As climate innovations proliferate in cities, it has become common to hear urban innovators talk about the “transformation” of urban systems, neighborhoods, the economy, and the entire city. but what exactly about the city is being transformed, and how does transformation happen? the answers lie in our understanding of both cities and innovations.

Cities arrange their built and natural space in ways that establish the fundamental elements of urban life–the underlying economic activities, life-maintaining metabolism, use of natural systems, and inhabitants’ capacity to shape a shared future…

We explain that urban climate innovations change the design and use of urban space in ways that don’t just decarbonize the city; they change the fundamental elements of cities.

The cities are still cities, of course…. But as their underlying elements change, the cities will not be the same as they were before. They are being transformed. 

When a dozen or so cities began in the early 1990s, with an early version ICLEI, to develop strategies for reducing GHG emissions within their borders, decarbonization, not transformation was on their minds. The urban decarbonization effort gained has gained traction worldwide thanks to entities like C40 Cities, which periodically reports on the thousands of actions its city members are taking to reduce GHG emissions.

Gradually, cities realized that many of the decarbonization actions they were taking produced other, highly desirable benefits. C40 Cities identified these as increased healthiness, economic efficiency, innovation, productivity, growth in the technology sector, and quality of life. “A well-designed city can reduce congestion, improve air quality, reduce noise pollution, and decrease energy use,” state the China Development Bank guidelines. “It can create enjoyable spaces for everyone, from children to the elderly, and increases options for daily life. It makes neighborhoods more attractive and livable, and creates cities with more vitality and economic prosperity.”

With decarbonization underway and co-benefits being promoted, our book argues, the focus can also turn more to intentional transformation–replacing the ideas upon which the modern city was built in the 19th and 20th centuries, but which cannot solve cities’ 21st century problems. Fortunately, we show, a new set of transformational ideas are embedded in the many climate innovations of cities.

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Once upon a time, there were no filling stations and no gas-powered vehicles. That was in the late 1800s–a situation much like that for electric vehicles just a few years ago. Now there are 100s of thousands of gas stations, more than 100,000 of them in the US alone.

The honor of hosting the first filling station–if it’s an honor–belongs to Wiesloch, Germany, where in 1888 Bertha Benz refilled the car her engineer husband, Karl, had built. She bought ligroin, a petroleum-based solvent, from a local pharmacy to use as fuel. Later, pharmacies started to sell gas as a side business.

In the US, before there were any filling stations, drivers got fuel from general stores, hardware stories, and blacksmith shops, using cans, buckets, and drums and funnels. The first drive-in filling station opened in Pittsburgh in 1913, selling a gallon of gas for 27 cents. Around this time, pumps and meters were developed for the growing market. Oil companies started to open filling stations and branded chains/franchises appeared.

In other words, what began as improvisation and resourcefulness–filling however one might–became an entrepreneurial activity–a business model–and then a branded corporate product line. Along the way, government regulations for safety, pricing, and environmental protection came into play.

The emergence pf EV charging infrastructure has some similarities and some differences to the advent of gas stations. (Photo above: Charging station with NEMA connector for electric AMC Gremlin used by Seattle City Light in 1973.) Cities that are deeply committed to decarbonizing their transportation systems have been investing directly in installing public charging stations. By 2020, for instance, Oslo will have more than 3,000 chargers available to the public. At the same time, EV owners are charging their vehicles at home–a filling option that wasn’t available at the start of the gasoline age. And the expansion of EV charging will have implications for the electricity grid.

Some 100-year-old gas stations have become museums and someday all gas stations will have been retired. EV charging will be as normal and pervasive as gas stations are today.

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• “World’s first electrified road for charging vehicles opens in Sweden” — “The world’s first electrified road that recharges the batteries of cars and trucks driving on it has been opened in Sweden. About 2km (1.2 miles) of electric rail has been embedded in a public road near Stockholm, but the government’s roads agency has already drafted a national map for future expansion.”
• “Superblocks: how Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars” — “The idea is pretty simple. Take nine square blocks of city. (It doesn’t have to be nine, but that’s the ideal.) Rather than all traffic being permitted on all the streets between and among those blocks, cordon off a perimeter and keep through traffic, freight, and city buses on that. In the interior, allow only local vehicles, traveling at very low speeds, under 10 mph. And make all the interior streets one-way loops (see the arrows on the green streets below), so none of them serve through streets.
• “This ‘Singing Road” in the Netherlands Has Been Driving Locals Batty” – “Rumble strips that have been installed on a highway located in the Friesland region, in northwest part of the Netherlands, make the road play the Frisian national anthem when drivers pass over them at 40 mph, the BBC reported. The new addition to the road was meant to promote the city of Leeuwarden, this year’s European Capital of Culture. But instead, it has turned into the residents’ nightmare. According to the BBC, one resident called it ‘psychological torture.'”

