Life After Carbon Reviews
Peter Plastrik and John Cleveland’s Life after Carbon is a highly engaging, forward-looking study of how modern cities are innovating to survive.
This superb book looks at the evolution of the world’s cities and their challenging future. It is organized into three cohesive parts: a survey of “urban climate innovation laboratories,” the examination of four specific ideas that represent modern city innovation, and a bold perspective on how these ideas will help set the course for cities of the future.
Outstanding examples depict the many innovative ways that some of the world’s cities are already positioning themselves to meet challenges like climate change and urban congestion. Throughout the text and in sidebars, the book refers to initiatives by cities in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, and the Far East. These illustrations effectively demonstrate the optimistic view that major global cities are already innovating, primarily in the area of climate change, but also in urban infrastructure, transportation, resource consumption, and waste disposal.
The stories are powerful themselves, but the book takes them further by incorporating them into specific areas that show how cities can use innovative thinking to create jobs, generate “urban abundance,” protect urban life, and meet future requirements. While “future think” permeates the book, its third part is the most ambitious and prophetic. It offers a hopeful view of the future, wherein urban “greening,” autonomous vehicles, and renewable energy may contribute to cities’ ultimate survival.
A book that exudes passion, enthusiasm, and optimism for the future, Life after Carbon is essential reading for anyone with a stake in the development of tomorrow’s cities.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your beautifully written and excellently researched book, Life After Carbon. You should be very proud of what you have accomplished, and hopefully your book will reach a wide and enthusiastic audience.
Plastrik and Cleveland give readers nothing less than a new and compelling vision for what cities could be: carbon-free, climate adaptive, biophilic and nature-rich, with restorative closed-loop metabolisms, and, of course, wonderful places in which to live. Together these stories, ideas, and emerging practices chart an optimistic urban future. Life After Carbon is an essential resource for planners, mayors and citizens (all of us) with a vested interest in accelerating this future.
Captivating! Life After Carbon’s story telling and ability to project a big vision is powerful. It will be a compelling and major tool to help cities and business move forward.
In Life After Carbon Plastrik and Cleveland lay out a hidden upside of climate action, detailing how innovative cities leading the fight against climate change are developing a new model for urban development that promises better cities in a carbon-free economy. This is an important and inspiring book for business leaders and other professionals in their efforts to create more livable cities while strengthening climate resilience.
Plastrik and Cleveland have written a timely, affirmative account of urban innovation and transformation in the face of climate change. Their vision of the post-carbon city is captivating and compelling, with ideas that are tangible, transferable and scalable. This is a much needed contribution at a pivotal moment.
Life After Carbon is a vivid and multifaceted look at the cities leading the global transition to a post-carbon world. Drawing insight from and connections among the communities at the forefront of urban climate innovation, Plastrik and Cleveland chart much-needed and promising pathways into the future.
I will never look at cities the same way again. The writing is outstanding!
I had the great pleasure of reading Life After Carbon over the weekend. I want to congratulate you and John for such a fine piece of work, such a good narrative, giving hope and a necessary and viable vision of the future. Well done and I hope the book proves to be as enabling, empowering and transformative as possible.
During the UN Climate Change Conference 2018, COP24, currently underway in Katowice, Poland, PM Imran Khan’s Advisor on Climate Change Malik Amin Aslam said “we are running out of time” in the global bid to forestall climate change.
During COP24, Aslam has reaffirmed Islamabad’s support of the Paris Agreement – especially considering the country ranks eighth on Germanwatch’s index of countries most affected by climate change – and even got superstar and environment activist Arnold Schwarzenegger to say yes to coming to Pakistan.
As COP24 gets global heads together and get as many of them to stick to a global action plan, a critical question would be on developing new models for a ‘carbon-free economy’.
A prominent contribution in this regard is Life After Carbon: The Next Global Transformation of Cities, written by John Cleveland and Peter Plastrik underlining the city as a unit taking on climate change for urban development in a bid to reduce the carbon footprint. The book underlines efforts to create the most livable cities with the least climate fallout.
Life After Carbon unveils itself in three sections, beginning with the climate laboratories – 25 of them that the book draws inspiration from – then examining the ideas that impacted the way modern cities were constructed, and then highlighting the work needed to pull off the requisite urban transformation. The book’s contents are neatly divided in these three broad sections.
Life After Carbon starts by elaborating how cities have incorporated innovation in their response to climate change by promoting bicycling and walking, streamlining movements for various vehicles, channelising buildings’ energy consumption, recycling waste, mining wastewater for heat, promoting solar, in addition to complete redesigns of buildings, public squares, coastlines and other structures.
‘Urban climate innovation labs’ are thoroughly discussed as cities that are acting on climate change challenges and reinforcing their commitment for the same. There are three characteristics that bind them: commitment to achieving long-term climate change goals, targeting of urban systems for large-scale change and initiating of experiments to see what works.
Shifts in transport modes to reduce driving to ensure car-free zones and periods are crucial in the pattern of innovation clusters and waves that the book wants to build on. It cites the example of Copenhagen to dissect what makes a ‘better city’ going into the future. The book also uses Star Wars to drive home its idea of a ‘rebel alliance’ that would transform the world’s modern cities.
But what exactly do these transformational ideas do? They encourage voluntary action, send price signals, offer choices and issue requirements – to point out a few.
‘Today, cities that are aggressively following a climate-innovation pathway are abandoning the very ideas that made them modern and got them this far. They are turning to a set of new ideas… transformational ideas that are embedded within the hundreds of climate innovations emerging in lab cities and spreading from city to city.’
The book then elaborates the advantages of going carbon free and how cities are changing their role from the reign of the fossil-fuel global economy. A major challenge is streamlining the consumption of energy, which is embedded in lifestyles of modern cities.
Life After Carbon argues that that cities can use energy and resources more efficiently to generate a revamped urban abundance, which needs to be sustainable, holistic and widely shared. It also urges compact lifestyles.
‘Urban compactness offers an efficiency advantage that builds on density, one that many cities had before they were designed for the automobile and that innovation lab cities are busy reclaiming. Compactness refers to the proximity of stores, jobs, and amenities to where people live—a development pattern that shortens routine travel distances and changes how people travel.’
The book emphasises upon the cities to restore the natural system power in order to uplift urban life. Here it cites the example of Melbourne where “every tree’s life matters.” The impetus to expand the use of green infrastructure stems from there factors: performance, cost effectiveness, and cobenefits.
Going forward, Life After Carbon underlines, that cities should be able to cultivate the inhabitants’ capacity and adapt accordingly in order to meet the requirements of the future. It is all about survival and “staying in the game” which the authors maintain as the necessary goal.
The road ahead requires a change in context, highlighting of the green and strong decision-making. Those ahead of the game are focusing on climate-oriented businesses and efforts to reduce consumption which bolsters the circular economies all the while promoting green infrastructure, biodiversity and biophilic immersion.
The authors seek city livability driven by climate action and aggressive performance expectation. They call out to ‘champions of big change’, which can of course be found in the private markets. New governance models, technical capacities and expanded financial resources need to be developed.
‘New ideas are taking hold in cities. They feed our needs and nourish our desires. They provide us with a new story about our future together. They fire our imaginations. They are transforming our cities.’
