Cities, neighborhoods and regions will be designed to use energy sparingly by offering walkable, transit-oriented options for all supplemented by renewably-powered electric plug-in vehicles. Cities with more sustainable transport systems have reduced ecological footprint from their reduced fossil fuels and greater chance of enhancing their ecology through reduced urban sprawl and car-based infrastructure.

The seventh and final installment of Peter Newman’s Resilient Cities series is the Sustainable Transport City. (Read about the first city model, the Renewable Energy City; the second city model, the Carbon Neutral City; the third city model, the Distributed City; and the fourth city model, the Photosynhetic City; the fifth city model, the Eco-Efficient City; and the sixth city model, the Place-Based City.

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The agenda for cities of the future is to have more sustainable transport options available so that a city can indeed reduce its traffic whilst reducing its greenhouse gases 50 percent by 2050 (the global agenda set through the International Panel on Climate Change). For many cities the reduction of car use is not yet on the agenda apart from seeing it as an obviously good thing to do. Unfortunately for most cities traffic growth has been continuous and appears to be unstoppable.  To reduce a city’s ecological footprint and enhance the liveability of the city it will be necessary to manage the growth of cars and trucks and their associated fossil fuel consumption.

The variations in private transport fuel use across 84 cities shows that there is a very large difference in how cities use cars and petroleum fuels. Through a number of studies it has been shown that these variations have little to do with climate, culture or politics, and even income is very poorly correlated, but they have a lot to do with the physical planning decisions that are made in those cities – see especially our ‘Sustainability and Cities’ Newman and Kenworthy, 1999. There is debate about the relative importance of urban planning parameters though within the profession there is increasing awareness that sustainable transport will only happen if there is an emphasis on urban form and density; infrastructure priorities especially the relative commitment to public transport compared to cars; and, street planning especially the provision for pedestrians and cyclists as part of sustainable mobility management.

Urban Form and Density Planning

The density of a city determines how close to urban activities most people can be. Very high density city centres mean that most destinations can be reached with a short walk or they can have highly effective public transport opportunities due to the concentration of people near stations. If densities are reduced but are focussed along corridors it is still feasible to have a good transit system. If however low densities are the dominant feature of a city then most activity needs to be based around cars as they alone can enable people to reach their destinations in a reasonable time. Public transport finds it hard to be competitive as there are just not enough people to justify reasonable services. Most low density cities are now trying to increase their densities to reduce their car dependence.

Density is a major tool available to planners in cities. It is best used where a city has good transit or wants to build transit as the resulting Transit Oriented Developments (TODs) are found to reduce car use per capita among its residents by half and to save households around 20% of their household income as they have on average one less car (often none). TODs are thus an affordable housing strategy as well. In the U.S., according to a 2007 study by Reid Ewing, “shifting 60 percent of new growth to compact patterns would save 85 million metric tons of CO2 annually by 2030.” TODs reduce ecological footprint in cities and undermine the kind of car-based sprawl that eats into the green agenda of cities. Thus this strategy of TODs can enable a city to put in place a clear urban growth boundary and to build a green wall for agriculture, recreation, biodiversity and the other natural systems of the green agenda. Cairo’s green belt is one attempt to do this.

If cities are dense, as in many developing cities, but they do not have adequate public transport and they allow too much traffic to develop in their streets, then they can easily develop dysfunctional transport systems. However their density will always enable them to provide viable public transport solutions if they invest in them, whereas low density cities are always struggling to provide any other options. High density means easier non-car based access but it can also mean much greater congestion whenever vehicles are used. If the vehicles in these confined spaces are poorly maintained diesel engines then very serious air pollution can result so cities need to be very serious about managing the source of such emissions.

Infrastructure Priorities–Especially Transit Planning

The relative speed of transit to traffic measures how effective public transport is in competing with the car. The best European and Asian cities for transit have the highest ratio of transit to traffic speeds and have achieved this invariably with fast rail systems. Rail systems are faster in every city in the sample by 10-20 kph over bus systems that rarely average over 20 to 25 kph. Busways can be quicker than traffic in car saturated cities but in lower density car dependent cities it is important to use the extra speed of rail to establish an advantage over cars in traffic. This is one of the key reasons why railways are being built in over 100 US cities and in many other cities modern rail is now seen as the solution for reversing the trend to the private car. The trend to electric urban rail is now called a global megatrend. Rail is also important as it has a density-inducing effect around stations which can help to provide the focussed centres so critical to overcoming car dependence and they are electric which reduces oil vulnerability.

Many cities in the world are unable to make transit politics work effectively. While major US cities such as New York and Chicago are dense and walkable, and their mayors have been lauded for their green plans and for signing onto the Mayor’s Climate Change Initiative, the mass transit systems for these cities continue to experience budget cuts. The city of Seattle, whose mayor is credited with initiating the US Mayor’s Climate Change Initiative, has struggled to implement any type of rail system. And while the State of California is a global leader on some state initiatives it has not yet developed a plan for how its heavy oil-using cities will wean themselves off their cars.

Yet across the world cities are building modern electric rail systems at vastly increasing rates as they solve the simultaneous problems of fuel security, decarbonising the economy for climate change, reducing traffic congestion sustainably, and creating productive city centres. The trend to fast electric rail in cities is now being called a Mega Trend. Chinese cities have moved from their road building phase to building fast modern rail across the nation. China is committed to building 120,000 km of new rail by 2020. Investment will rise from 155 billion Yuan (US$22b) per year in 2006 to 1000 billion per year by 2009 (US$143b), with around 6 million jobs involved; the projects are part of their response to the economic downturn. Beijing now has the world’s biggest Metro.

In Delhi the city has built a modern electric metro rail system which has developed considerable pride in their community and belief in their future. The 250km rail system is being built in various stages and will enable 60% of the city to be within 15 minutes walking distance of a station.

In Perth, Australia a 172 km modern electric rail system has been built over the past 20 years with stunning success in terms of patronage and the development of TODs; the newest section runs 80 kms to the south and has attracted 50,000 passengers a day where the bus system carried just 14,000 a day – the difference is that the train has a top speed of 130 kph and averages 90 kph so the trip takes just 48 minutes instead of over an hour by car. London, especially with its congestion tax which is recycled into the transit system, and Paris have both shown European leadership in managing the car.

While greening buildings, looking to renewable fuel sources, and creating more walkable communities are critical pieces of the sustainable city, investing in viable, accessible transit systems for cities is the most important component for them to become resilient to waning oil sources and in minimizing the impact of urban areas on climate change. Transit not just saves oil it helps restructure a city so that it can begin the exponential reduction in oil and car use so necessary for the future.

The opportunities for making major changes in a city if quality transit is a priority can be imagined but their extent is often not seen to be more than a mere slowing of traffic growth. We suggest it is possible to imagine an exponential decline in car use in cities that could lead to 50% less passenger kms driven in cars. The key mechanism is a quantitative leap in the quality of public transport whilst fuel prices continue to climb, accompanied by an associated change in land use patterns. This is due to a phenomenon called Transit Leverage whereby one pass km of transit use replaces between 3 and 7 pass kms in a car due to more direct travel (especially in trains), trip chaining (doing various other things like shopping or service visits associated with a commute), giving up one car in a household (a common occurrence that reduces many solo trips) and eventually changes in where people live as they prefer to live or work nearer transit.

Street Planning and Mobility Management

If cities build freeways then car dependence quickly follows. This is because the extra speed of freeways means that the city can quickly spread outwards into lower density land uses as the freeway rapidly becomes the preferred option. If on the other hand a city does not build freeways but prefers to emphasise transit it can enable its streets to become an important part of the sustainable transport system. Streets can be designed to favour pedestrians and cyclists and wherever this is done, cities invariably become surprised at how much more attractive and business-friendly it becomes – see the many projects and publications from Jan Gehl.