But don’t just look to innovations for the future of city streets. San Francisco recently discovered film of the aftermath of its 1906 earthquake. There’s not much more than rubble and survivors to be seen, but when you compare that footage to pre-earthquake footage of the city’s Market Street, you can see the multiple-use of city streets by pedestrians, trolleys, horse-drawn carts, and, yes, some slow-moving cars–in the days before cities let cars take over and shove every other user aside. No traffic lights and no bicycles, but a people- and transit-centered vibrancy that cities lost and are now trying to restore.

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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.”

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As Arup seeks to carve out a new market to serve–arid urban climate adaptation–it has identified dozens of strategies for cities to pursue at the scales of buildings, public spaces, and citywide. Arup’s most important framing message: Arid cities must set aside old ideas about urban design, planning, and development and invent,

“Cities in these regions face complex challenges such as water scarcity, inadequate infrastructure, rapidly growing populations, and impacts on public health from the effects of urban heat islands. Yet most cities in arid environments are still planned and designed based on a global city making paradigm established during the middle parts of the 20th century. This one-size-fits-all approach, characterised by private car ownership and separate land uses connected by highway networks, fails to respond to specific climatic contexts and needs.

“Planners, engineers and decision makers working in arid environments require climate appropriate design solutions to create sustainable and liveable cities. Future responses must be tailored to specific social, economic, environmental and political conditions, combining the best of new technology with locally adapted solutions.”

This is precisely the theme of our forthcoming book, Life After Carbon: cities must–and are–replacing the modern-city paradigm with a new set of ideas accounting for climate change, energy system transformation, urban greening, and other sustainability models–and these ideas are transformational.

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In wake of the news of an autonomous vehicle killing a pedestrian for the first time–in Tempe, Arizona–I recalled the story of the first person killed by a car in the U.S. more than a century earlier.

Henry H. Bliss, a realtor in New York City, had just gotten off a streetcar in the evening and was at the intersection of 74th Street and Central Park West (just a few blocks from where John Lennon was shot and killed). He was struck by an electric-powered taxi (!) on September 13, 1899, and died at a hospital. The driver was arrested and acquitted of manslaughter because he had not been negligent. (Can an AV be “negligent”?)

A century later, the city placed a plaque at site of the killing — “to promote safety on our streets and highways.” It’s a mile-and-a-half from Times Square, where the city has banned cars since 2009.

The post Making the Modern City: First Auto Fatality in U.S. appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

“The city’s first apartment buildings, like the Dakota, the Gramercy and the Chelsea, were constructed in the 1870s. Unlike the city’s existing tenements — those greasy, cholera-ridden death traps described in books like Jacob Riis’s “How the Other Half Lives” — apartments offered amenities like telephones, electric lighting, commercial refrigerators, private dining rooms and ground-floor restaurants that could deliver food to your unit.”

This was but the first of a set of transformations triggered by consumer interests, technology, economic change, and public policies:

“In 1901, New York State banned tenements, and toilets, natural light and ventilation were added to existing buildings to make them more sanitary. During the depression, our city’s luxury apartments were chopped up and sold off, while servant’s quarters were converted into bedrooms. And in 1935, the nation’s first public housing units went up on the Lower East Side.”

Today a new set of urban imperatives are gradually reshaping living space, buildings, and city scapes: the need to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce water consumption; the consequential challenge of affordability and sufficient housing; and the need to renature cities. The next evolution is becoming visible: Buildings that produce more energy than they consume and capture stormwater onsite to be recycled. Increased density of housing in already built areas and Transit Oriented Development. Green infrastructure, inside and outside of buildings, and biophilic immersion.

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The convoy had been organized to show the country how motor vehicles could be used for military purposes and to promote the construction of transcontinental highways. In many of the 350 towns through which the army’s promotional convoy passed, hospitable residents offered barbecues, melon fests, and other celebrations. “The truck train was well received at all points along the route,” Eisenhower testified. “It seemed that there was a great deal of sentiment for the improving of highways and, from the standpoint of promoting this sentiment, the trip was an undoubted success.”

A century ago, such promotion of motor vehicles was considered essential. The U.S. automotive industry was only about 30 years old and in 1901 it had produced a mere 3,219 cars. By 1916 production exceeded 1 million vehicles for the first time, but annual sales had declined for several years and the lack of suitable roads was a barrier to growth.

The 1919 convoy’s greatest impact came 37 years later when the lieutenant colonel along for the ride had become president of the United States. Eisenhower recalled his time-consuming transcontinental road trip and the efficient, four-lane highways of the German autobahn network that he’d encountered while commanding Allied forces in Europe during World War II. In 1956 he successfully pushed for the first huge federal investment, $25 billion, for a national Interstate Highway System. Some 60 years and $128 billion later, the completed system contains about 47,000 miles of interstate, including thousands of miles of heavily traveled highways inside cities.

