The “century of the city,” as it’s been dubbed, is filled with urban challenges, and it’s clear that “old thinking” about cities won’t get us through the mess; it’s what got us there in the first place. Enter new thinking, lots of it. New thinking about urban sustainability, about the use of technologies in urban space, about decarbonizing urban energy systems, about adapting cities to climate changes, about reducing the economic and social disparities among groups of urban dwellers, about governing structures for cities, and more.

In the application of these ideas, cities are becoming intentional “innovation laboratories”–live settings in which innovators try new things. In our new book, Life After Carbon, to be published in the fall, we examine how urban climate innovators in leading-edge cities around the world have been implementing hundreds of innovations that are transforming the fundamental nature of their cities. That’s one of the big 21st century dynamics driving change.

This innovation-driven transformation is occurring at four nested urban scales at once: sites and parcels–buildings, streets, parks, and more; districts, as in low-carbon neighborhoods,  university campuses, and hospital complexes; systems, as in transportation, energy, and water systems; and citywide plans that integrate changes across sites, districts, and systems while allowing flexibility and differentiation. Mostly, though, we emphasize change of systems as the big driver of transformation, because a city is fundamentally its operating systems.

In Life After Carbon we note that the most ambitious and innovative cities, which have become “urban climate innovation laboratories,” all push for change in their functional and spatial systems. Still, system-scale change is incredibly complex, risky, and takes a lot of time–and cities usually don’t have full control over the performance of their systems.

At the district scale, there’s still a lot of complexity to manage, but it’s more controllable, especially if the city owns the land, and it may be easier to get developers interested in investing; witness Stockholm’s Royal Seaport district, Austin’s Mueller community, and Toronto’s Quayside project with Sidewalk Labs. And new districts provide lessons for design of the rest of the city.

But it’s the site scale that is the target of the Reinventing Cities competition (#ReinventingCities), launched by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo (@Anne_Hidalgo) and sponsored globally by C40 Cities. Sixteen participating cities have identified a total of 45 “underutilized spaces to redevelop,” including empty lots, abandoned buildings, underused markets, a former airport site, car parks, and an abandoned incinerator. They will invite neighborhood groups, developers, artists, environmentalists, and other stakeholders to compete for the opportunity to transform the sites into “beacons of sustainability and resilience.” Here’s the competition’s Theory of Change: “Winning projects will serve as models for cities around the world, demonstrating how the alliance between the public and private sector can shape the future, delivering decarbonised and economically viable urban development.”

When Hidalgo pioneered this approach in Paris, 22 public spaces became settings for innovative solutions developed by diverse teams. The site scale, says Hélène Chartier, an urban planner in the mayor’s office who moved to New York City to run the C40 initiative, is where “experiments in urban regeneration” can be mounted. “Small is beautiful”–and usually easier to   get going than big projects that have to take on many challenges at once. It also is a scale that is accessible to many different types of people, not just professional urban designers and planners. As the mayor put it in announcing the global competition: “Who better than our citizens to imagine the future of their cities?” In Paris, Chartier adds, some of the reinvention projects have changed how urban developers are thinking about the city and its future.

As ideas from the site scale move “up” into the district and system scales, ideas also move “down” to the site scale. C40’s initiative, for instance, insists that projects in the competition must be “carbon neutral,” a spreading standard for urban regeneration at every scale.

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The Zone is composed of two stretches of mostly coastal land in the United States, covering 12 states. Atlantic Climate Zone spans 400 miles, from Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia to New York City and Boston, and contains more than 33.7 million people in its major metropolitan areas. Pacific Climate Zone sweeps across 1,100 miles, from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Portland and Seattle, with about 24 million people in the largest metro regions. These Zone’s combined metropolitan areas alone generate about 23 percent of the entire U.S. economy’s annual output—a combined GDP larger than any nation except China and Japan.

When you use a climate economy lens to look at this population and economic data, adding climate change, physical and economic infrastructure, and political culture, a larger and intriguing picture emerges—a potentially robust response to the Trump Administration’s ferocious opposition to climate-smart policies.