Sustainable mobility management is about “streets not roads”, whereby the streets are used for a multiplicity of purposes, not just maximising vehicle flow. The emphasis is on achieving efficiency by maximising people movement, not car movement and on achieving a high level of amenity and safety for all street users. This policy also picks up on the concept of integration of transport facilities as public space. One of the ways that US and European cities are approaching this is through what are called ‘Complete Streets’ or in the UK ‘Naked Streets’. This new movement aims to create streets where mobility is managed to favour public transport, walking and cycling in streets as well as traffic which is reduced in capacity somewhat, mainly through reduced speed. The policy often includes removing all large signs for drivers which means they automatically slow down; in Kensington High Road in London the traffic accident rate has halved.

Building freeways does not help either the brown agenda or the green agenda. It will not help a city save fuel as each lane rapidly fills leading to similar levels of congestion that were found before the road was built. Indeed studies have shown that there is little benefit for cities when they build freeways in terms of congestion and as that is the main reason for building them it does seem a waste. Data from Texas Transportation Institute show there is no overall correlation between delay per driver and the number of lanes of major roads built per head of population for the 20 biggest cities in the USA.

Thus for urban planners the choices for a more sustainable city are quite stark though politically they are much harder as the allure of building more road capacity remains very high. Many cities that have confronted the provision of a freeway have been global leaders in this move towards more sustainable transportation. In Copenhagen and Zurich, in Portland, Vancouver and Toronto, all had to face the cathartic experience of a controversial freeway. After a political confrontation the freeway options were dropped. They decided instead to provide other greener options and hence the building of light rail lines, cycleways, traffic calming and associated urban villages began to occur. All these cities had citizen groups that pushed visions for a different, less car-oriented city and a political process was worked through to achieve their innovations. Similar movements are active in Australia.

Freeways have blighted the centres of many cities and today there are cities that are trying to remove them. San Francisco removed the Embarcadero Freeway from its blighted waterfront district in the 1990’s after the Loma Prieta earthquake. It took three ballots before consensus was reached but the freeway has been rebuilt as a friendlier tree-lined boulevard involving pedestrian and cycle spaces. As in all cases where traffic capacity is reduced the city has not found it difficult to ensure adequate transport as most of the traffic just disappears. Regeneration of the land uses in the area has followed this change of transportation philosophy.

Seoul in Korea has removed a large freeway from its centre that had been built over a major river. The freeway had become controversial because of its blighting impacts on the built environment as well as the river. After a mayoral contest where the vision for a different kind of city was tested politically the newly elected mayor began a five year program that saw:

• The freeway dismantled
• The start of a rehabilitation process for the river
• The restoration of an historical bridge over the river
• Restoration and rehabilitation of the river foreshores as a public park
• Restoration of adjacent buildings
• Extension of the underground rail system to help replace the traffic

The project has been very symbolic for the city as the river was a spiritual source of life for the city. Now other car saturated Asian cities are planning to replace their central city freeways (http://www.metro.seoul.kr/kor2000/chungaehome/en/seoul/2sub.htm/).

What these projects have shown is that we should as David Burwell from People for Public Spaces says ‘think of transportation as public space’. Freeways thus, from this perspective, become very unfriendly solutions as they are not good public spaces. However boulevards with space for cars, cyclists, pedestrians, a busway or LRT, all packaged in good design and with associated land uses that creates attractions for everyone – these are the gathering spaces that make green cities good cities. In the UK the Demos Institute has shown how public transport helps create good public spaces that help define a city. The change of awareness amongst traffic engineers of this new paradigm for transportation planning is gathering momentum. Andy Wiley-Schwartz says that ‘Road engineers are realising that they are in the community development business and not just in the facilities development business’. He calls this the ‘slow road ‘movement. In essence it means that urban planners are asserting their role over traffic engineers or at least making an integrated approach rather than one that reduces city function down to vehicle movement.

With this changed approach to city planning the small scale systems of pedestrian movement and cycling become much more important. Pedestrian strategies enable each centre in a city to be given priority to the most fundamental of human interactions, the walking-based face-to-face contact, that gives human life to a city and in the process reduces ecological footprint.

Cycle strategies can go across the city with greenways that improve the green agenda as well as lowering energy use. Enough demonstrations now exist to show that pedestrian strategies and bicycle strategies work dramatically to improve city economies and to help create a Resilient City. The work of Jan Gehl in Copenhagen followed by pedestrian strategies in all Australian cities, London, New York and San Francisco, the work of Enrique Penelosa in Bogota, the dramatic changes in Paris with the Velib bicycle scheme and the growing awareness that it works in developing cities as well, are all testament to this new approach to cities.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.

The sixth Resilient City model is the Place-Based City. (Read about the first city model, the Renewable Energy City; the second city model, the Carbon Neutral City; the third city model, the Distributed City; and the fourth city model, the Photosynhetic City; and the fifth city model, the Eco-Efficient City.)

Cities and regions will understand sustainability more generally as a way to build local economy and build onto a unique and special sense of place and as a way to nurture a high quality of life and a strong commitment to community. The more place-oriented and locally self sufficient a city’s economy the more it will reduce its ecological footprint and the more it will ensure its valuable ecological features are enhanced.

Local economic development has many advantages for the triple bottom line, including the ability for people to travel less as their work is local. Finding ways to help facilitate local enterprises becomes a major achievement in moving towards a reduced ecological footprint in the city or town. Michael Shuman has pioneered how to help small towns in the US to grow their own jobs. Ernesto Sirolli has developed an approach to creating local enterprises that builds on the passions and resources of the local community and supports local businesses in their early vulnerable steps. The inaugural Enterprise Facilitation project to create local jobs was pioneered in the small rural town of Esperance Western Australia in 1985 but has since spread across three continents.  Chair of the Esperance Project, Barrie Stearne, states: “We are proud to say almost 800 businesses – or 60 per cent of the entrepreneurs we met are still running successful, sustainable operations and have contributed more than $190 million in revenue to the local economy”, Mr. Stearne said.  “We have averaged almost 40 new business start ups a year consistently in the last 20 years, which is quite a track record given Esperance has a population of just 13,500 people.” What Sirolli and Shuman have both found time and time again is that place really matters. When people belong and have an identity in their town or city they want to put down their roots and create local enterprise.

Most city officials want local economic development as their first priority. The best approach to this is to emphasize local place identity as shown by Robert Putnam when he found social capital to be the best way to predict wealth in a community. Thus when communities relate strongly to the local environment, the city’s heritage and its unique culture, such places develop a strong social capital of networks and trust that forms the basis of a good economy. Cairo, has a strong sense of place due to its ancient monuments and culture based around the Nile. It has been a continuing source of economic growth and is the basis of its attraction to people from across Egypt.

This approach to economic development which emphasizes place-based social capital has many supporters but very few relate this to the sustainability agenda in cities.  For example, energy expenditures—by municipalities, companies and individuals—represent a significant economic drain, as they often leave the community and region.  Producing power from solar, wind or biomass in the locality or region is very much an economic development strategy—generating local jobs and economic revenue for lands and landscapes (farmland) that might otherwise be economically marginal, and re-circulating dollars with an important economic multiplier effect. Energy efficiency can also be an economic development strategy. Research on renewable energy, and the creation of related products has developed into a strong part of the economy in Freiberg, Germany.