Since the 1950s, the urban highways have been heavily criticized for several reasons, as historian Raymond Molh summarizes: “The interstates linked central cities with sprawling postwar suburbs, facilitating automobile commuting while undermining what was left of inner-city mass transit. Wide ribbons of concrete and asphalt stimulated new downtown physical development, but soon spurred the growth of suburban shopping malls, office parks, and residential subdivisions as well. At the same time, urban expressways tore through long-established inner-city residential communities in their drive toward the city cores, destroying low-income housing on a vast and unprecedented scale. Huge expressway interchanges, cloverleafs, and access ramps created enormous areas of dead and useless space in the central cities.” Before Eisenhower left the presidency, he expressed surprise that the system was penetrating into cities, rather than bypassing them as the German autobahns did. But, a history of the interstate’s origins notes, it was big city mayors and planners who had lobbied the Congress to make sure highways ran into cities, as extensions that would distribute urban traffic heading to and from the interstates. They wanted more big roads to help them manage the growing number of cars moving around in cities.

In 2016 an unexpected source blamed this development for damaging cities: the head of the U.S. transportation department, which spends tens of billions of dollars a year on highways. Anthony Foxx called for policies to undo the damage caused by urban highways. Foxx recalls growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina in an African-American neighborhood walled in by highways. “Freeways were there to carry people through my neighborhood, but never to my neighborhood,” he says. “Businesses didn’t invest there. Grocery stores and pharmacies didn’t take the risk. I could not even get a pizza delivered to my house.” Being cut off meant having to rely more on a car. The grandparents he lived with, Foxx says, had to drive across town “to do just about anything some of us take for granted.” In a series of public speeches, Foxx charged highway building in New York City, Seattle, and other cities had damaged neighborhoods targeted by planners: “Our urban freeways were almost always routed through low-income and minority neighborhoods, creating disconnections from opportunity that exist to this day.” Foxx had a second life-experience that sensitized him to the problems of urban highways. Before taking the federal job, he served Charlotte as its mayor.

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“The fossil economy has one incontestable birthplace: Britain accounted for 80 percent of the global emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion in 1825 and and 62 percent in 1850. . . . Britain . . . continued to generate more than half of the world’s emissions far into the nineteenth century. The origins of our predicament must be located on British soil.” (13)

“By 1800, most of the smoke from British coal combustion still left fairly small chimneys. . . . Combustion had yet to be decoupled from population, and so Britain could not be said to have constituted a fossil economy proper. By 1850, all that had changed. . . . By 1870, three times more coal was burnt in general manufacturing, iron and steel than in the hearths and homes of Britain, the fires decoupled from population growth and linked to self-sustaining economic growth.” (249-250).

Book details here »

2. “Wind and Solar are Crushing Fossil Fuels” (April 6, 2016)

The world’s first coal superpower, the U.K., now produces less power from coal than it has since at least 1850.” (Bloomberg News) Article here »

3. “Solar power sets new British record by beating coal for a day” (April 13, 2016, The Guardian)

The sun provided British homes and businesses with more power than coal-fired power stations for 24 hours last weekend. While solar power has previously beaten coal for electricity generation over a few hours in the UK, Saturday was the first time this happened for a full day. Analysts said the symbolic milestone showed how dramatic coal’s decline had been due to carbon taxes, as solar had “exploded” across the UK in recent years. Article here »

4. Peabody Energy, a Coal Giant, Seeks Bankruptcy Protection (April 13, 2016, New York Times)

The collapse in natural gas prices over the last three years and new environmental regulations by the Obama administration have led to a rapid decline of the industry, especially in the Appalachia region, where mines are deep and expensive to operate. Domestic production last year slumped to a three-decade low. Coal was once the provider of roughly half of the nation’s power, but it was surpassed by natural gas as the No. 1 source of electricity for the first time a year ago. The Paris climate agreement signed in December has convinced many investors that the coal industry is in a death spiral. At the same time, there is a glut of coal on global markets, in part because of uneven economic growth in Europe and emerging markets. Article here »

5. The day coal power dropped out of the UK’s national grid for the first time in more than 100 years (The Independent, May 22, 2016)

At midnight on 10 May 2016, the UK hit an energy milestone. For the first time in over 100 years, the amount of coal being used by the national grid to power Britain’s kettles, computer and televisions fell to zero. And then it stayed at zero for four hours. The Independent, United Kingdom.  Article here »

6. Solar power breaks UK records thanks to sunny weather (The Guardian, May 29, 2017)

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