Why add these particular elements? First, they are critical to the prosperity and wellbeing of urban economies in the 21^st century. As has been widely noted, a “climate-smart” economy—clean-energy technologies, green buildings and infrastructure, energy-efficient heating and cooling systems, electric vehicles, water-efficient utilities, and more—is growing rapidly and becoming a driver of urban wealth creation and a means to reduce the cost of living for households. At the same time, the risks of severe physical damage and business disruption from climate changes is growing; examples already exist worldwide and climate science tells us that things are only going to get worse. The cities, states, and regions that will be big winners in the emerging economy are those that take climate change seriously, as an opportunity and a threat, by forging the political leadership and consensus needed to invest in innovation and infrastructure. Second, these elements lend themselves to geographic mutuality, the connection and alignment among metropolitan regions and states that makes it possible to generate shared benefits that an individual city or state cannot realize by itself. As strategist Parag Khanna argues in Connectography, the global trends of urban connectivity across national borders, devolution of authority from central capitals to provinces and cities, and competition over global supply chains, energy markets, and flows of finance, technology, knowledge, and talent all lead “smaller political units” like cities and states to fuse together so they have the resources needed to survive.

Applying the climate economy lens reveals that these coastal urban agglomerations—the metro areas and states of the Pacific and Atlantic zones—look pretty similar, and quite different from much of the rest of the nation.

When it comes to climate change, California, Massachusetts, New York, and other coastal states and the cities we’ve mentioned are national and international leaders in reducing GHG emissions and building climate resilience and, In many cases, they have achieved strong “vertical” alignment of local and state policies. They are adopting and implementing public policies that require new and existing buildings to meet strict standards for energy consumption; transition as much energy supply as they control with renewable sources; promote a shift from driving to walking, bicycling, and use of public transit; and remove potential sources of GHG emissions from the waste stream. They are using their resources to stimulate the emergence of “green economy” businesses and jobs—especially clean-energy technologies—as a robust and sustainable sector. They are taking steps to assess the risks they face from increasing climate turbulence, to plan actions that will make them “climate proof,” and to develop the community, technical, and financial capacities to implement plans.

When it comes to infrastructure, the economies of the Climate Economy Zone’s two regions, especially their metropolitan areas, are based on a similar model for success: They are deeply embedded in the interconnected global trading economy and have developed, over the decades, world-leading business clusters in technology, finance, education and other sectors. They depend critically on competitive transportation and digital systems, corporate supply chain management, research and development assets, availability of financial capital, and well-educated and entrepreneurial talent. And they face similar challenges due to the national underinvestment in physical and communications infrastructure and the chronic underperformance of public education systems.

When it comes to political culture, the climate-economy regions have developed large constituencies and prominent stakeholder groups, including business leaders, which support aggressive climate action and have been willing to support substantial local changes, including increased public investment. They share a strong affinity for political leadership that fully acknowledges the practical and moral responsibilities of the nation, as well as its cities, to address climate change. One indicator of this is voting in the 2016 presidential election. In 10 of the 12 Zone’s states, Clinton defeated Trump by landslides, 10 to 29 percentage points, won another by 4 points, and narrowly lost one, while the District of Columbia went 92 percent for Clinton. Another indicator is found in survey data from Yale University: people in the Zone’s metropolitan areas and states are more likely than most other Americans to think that global warming is happening, caused mostly by human activities, and already harming people in the U.S., and that carbon emissions from power plants should be strictly limited and utilities should be required to produce 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources.

This sketch of the Climate Economy Zone suggests a potential for “horizontal” economic, infrastructure, and political collaboration at the regional level, multiple cities and states, which has only been minimally tapped so far. Pacific Zone states, for instance, are slouching toward a regional price on carbon emissions; California has a cap-and-trade market, while Washington and Oregon have explored options. The three states are developing the West Coast Electric Highway, a network of fast-charging stations located every 25 to 50 miles on Interstate 5and other roads. Six states in Atlantic Zone are part of a regional carbon-emissions trading market. Core cities on both coasts work together on aggressive climate actions: eight are members of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, six are in the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, eight are among the 100 Resilient Cities.

But much more could be explored and perhaps done. We tend to think of public policy making as occurring along the traditional vertical axis of federal-state-local authority, and this obscures the potential of horizontal approaches. We tend to think of cities as locations, and this obscures their growing interest and engagement in international relations. We tend to think of climate change as a problem of reducing GHG emissions through national government regulation of energy markets, but this obscures the crucial role of corporations and cities as end users in the energy supply chain. If we were to think more about Climate Economy regions not as separate states and separate urban regions, but as “countries within the country” that align around a shared framework of public policies to address climate change, business growth, and urban development—what opportunities might be revealed?

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