All the efforts at localizing energy, food, materials and economic development, remain dependent on the strength of local community.  BedZed shows the critical importance of thinking beyond the design of the buildings themselves and seeing urban development through a more holistic community-oriented design lens.  However impressive the passive solar design and smaller energy demands of this project are (300 mm insulation, an innovative ventilation and heat recovery system, for instance) much of the sustainability gain will come from how residents actually live in these places.  Here, residents are being challenged to re-think their consumption and mobility decisions—there is a car-sharing club on site, for example, a food buying club, and the emergence of a community of residents helping each other to think about and creatively reduce their ecological impacts and footprints.  This is actually a hallmark of European green projects and an important lesson seen in other projects.

Jan Scheurer examined a range of European urban ecology innovations. One of his key conclusions was that when the innovations came from a close and committed community then the innovations actually stuck and were ingrained in lifestyles, giving the next generation a real opportunity to gain from them. However, many architect designed innovations that were imposed on residents without their being involved or educated in their value and use, tended to fall into neglect or were actively removed.

Sense of place in a city requires that we pay attention to people and community development in the process of change – a major part of the urban planning agenda for many decades. This localized approach will be critical to integrating the green and brown agendas. It creates the necessary innovation as people dialogue through the options to reduce their ecological footprint which in turn creates a social capital that is the basis for on-going community life and economic development. Tim Beatley’s books have been setting out this agenda for a decade. City dwellers already increasingly want to know where their food is grown, where wine comes from, where the materials that make up their furniture comes from. This can increasingly move towards every element of our built environment. Thus as well as a slow food movement for local foods, a slow fibre and slow materials movement for local fabric and building purposes can also help create sense of place and bring the green and brown agendas together.

City economies in the past had their own currencies and Jane Jacobs argues that national currencies often fail to express the true value of a city and its bioregion. Transforming urban economies towards a more of a bioregional focus has been assisted in some places by adopting complementary currencies, providing an alternative to national currencies, and establishing local financial institutions. Korten  points out that a common currency not only facilitates change but also creates a community with a reciprocal interest in productive exchange among its members in the bioregion. In this way a community affirms its identity and creates a natural preference for its own products. Over a thousand communities around the world have issued their own local currencies to encourage local commerce.

Most developed cities have created similar development bonuses that are part of the non-monetary economy of the city. For example in Vancouver the city requires that 5% of the value of a development be directed into what they call social infrastructure. This is worked out by the developer and council in discussion with the local community who may want more landscaped streetscapes, more pedestrianised areas or a community meeting space, even an art-house cinema. Social housing is worked out on the basis of receiving a density bonus for more development rights. The more that Vancouver exercises these complementary currency requests the more that the development process works to create better public spaces to go with the private spaces that the market is for. Thus sustainability can be made to mean something at a very local level through the planning system.

All cities have the opportunity through their planning systems to create their own currencies which work in a parallel way with normal money. These ‘sustainability credits’ are not owned by the developer or by the city but they are real – they are in fact owned by the community as it is their values that are being expressed in the development bonuses granted. Thus cities can create community banks of sustainability credit through their planning system. Most cities in the third world don’t have much to invest in their public spaces and hence the whole city economy suffers. Curitiba showed how it could break that mould. Through the planning system cities can create their own sustainability currencies for what they most need as determined by their local citizens – they just need to define them as ‘development rights’. These new Sustainable Development Rights could be related to biodiversity credits, greenhouse reduction credits, salinity reduction credits, affordable housing credits or anything else that a community would see they can create a ‘market’ for in their city and its bioregion. Experiments in these new forms of city currency need to be undertaken by innovative city councils wanting to develop their economies around sustainability.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.

Cities and regions will move from linear to circular or closed-looped systems, where substantial amounts of their energy and material needs are provided from waste streams. Eco-efficient cities will reduce their ecological footprint by reducing wastes and reducing resource requirements.

The fifth city model is the Eco-Efficient City (read about the first city model, the Renewable Energy City; the second city model, the Carbon Neutral City; the third city model, the Distributed City; and the fourth city model, the Photosynhetic City.

A more integrated notion of energy and water as outlined above also entails seeing cities as complex metabolic systems (not unlike a human body) with flows and cycles and where, ideally the things that have traditionally been viewed as negative outputs (e.g. solid waste, wastewater) are re-envisioned as productive inputs to satisfy other urban needs, including energy. The sustainability movement has been advocating for some time for this shift away from the current view of cities as linear resource-extracting machines. This is often described as the eco-efficiency agenda.

The eco-efficiency agenda has been taken up by the United Nations and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, with a high target for industrialized countries of a 10-fold reduction in consumption of resources by 2040, along with rapid transfers of knowledge and technology to developing countries. While this eco-efficiency agenda is a huge challenge, it is important to remember that throughout the Industrial Revolution of the past 200 years, human productivity has increased by 20 000 per cent. The next wave of innovation has a lot of potential to create the kind of eco-efficiency gains that are required.

The urban eco-efficiency agenda includes William McDonough’s ‘cradle to cradle’ concept for the design of all new products, and new systems like industrial ecology where industries share resources and wastes like an ecosystem. Good examples exist in Kalundborg, Germany and Kwinana, Australia.

The view of cities as a complex set of metabolic flows might also help to guide cities dealing with those situations (especially in the shorter term) where considerable reliance on resources and energy from other regions and parts of the world still occurs.  Policies can include sustainable sourcing agreements, region-to-region trade agreements, urban procurement systems based on green certification systems, among others.  Embracing a metabolic view of cities and metropolitan areas takes global governance in some interesting and potentially very useful directions.

This new paradigm of sustainable urban metabolism (seeing them as complex systems of metabolic flows), will require profound changes in the way cities and metropolitan regions are conceptualized as well as in the ways we plan and manage them.  New forms of cooperation and collaboration between municipal agencies, and various urban actors and stakeholder groups will be required, for instance municipal departments will need to formulate and implement integrated resource flow strategies.  New organizational and governance structures will likely be necessary as well as new planning tools and methods, for example cities that map the resource flows of their city and region, will need to see how these new data can be part of a comprehensive plan for integrating the green and brown agendas.

Toronto has a trash-to-can program, which allows them to capture methane from waste to generate electricity. This not only reuses waste and provides an inexpensive energy source, but captures a significant amount of methane that would otherwise be released in the air. Before it reached capacity in its operation, it is estimated that the Keele Valley Landfill generated three to four million dollars annually, and provided enough power for approximately 24,000 homes (Clinton Climate Initiative best practices, www.c40cities.org/bestpractices/watse/toronto_organic.jsp).

One extremely powerful example of how this eco-efficiency view can manifest in a new approach to urban design and building can be seen in the new dense urban neighborhood of Hammarby Sjöstad, in Stockholm.  Here, from the beginning of the planning of this new district, an effort was made to think holistically, to understand the inputs, outputs and resources that would be required and that would result.  For instance, about 1000 flats in Hammarby Sjöstad are equipped with biogas stoves that utilize biogas extracted from wastewater generated in the community.  Biogas also provides fuel for buses that serve the area.  Organic waste from the community is returned to the neighborhood in the form of district heating and cooling. There are many other important energy features in the design as well, most importantly perhaps is the close proximity to central Stockholm and the installation (from the beginning) of a high-frequency light rail system that makes it truly possible to live without a private automobile (there are also 30 car-sharing cars in the neighborhood).  While not a perfect example, it represents a new and valuable way to see cities, and requires a degree of interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral collaboration in the planning system that is unusual in most cities.

Eco-efficiency does not have to involve just new technology it can also be introduced into cities through intensive use of man-power as in Cairo’s famous Zabaleen recycling system (Box 6). There are many other examples of how cities across the third world have integrated waste management into local industries, buildings and food production.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.

