad a range of civic challenges as they are willing and able to undertake.” Shifting more public decision making to communities will allow Americans “to choose from among different social mores, life styles, political philosophies, and economic opportunities without sacrificing either self-government or membership in a great nation.” This “return to community decision-making offers the opportunity to make democratic governance personal again.”

But localism is not enough, they continue. Even as governance power would devolve to the local level, we have to be clear about what remains essential at the national level: “The Constitution, as it exists today or as amended in the future, must be recognized as establishing the framework for acceptable behavior by all levels of government for a system of localism to work. It is the only way we can ensure adherence to the ‘American Ideal,’ the set of principles of individual freedom and effective collective action that . . . have been the common bond that allowed a country of wide variation in its citizens’ heritage and culture to unite as one democratic nation.”

In short, this is a bottom-up framework for redistributing decision-making power  to solve community problems–but one that does not give up on the 250-year-old national democratic project.

The post Think Local, Act Local, But… appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

Johnson mines historic materials to make his case–much as we found, in researching our forthcoming book, Life After Carbon, that examining the interconnected rise of the fossil-fuel economy and the modern city was driven by new ideas that became deeply embedded in urban development and global urbanization. And, as he points out toward the end of Carbon Nation, what became embedded in the  modern self–the ideas, feelings, symbols, art, and so on–can be hard to change.

“The urge to look sideways at our energy dependencies goes well beyond unhampered propaganda and lax political contribution laws. It also derives from the fact that most Americans–on the political right and left and in the center–have very strong short-term incentives to want to believe that the status quo can be maintained.” Certainly the same is true about the underlying model–the assumptions–for modern urban development. Johnson continues: “To imagine life without prehistoric carbons . . . means engaging ourselves in the very messy and uncomfortable work of finding out who we are and what we might be without combusting fuels.” This is precisely what cities that have been most aggressive about decarbonizing themselves are discovering: the work is not just about technical solutions that reduce GHG emissions; it’s about reimagining the city’s identity and future.

Johnson makes another point about carbon culture in the U.S. that seems fresh. The rise of the fossil-fuel economy in the early 18th century occurred before Americans had experienced the limits of exploiting natural ecosystems–and the pain of economic contraction–that Europeans had already been through. In the US there was still much more land, trees, minerals and the like to consume. Americans evaded “the logic of organic constraints felt so viscerally in more land-strapped early modern regions such as England, France, Germany, Japan, and China.” As a result, Johnson concludes, “Americans became subsequently vaccinated against talk of ecological constraints.”

Climate change presents a great challenge to this nation’s deeply held cultural aversion to ecological limits. No wonder Johnson says that “disentangling ourselves from prehistoric carbon implies, in other words, that we are willing to cleave off a part of ourselves.”

The post “Carbon Nation” Examines How Fossil-Fuel Culture Stands in Way of Change appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

With these words, distinguished historian Frank Trentmann draws his magisterial 2017 book, Empire of Things, to a close. The book’s subtitle, How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First, describes Trentmann’s ambition, which has global scope. He uncovers the historical roots of our modern consumer society, starting in the 1600s, partly by mining an enormous amount of data from an amazing array of sources, and partly by recognizing what came before it. A big shift occurred when wealthy Europeans in cities turned away from an idea that had guided previous generations, Aristotle’s praise for the use of private wealth as, Trentmann says, “a sign of civic virtue and pride in a community governed and defended by like-minded brave, propertied citizens. . . . The admired life was that if the active citizen who increased the splendor and strength of his city by erecting monumental buildings, commanding an army and sponsoring communal feasts and public works. Large-scale consumption was safe—and could be enjoyed—when it occurred in the pursuit of such public ends.”

Citizen-consumers. Consumers as virtuous citizens—taking responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of their consumption. A fantasy, perhaps, but as Trentmann’s project shows, what we feel and think about consumption, and the ways we consume, have not been fixed. They evolved and will continue to evolve.

The post Consumers as Virtuous Citizens? appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.