The potential to grow energy and provide food and materials locally will become part of urban infrastructure. Photosynthetic processes in cities will reduce their ecological impact through replacing fossil fuels and can bring substantial ecological benefits through their emphasis on natural systems.

The fourth city model is the Photosynthetic City (read about the first city model, the Renewable Energy City; the second city model, the Carbon Neutral City; and the third city model, the Distributed City).

The potential to grow energy and provide food and materials locally will become part of urban infrastructure. Photosynthetic processes in cities will reduce their ecological impact through replacing fossil fuels and can bring substantial ecological benefits through their emphasis on natural systems.

There has been a positive trend in planning in the direction of an expanded notion of urban infrastructure to include the idea of “green infrastructure” using photosynthetic processes.  Green infrastructure refers to the many green and ecological features and systems, from wetlands to urban forests, that provide a host of benefits to cities and urban residents —clean water, storm water collection and management, climate moderation and cleansing of urban air, among others.  This understanding of green infrastructure as part of the working landscape of cities and metropolitan areas could also extend to include the photosynthetic sources of renewable energy, local food and fibre, as potential green infrastructure.

Renewable energy can be tapped from the sun and wind and geothermal sources as a small scale decentralized technology as described in the previous section. However renewable energy can also be grown through biofuels. The transition to growing fuels will need to be tailored to new crops and forests that can feed into new ways of fuelling our buildings and vehicles. Farms and landscapes, open areas around cities could develop as the source of renewable energy, especially the production of bio-fuels. However they can also be produced as part of a city’s urban environment. This will mean more intensive greening of the lower density parts of a city and its peri-urban regions with intensive food growing, renewable energy crops and forests, but also greening the high density parts of cities as well.

The City of Växjä in Sweden has developed a locally based renewable energy strategy that takes full advantage of its working landscapes, in its case the abundant forests that exist within close proximity of the city.  Växjä’s main power plant, formerly fueled by oil, has been converted to biomass, almost entirely now from wood chips, most of which are a byproduct of the commercial logging in the region.  The wood, more specifically, comes from the branches, bark and tops of trees, and is derived from within a 100 km distance of the power plant.  This combined heat and power plant (Sandvik II) provides all the town’s heating needs and much of its electricity needs, and its conversion to biomass as a fuel has been a key element in the city’s aspiration to become an oil-free city.  Clearly each city can develop its own mix of local renewable sources but Vaxja has demonstrated that it can transition from an oil-based power system to a completely renewable system without losing its economic edge. Indeed cities that develop such resiliency early are likely to have an edge as oil resources decline.

The metropolitan landscape can be viewed as the pallet for a creative mix of solar design and renewable energy projects, and every city and region will have its own special opportunities and resources and in doing so will help integrate the green and brown agendas.

One of the most important potential bio-fuel sources of the future will be blue-green algae that can be grown intensively on roof tops. Blue green algae can photosynthesize so all they need is sun, water and nutrients. The output from blue-green algae is ten times faster than most other biomass sources so it can be continuously cropped and fed into a process for producing bio-fuels or small scale electricity. Most importantly city buildings can all utilize their roofs to tap solar energy and use it for local purposes without the distribution or transport losses so apparent in our cities today. Bill McDonough says that ‘every roof should be photosynthetic’; by this he means either a green roof for biodiversity/ water collection/landscape, or for PV collectors or for biofuel algal collectors. This can become a solar ordinance set by town planners as policy by local governments.

Few cities and few municipal governments have done much to take stock of their photosynthetic energy potential.  Municipal comprehensive plans typically inventory and describe a host of natural and economic resources found within the boundaries of a city—from mineral sites to historic buildings to biodiversity—but estimating incoming renewable energy (sun, wind, wave, biomass or geothermal) is usually not included here.  In advancing the renewable energy agenda in Barcelona, the city took the interesting step of calculating incoming solar gain.  As former sustainable city counsellor Josep Puig notes, this amounts to “10 times more than the energy the city consumes or 28 times more than the electricity the city is consuming”. The issue now is how to tap into this across the city.

As well as renewable fuel, cities can incorporate food in this more holistic solar and post-oil view for the future. Food, in the globalized marketplace increasingly travels great distances—apples from New Zealand, grapes from Chile, wine from South Australia, vegetables from China.  ‘Food Miles’ are rising everywhere and already food in the US travels a distance of between 1,500-2,500 miles from where it is grown to where it is consumed.  Any exotic sources of food come at a high-energy cost. Thomas Starrs refers to modern food as “The SUV in Our Pantry,” in an article in Solar Today magazine:

It takes about 10 fossil fuel calories to produce each food calorie in the average American diet. So if your daily food intake is 2,000 calories, then it took about 20,000 calories to grow that food and get it to you. In more familiar units, this means that growing, processing and delivering the food consumed by a family of four each year requires the equivalent of almost 34,000 kilowatt-hours of energy, or more than 930 gallons of gasoline. (For comparison, the average U.S. household annually consumes about 10,800 kilowatt-hours of electricity, or about 1,070 gallons of gasoline.) In other words, we use about as much energy to grow our food as to power our homes or fuel our cars.

There are now good examples of new neighborhoods and development projects that design-in from the beginning, spaces for community gardens and that attempt to satisfy a considerable portion of food needs on-site or nearby. Growing food within cities and urban (and suburban) environments can take any number of forms.  Community gardens, urban farms, and edible landscaping are all promising urban options. Prominent and compelling examples of edible urban landscaping have shown that it is possible to trade hardscape environments for fruit trees and edible perennials.  In the downtown Vancouver neighborhood of Mole Hill, for instance, a conventional alleyway has been converted to a green and luxurious network of edible plants and raised-bed gardens, in a pedestrianised community space, where the occasional automobile now seems out of place. New urban development can include places (rooftops, sideyards, backyards) where residents can directly grow food.  This has been a trend in developed cities, as new urban ecological neighborhoods have included community gardens as a central design element (e.g. Viikki, in Helsinki, South False Creek in Vancouver, Troy Gardens in Madison) but is perhaps most famous in Cuban cities over the past few decades in response to being cut-off from oil imports.

Cities need to find creative ways to promote urban farming where it is feasible and not in tension with the need to redevelop for reduced car dependence. This may mean that a city can utilize the many vacant lots for commercial and community farms in areas that have been blighted (e.g. estimated 70,000 vacant lots in Chicago alone). However if these areas are well served with good transit and other infrastructure then such uses should be seen as temporary and indeed can be part of the rehabilitation of an area leading to the redevelopment of eco-villages that are car free and models of solar building as in Vauban.  Many cities have embarked on some form of effort to examine community food security and to promote more sustainable local and regional food production.  These can be integrated into ecologically sustainable urban and regional rehabilitation projects and can utilize the intensive possibilities of urban spaces such as in urban permaculture.

In Madison, Wisconsin, a model urban garden called Troy Gardens has emerged from excess land owned by a state-owned mental hospital. Dubbed the Accidental Eco-village by those involved in its transformation, the land was being sold in 1995 when the community who used it as a garden and park stepped in and formed an association to try and buy the land. Through partnerships with other NGOs and the University of Madison Department of Urban and Regional Planning, the Friends of Troy Gardens was able to create a diversity of uses that enabled the money to be found. Thus on the site now is a mixed income co-housing project involving 30 housing units, a community garden with 320 allotments, an intensive urban farm using traditional Hmong agricultural techniques for a community supported agriculture enterprise, and a prairie restoration scheme which is regenerating local biodiversity.

Progress in moving away from fossil fuels will also require serious localizing and local sourcing of building materials and this in turn provides new opportunities to build more photosynthetic-economies.  The value of emphasizing the local is many-fold and the essential benefits are usually clear.  Dramatic reductions in the energy consumed of these materials is, of course the primary benefit. It is also of course about strengthening local economies and helping them to become more resilient in the face of global economic forces and it is also about re-forming lost connections to place.

At the Bed ZED project in London, more than half of the building materials for the project came from within a 35-mile radius, and the wood used in construction, as well as a fuel in the neighborhood’s CHP plant, derives from local council forests. A photosynthetic approach to urban use of fibre will mean an added reduction in fibre miles as well as potential to help re-grow bioregions.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.

The seven key innovations of resilient cities are set as city models (being detailed over the next several weeks here at “Eco-Compass”). While no one city has shown innovation in all seven areas, some are quite advanced in one or two. The challenge for urban planners will be to apply all of these city characteristics together, to generate a sense of hope through a combination of new technology, city design and community-based innovation, which together will create the Resilient City.

The third city model is the Distributed City (read about the first city model, the Renewable Energy City and the second city model, the Carbon Neutral City).

Cities will shift from large centralized power and water systems to small-scale and neighborhood-based systems, including expanding the notion of “green infrastructure”. The distributed use of power and water in a city can enable a city to reduce its ecological footprint as power and water can be more efficiently provided using the benefits of electronic control systems, and, particularly through water sensitive urban design, a city can improve its green character.

Most power and water systems for cities over the past 100 years have become bigger and more centralized. Now the new forms of power and water are smaller scale but often they are still fitted into cities as though they were large. The movement that tries to see how these new technologies can be fitted into cities and decentralized across grids, is called distributed power and distributed water systems.

The distributed water system approach is called Water Sensitive Urban Design and includes how to use the complete water cycle, from rain and local water sources like groundwater, to feed into the system and then to recycle grey water locally and black water regionally, to ensure that there are significant reductions in water used. This system can enable the green agenda to become central to the infrastructure management of a city as stormwater recycling can involve swales and artificial wetlands that can become important habitat in the city, grey water recycling can similarly be used to green parks and gardens, and regional black water recycling can be tied into regional ecosystems. All these systems will require ‘smart’ control systems to fit them into a city grid and also will require new skills by town planners who are used to water management being a centralized function rather than being a local planning issue.

In global cities, the traditional engineering approach to power has been that the most effective and efficient way of providing energy is through larger centralized production facilities, and extensive distribution systems that transport energy relatively long distances. This is wasteful because of line losses but also because large base load power systems cannot be turned on and off easily so there is considerable power shedding when the load does not meet the need.  However renewable, low-carbon cities mostly involve a more decentralized energy production system, where production is more on a neighborhood scale and both line losses and power shedding can be avoided.  Whether a wind turbine, small biomass CHP plant, or a rooftop photovoltaic system, renewable energy is produced closer to where it is consumed, and indeed often directly by those who consume it.  This distributed generation offers a number of benefits including energy savings given the ability to better control the power production, lower vulnerability and greater resilience in the face of natural and human-caused disaster (including terrorist attacks). Clever integration of these small systems into a grid can be achieved with new technology control systems that balance the whole system in its demand and supply from a range of sources as they rise and fall and link it to storage, especially vehicle batteries through vehicle-to-grid or V2G technology. Small-scale energy systems are being developed to make more resilient cities in the future.

The same approach can be applied to water systems where there are now many cities that are able to demonstrate small scale local water systems that are very effective. The many developing cities that already have distributed water supplies from community bores and small scale sewage treatment, can look to a number of cases where these have been made safe and effective without being turned into expensive centralized systems. In Malang, East Java a small scale community sewage system was fitted into a squatter village to provide sanitation for 500 families.

Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, has a major system of wastewater reuse involving vegetables, rice, as well as fish in low lying Tranh Tri district which lies to the south of the city. Produce from the reuse system provides a significant part of the diet of the city’s people (Ho, 2002). Wastewater and stormwater are discharged untreated to four small rivers which play a dual role: drainage of wastewater from the city; and wastewater supply for reuse in agriculture and aquaculture. Conventional wastewater treatment plants have been constructed but lie idle due to lack of budget for operational and maintenance costs. About one-third of the city is sewered but its pipes are directed to these small rivers. The wastewater is 75-80% domestic and 20-25% industrial.

The system for treatment has largely been developed by the district farmers and local community over the past 30 years. Before 1960 the treatment area was a sparsely populated swamp where rice was grown but with low yields and frequent flooding. Aquaculture began to develop in the early 1960s with the construction of an extensive irrigation and drainage system to facilitate rice cultivation. Farmers began to stock seed of wild fish collected from the river in rice fields as they perceived the benefits of wastewater-fed aquaculture. Following the formation of cooperatives in 1967, land use stabilized into vegetable cultivation on higher land, rice/fish cultivation on medium level land, and year-round pond fish culture on deeper land adjacent to the main irrigation and drainage canals. Wastewater-fed aquaculture became the major occupation of 6 cooperatives with easy access to wastewater and a minor occupation of 10 others out of the total of 25 district communes.

The use of waste in a food production system must always be sympathetic to public health. Traditionally wastewater has been gathered around cities and re-used only after sufficient time has elapsed for human contaminants to be naturally removed. Excess wastes were flushed into the rivers but only if the value in those wastes was mostly removed for agriculture. The use of the bioregion for waste treatment was feasible as the capacity for it to treat was not exceeded. As cities have grown, the increase in waste has far outstripped natural capacities. Cities everywhere have to find ways of treating waste as well as re-using it. Approaches that can use new technology to totally remove waste are now feasible but a distributed approach would try to use waste as much as possible in the bioregion for agricultural production as in the East Calcutta Wetlands project.

Often public health authorities have tried to ban all use of waste for agriculture which just means that water and waste are not used efficiently or ecologically. Human health is the sole focus in this approach but it is generally not sustainable to continue like this as there is not enough water and organic fertilizer to enable bioregional agriculture to proceed ecologically. The city then tends to extract water and produce food in largely unsustainable ways. Thus approaches to water and waste will require new technologies and management systems that integrate public health and environmental engineering with ecologically sound planning (Ho, 2003).

Distributed power and water needs community support. In Toronto a possible model has been developed similar to those above in developing cities, when communities began forming ‘buying-cooperatives’ in which they pooled their buying power to negotiate special reduced prices from local photovoltaic (PV) companies that had offered an incentive to buy solar PV. The first co-op was the Riverdale Initiative for Solar Energy, or RISE, when 75 residents joined together to purchase rooftop PV systems, resulting in about a 15 percent savings in their purchase cost.  This then spread across the city. The Toronto (and Ontario province) example suggests the merits of combining bottom-up neighborhood approaches with top-down incentives and encouragement. This support for small-scale distributed production—offered through what are commonly referred to as Standard Offer Contracts (SOCs, often referred to as “feed-in tariffs” in Europe), has been extremely successful in Europe where they are now common.  The same can be done with new technologies for water and waste such as rain water tanks and grey water recycling as part of any urban approvals.

One other model can be seen in the redevelopment of the Western Harbor in Malmö , Sweden. Here the goal was to achieve distributed power and water systems from local sources.  This urban district now has 100% renewable power and an innovative storm water management system that recycles water into green courtyards and green rooftops along with the solar panels (City of Malmo, 2005). The project involves local government in the management and demonstrates that a clear plan helps to drive innovations in distributed systems.

Distributed infrastructure is beginning to be demonstrated in cities across the globe. Utilities will need to develop models with city planners of how they can do local energy and water planning with community-based approaches and local management.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.

The seven key innovations of resilient cities are set as city models (being detailed over the next several weeks here at “Eco-Compass”). While no one city has shown innovation in all seven areas, some are quite advanced in one or two. The challenge for urban planners will be to apply all of these city characteristics together, to generate a sense of hope through a combination of new technology, city design and community-based innovation, which together will create the Resilient City.

The second city model is the Carbon Neutral City (click here to read about the first city model, the Renewable Energy City). 

2. Carbon Neutral in the City. Every home, neighborhood and business is carbon neutral. Carbon neutral cities are able to reduce their ecological footprint through energy efficiency and replacing fossil fuels, but in creating offsets in the bioregion it can be the basis of ecological regeneration.

In 2007 the head of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of one of the biggest media empires in the world, announced that his company would be going carbon neutral. This has led to some remarkable innovation in the company as they confronted the totally new territory of becoming a global leader in energy efficiency, renewable energy and carbon offsets.

Many businesses, universities and households are now committing to minimizing their carbon footprint and even becoming carbon neutral.  But can it become a feature of whole neighborhoods and even complete cities? There are those who suggest it is essential if we are to move to Post Carbon cities.

Carbon neutral can become the goal for all urban development just as it has for businesses and households. This will require a three step process:

• reducing energy use wherever possible-especially in the building and transportation sectors;
• adding as much renewable energy as possible, while being careful that the production of the renewable energy sources is not contributing significantly to greenhouse gases; and
• offsetting any CO2 emitted through purchasing carbon credits particularly through tree planting.

There are private initiatives focused on helping cities to reach these goals, including ICLEI’s Cities for Climate Change, Architecture 2030, and The Clinton Foundation’s C-40 Climate Change Initiative. And as mentioned in the above section, many municipalities have started to offer incentives and/or require that new buildings must meet certain green-building standards. Minimizing carbon at the building level has momentum as it is easier to integrate the technology into new building, and the cost benefits have been proven (not just in energy savings, but in increased productivity and fewer sick days in green office buildings).

In Sydney, Australia the State of New South Wales, through its BASIX program, has mandated that new homes must now be designed to produce 40 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions, compared with an existing house (after initially requiring 20 percent and finding it was relatively easy to achieve), as well as 40 percent less water. BASIX is calculated to save 8 million Tonnes of CO2 and 287 billion liters of water in ten years. This is an important role for urban planning through the assessment process which can help to set up carbon neutral suburbs.

Zero energy buildings and homes go well beyond what is required by any green building rating system. These have been built in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany for at least ten years, and now there are increasingly positive examples in every region of the world.

The United Kingdom government has mandated that all urban development will be carbon neutral by 2016 with a phasing in from 2009. BedZED-or Beddington Zero Energy Development-is the first carbon-neutral community in the UK.  It has extended the concept to include the building materials and as it is a social housing development it has shown how to integrate the green and brown agendas.

Malmo, Sweden has stated that it has already become a carbon neutral city; Växjä, Sweden, has declared its intention to become a fossil-fuel free city, and Newcastle, in the UK, and Adelaide in Australia aspire to be “carbon neutral”. Each has taken important steps in the direction of renewable energy consistent with the vision articulated here.

The link to the green agenda is very direct with the carbon neutral approach through bioregional tree planting schemes. By cities committing to carbon neutral they can focus their offsets into bioregional tree planting that is part of the biodiversity agenda as well as climate change.

In all Australian cities, the carbon and GHG emissions associated with many municipal motor pools are being offset through innovative tree-planting initiatives and organizations like GreenFleet, which has recently planted its 2-millionth tree. Firms like airlines all offer a carbon neutral service, schools like South Fremantle High School and many businesses like News Corporation are committed to being carbon neutral.  The carbon offsetting is accredited through a Federal Government scheme called Greenhouse Friendly and provides a strong legal backing to ensure that plantations are real, related to the money committed and are guaranteed for at least 70 years as required by the Kyoto Convention. Many of the carbon offsetting programs are going towards biodiversity plantations that are regenerating the bioregional ecology around the cities. One plan in particular is the Gondwana Links project which is regenerating an ecological link over 3000 kms between the coastal ecosystems of the Karri forest to the inland woodlands by joining up various reserves. The project is driven by many big firms using their offsets to build in these biodiversity-based plantings – see Newman and Jennings, Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Island Press, 2008).

Preserving and planting trees helps to sequester carbon that is emitted. Tree cover also helps to naturally cool buildings and homes and can reduce the need to use energy necessary for artificial cooling. Tree planting as part of a carbon neutral program can be built into the normal functions of the city as in Cairo (see indented section, below). Initiatives to provide greater tree coverage include the tree planting program at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD). SMUD has been actively promoting tree planting as a way of reducing energy consumption, and effectively addressing the urban heat island problem. Since 1990, this program of providing residents with free shade trees, has resulted in the planting of some 350,000 trees there. This program could be expanded to provide residents and businesses with carbon neutral options.

In Cairo their Plan includes a greenbelt which will be part of a carbon neutral goal. The greenbelt has been in their Plan for over 30 years but now has received a boost from this new initiative. The greenbelt plantation, outside the Greater Cairo Region ring road and its major junctions, is being developed along with greenbelts for all the surrounding new satellite cities. As of 2005, a greenbelt of about 500 000 trees using a highly efficient drip irrigation system was completed along the ring road. These stretches of green-space will use only treated waste water with predominantly drip irrigation systems in order to efficiently disperse waste water while providing the plants a needed fertilizer. Some of the afforestation projects also include the production of crops of high-economic yield (mainly Jatropha and Jojoba plants). To off-set the current carbon emission in Cairo, the government estimated 10.5 million medium-sized trees would be necessary. The successful completion of this goal will depend on the establishment of new treatment plants and irrigations systems to meet the rising waste water production. Besides reducing the carbon impact of Cairo, these forests provide a means to control urban expansion and generate many job opportunities and more importantly, they improve biodiversity and other natural environment outcomes. Thus this program provides a clear example of how the green and brown agenda can be linked. 

As part of Atlanta’s ambitious beltline project to connect trails, transit, greenspace and development along 22-miles of an old rail corridor, over 1,200 acres of new greenspace will be added to the urban landscape. And in Los Angeles, Mayor Villaraigosa has committed to planting one million trees through the urban area, made possible by public-private partnerships.

All these are good programs but none are committed yet to a comprehensive city-wide carbon neutral approach that can link their tree planting to a broader biodiversity cause. In doing so, they can raise urban and bioregional re-forestation to a new level and provide hope for their citizens that are looking for ways to contribute to reducing the impact of climate change and simultaneously solving local and regional green agenda issues.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.

The seven key innovations of resilient cities are set as city models, which will be detailed over the next several weeks here at “Eco-Compass.” While no one city has shown innovation in all seven areas, some are quite advanced in one or two. The challenge for urban planners will be to apply all of these city characteristics together, to generate a sense of hope through a combination of new technology, city design and community-based innovation, which together will create the Resilient City.

The first is city model is the Renewable Energy City.

1. Renewable Energy City. Urban areas powered by renewable energy techniques and technologies from the region to the building level. Renewable energy enables a city to reduce its dependence on fossil energy and its ecological footprint and if using biological fuels can be part of a city’s enhanced ecological functions.

Renewable energy production can and should occur within cities, integrated into their land use and built form, and comprising a significant and important element of the urban economy.  Cities are not simply consumers of energy, but catalysts for more sustainable energy paths.  Cities can become more and more a part of the earth’s solar cycle.

While some solar city projects, such as those in the indented paragraph below, are underway (including Treasure Island in San Francisco) there are presently no major cities in the world that are powered entirely by renewable energy. Vauban is a 100% renewable suburb in Freiburg, Germany. Cairo has a plan for 20% renewable energy by 2020 based on wind and solar. Movement towards a renewable-energy future will require much greater levels of commitment from cities themselves-from the local governments and municipalities, large and small that make up metropolitan areas.

Urban planning is necessary to create the infrastructure needed to support solar and wind power at the scale necessary to help power a city. While finding locations for large wind farms  near urban areas has been controversial (such as the wind farm proposal that was defeated off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts), there are significant opportunities to harness solar and wind power. Studies are also now showing that wind, like PV solar can be integrated into cities and their buildings. A study from Stanford University examined the potential for wind power in regions and in cities. Researcher Cristina Archer said “The main implication of this study is that wind, for low-cost wind energy, is more widely available than was previously recognized.”

Hydro power has been used in cities such as Vancouver, British Columbia and Christchurch, New Zealand, for decades. Few people see much more potential for hydro power due to the impact of large dams but the role of geothermal power appears to be offering a similar level of base load renewable power.

Dongtan, Masdar and North Port Quay – renewable city models for the future.

Dongtan. . . “It is designed to be a beautiful and truly sustainable city with a minimal ecological footprint. The goal is to use Dongtan as a template for future urban design. As China is planning to build no less than 400 new cities in the next twenty years, Dongtan’s success is of crucial importance.” — World Business Council of Sustainable Development

Dongtan is a new Chinese city near Shanghai which is designed to use 100% renewable energy in its buildings, it will be self-sufficient in water and food sourced from the surrounding farmland, and it will feature a zero-carbon public transport system powered entirely by renewable-energy. What happens to cars in the city is not yet clear. Energy plant will burn rice husks, normally just waste, near the city center and the energy will be generated on a decentralised model, using combined heat and power.

Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates is an important first example of a city built from scratch with 100% renewable energy and zero car use (in theory anyway). It is being built with a 60MW Solar PV plant to power all construction, and eventually a 130MW Solar PV plant for on-going power as well as a 20MW Wind farm and geothermal heat pumps for cooling buildings. Electric automatic pod cars on an elevated structure will be the basis of the transport.

North Port Quay in Western Australia will be home to 10,000 households and is designed to be 100% renewable through solar PV, small wind turbines called wind pods and a nearby wave power system. The development will be dense and walkable with an all-electric transport system featuring electric public transport and electric private transport all linked to the renewable power through battery storage in the vehicles (see Went, Newman and James, 2008).

New models of how we can make cities 100% renewable are needed but rebuilding our present cities is just as important. Cities like Adelaide have gone from zero to 20 percent renewable energy in ten years by building four large wind farms.

The shift in the direction to the renewable city can occur through many actions:  demonstration solar or low energy homes created to show architects, developers, and citizens that green can be appealing, procurement actions that source regionally produced wind and other renewable energy to power municipal lights and buildings and locally and green building standards and requirements for all new public as well as private buildings.

Few cities have been as active in seeking and nurturing a reputation as a solar city as Freiburg, Germany.  Known to many as the “ecological capital of Europe” Freiburg has adopted an impressive and wide-ranging set of environmental planning and sustainability initiatives, many focused on renewable energy.  Through its Solar Region Freiburg program, the city has sought to actively support solar energy as an important element of its economic base, and even a form of local tourism.  A series of “solar tours” have been organized, for instance, as a way to visit and learn about their innovative solar energy projects in the city.  And there are many such projects, from dramatic individual residences (e.g. Rolf Disch’s Heliotropic House) to prototype experimental homes (e.g. the Freiburg zero-energy house) to business structures (e.g. the zero-emission Solar Fabrik, the Solar Tower, high-rise office building), and public buildings and installations.  The city has also become home to an impressive number of scientific and educational organizations dedicated to renewable energy to ensure it has an economic edge in the next industrial era.

Freiburg has, moreover, incorporated solar energy in all major new development areas including Resielfeld and Vauban, new compact green growth areas in the city.  Both active and passive solar techniques are employed in these projects, and the city also mandates a stringent energy standard for all new homes. In Vauban, some 5,000 zero-energy homes—homes that produce at least as much energy as they need—have been built and a zero energy office complex was added in 2006, along with two solar garages where PV covers the roof of the only allowable parking in the area.

This emphasis on solar energy has in turn set the tone and context for what other businesses and organizations could do. The Victoria Hotel in the center of Freiberg, for instance, now markets itself as the world’s first zero-emission hotel, boasting that all its energy needs are satisfied through renewable energy sources, including solar hot water and photovoltaic panels on the hotel’s rooftop.  A host of other environmental features are employed, including providing all guests with free transit passes for riding the city’s exemplary public transit system.

The City of Adelaide, in the State of South Australia also envisions itself as a renewable city, as a part of its larger green city initiative.  It has designated solar precincts for the installation of photovoltaics on the rooftops of buildings, including Parliament House. There is a solar schools initiative, with the goal of 250 solar schools (schools with rooftop installations, and that incorporate solar and renewable energy into their educational curricula).  This idea has since been taken up by the new Australian Federal government to be applied to every school in the country. And most creatively the city has been installing grid-connected PV street lamps that produce some six times the energy needed for the lighting.  These new lights are designed in a distinctive shape of a local mallee tree. This is one of the few examples of solar art or solar ‘place’ projects.

Along with incentives (financial and otherwise), solar cities recognize the need to set minimum regulatory standards.  Barcelona has a solar ordinance, which requires new buildings and substantial retrofits of existing buildings must obtain a minimum of 60 percent of hot water needs from solar.  This has already led to a significant growth in that city in the number of solar thermal installations.

Transport can also be a major part of the renewables challenge. The more that public transport moves to electric power the more it can be part of a renewable city. Calgary Transit’s creative initiative “Ride the Wind” provides all the power needed for its light rail system from wind turbines in the south of Alberta.  Private transport can now also be part of this transition through a combination of electric vehicles and new battery storage technology (together called Renewable Transport by Went, Newman and James, 2008 – see www.resilientcitiesbook.org). Electric vehicles not only can use renewable electricity to power their propulsion they can be plugged in during the day and through their batteries enable the power system to store four times their consumption in renewables. Thus they can provide a critical role in enabling renewables to build up as a much higher proportion of the grid. This breakthrough in technology will need to be carefully examined to ensure that cities use it to be fully sustainable and do not use it to justify further urban sprawl.

Renewable power in a city enables it to use energy for creating healthy and livable environments without anything like the impact of fossil fuels. But by itself it will not be enough.

Check back next week for the #2 city model resulting from innovations of resilient cities.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.

How did the crash happen? Over-inflating the economic balloon with debt that was vulnerable to rises in oil price. What do we do about it? Use non-oil-based projects and approaches to generate economic growth or else we are going to make things worse. In detail….

• Peak oil theorists have been squabbling about when the geological peak will happen but in economic terms it happened in 2005 when the production of conventional oil (cheap oil which can be produced under about $65/bbl) peaked. The five mega Major oil companies peaked in their oil production in 2005 and have gone down since.

• The price of oil was then based on the marginal production from unconventional oil (deep water, remote and dirty oil like shale). Oil rapidly increased in price from $40 to $140 between 2005 and July 2008.

• The first financial fall-out was the exposure of debt in sub-prime mortgages based primarily in highly car dependent urban areas. Tripling of fuel prices made it impossible to pay mortgages. Non-recourse financing meant that people in many vulnerable areas walked away from their homes without carrying the debt with them (cant do this in Australia).

• All global debt began to be pulled into the crash as the vulnerability to oil underlies just about everything. As Colin Campbell predicted in 2005:

“…the banks lent more than they have based on confidence that the resulting expansion was sufficient collateral for today’s debt. But unrecognised was that this expansion was not just money it was good old cheap energy… We face this monumental kind of weakness of our entire banking and financial sector.” Peak Oil Newsletter 53, May 2005.

• Imploding debt spread around the world as the debt-based economic balloon began deflating. The assumption of cheap oil now lay in tatters and challenged the ability of any bank to be able to repay its debt.

• How far will this go? US debt alone is over $110 trillion (world annual GDP is $66 trillion)… which represents $386,000 per person. Even 30% of this being vulnerable would suggest that the crash could go a lot further.

• With the economic balloon deflating rapidly the oil price has dropped even more rapidly to less than $40 (in early December, 2008). What kind of price is going to result is now of much debate – see http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4846

• The oil price crash means that most higher price oil alternatives are now being dropped or moth-balled. The figure below shows that in production costs alone oil over $40 a barrel is much more likely than oil under $40 a barrel. The deep water and dirty oil (shale) options are all over $100 as are most biofuel projects without their subsidies.

(See the Chairman’s Address of Horizon Oil.)

• The marginal cost of oil production is thus around the $70 to $80/bbl mark so the price could be expected to hover around there until demand pushes it into the more expensive options. As long as oil markets and financial markets return to something like a sane process.

• What is very clear is that no further economic expansion can occur based around oil prices that are less than $40 a barrel which was the assumption of most in the financial community until recently. Projects with debt based around that assumption remain vulnerable. This includes a swathe of suburban and peri urban developments as well as many toll road projects.

• A similar analysis can be made based around climate change. Lack of confidence in any fossil fuel-based growth has seeped into all financial markets since the work of Nicholas Stern and Ross Garnaut demonstrated the importance of early action over climate change. Climate change governance will now progressively push the price of carbon up, making suspect those projects already debt financed using assumptions of cheap carbon.

• The economy of cities everywhere are thus vulnerable to oil. However some cities are much more vulnerable than others as shown in the figure below based on data we collect on global cities.

These data are for city regions in 1995 and include all the gasoline and diesel for private passenger travel. They show:

1. US cities dominate in their oil consumption and car use with a significant difference between Atlanta at 103 GJ/person, Houston 75 GJ/person and New York at 44GJ/person. (Note: 1 GJ of fuel equals 28.8 litres of gasoline equivalent or 7.8 gallons).
2. Australian, Canadian and New Zealand cities follow this with 30 to 40 GJ/person.
3. All European cities use less than 20 GJ/person and reach as low as 12 GJ/person in Helsinki and 8 GJ/person in Barcelona; Eastern European cities are even lower between 5 and 10 GJ/person with Cracow lowest at 2GJ/person.
4. Wealthy Asian cities (Sapporo, Taipei, Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Hong Kong and Singapore) are also extremely low with 5 to 10 GJ/person.
5. Cities in developing countries are scattered throughout this array but apart from Riyadh and Tel Aviv are less than 8 GJ/person and mostly are less than a few GJ/person.
6. The developing cities to the right of the graph (Jakarta, Beijing, Bogota, Guangzhou, Cairo, Chennai, Shanghai, Mumbai, Dakar and Ho Chi Minh City) are hardly measurable on the same scale as those to the left of the graph.

• Vulnerable cities such as those in North America and Australia need to respond to the crash in much more dramatic ways than those cities where gasoline and diesel are only a small part of their economies.

• All attempts at expansion of their economies based on further use of oil will cause serious impacts on their future ability to adapt. This particularly applies to new high capacity road systems.

• How can oil-vulnerable cities create an economy that reduces their oil use and creates a more resilient future? In our new book Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change (Newman, Beatley and Boyer, Island Press) we set out a range of technological, land use and governance options based on experience of where these are beginning to be demonstrated. Simply put….

• Electrified transit. This means high capacity electric Metros and Suburban Rail (heavy rail) with their associated dense centers or Transit Oriented Developments. It also means plug-in electric buses (already quite common in some cities) and electric light rail with their associated local corridors of denser linear development.

• Electrified vehicles. This means plug-in electric vehicles (and plug-in hybrids) which together with a range of smaller electric vehicles like scooters, gophers and golf carts, are associated with more dispersed land uses. The key value in these plug-in vehicles is that they enable renewable energy to be 100% of a city’s grid through providing a storage mechanism (they are likely therefore to be part of the transport systems in denser parts of the city as well, though supplementary). We call this Renewable Transport. See http://sustainability.curtin.edu.au/research_publications/.

• Electrified rail and the associated denser land uses will be cheaper and more resilient than the road-based dispersed kind of development as we have shown in a number of publications, including a recent assessment of the costs of urban development for Parsons Brinckerhoff (http://sustainability.curtin.edu.au/research_publications/). However most cities have a combination of these land use types and although dispersed land uses will be more vulnerable they cannot be abandoned – some extremely dispersed parts of cities may need to be.

• Ruralising cities based around local food production is unlikely to occur as cities will still need to be cities providing a range of opportunities not available in rural areas. However cities can incorporate greater local food production as in Cuba though they will remain primarily urban and not rural in function. Ruralised land uses in peri urban areas that are highly car dependent are likely to die first.

• Plans to rebuild local economies will need to factor in how to reduce car use and create more walkable and bikeable local areas. Green buildings and green industries will not create green cities unless they are based around electric renewable transport or non motorised transport.

• It is time to refill the economic balloon based around these innovations, not try to reinflate the old oil-based urban development paradigm.

NOTE: Data are from Kenworthy J and Laube F (2001) The Millennium Cities Database for Sustainable Transport., UITP, Brussels, which was a study of 100 cities (16 were incomplete) and 27 parameters using highly controlled processes to ensure comparability of data. See also Kenworthy J., Laube F., Newman P., Barter P., Raad T., Poboon C. and Guia B. (1999). An International Sourcebook of Automobile Dependence in Cities, 1960-1990. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.

In my first blog post, I suggested that we need to respond to the present economic crash in ways that do not undermine the basic cause of our dysfunctional global urban economy. The issues of peak oil and climate change are exposing the weakness of building our cities with growing car dependence.

Resilient Cities is a new approach to how cities must adapt or they will collapse in the light of the major challenges of peak oil and climate change. Fundamental reductions in fossil fuel use are now being driven by demand constraints imposed by climate change governance and supply constraints due to production declines in petroleum fuels. Resilient Cities suggests how cities can respond to such challenges as an economic opportunity, though the book also outlines how “Collapse City,” “Ruralized City,” and “Divided City” responses are also possible though highly undesirable.

“Collapse City” is the only option for a number of people who see the history of cities that do not adapt quickly enough. This can happen but is more terrible than even the most pessimistic can imagine.

“Ruralised City” is how permaculture advocates believe that cities must be broken down into self sufficient food production areas rather than continuing as cities. Cities are most unlikely to diminish their historic role in providing new opportunity and innovation; spreading cities out into lower density because it will be good for food growing undermines their resilience. Local food growing will be more important but cities will not be replaced by food-growing suburbs.

“Divided City” is where market approaches alone are used and the wealthy rapidly move into eco-enclaves with all the good transit, cycling and walking as well as green buildings; the rest of the city then descends into Mad Max suburbs desperately trying to cope with transport and land use no longer suited to a carbon and fuel constrained world.

“Resilient City” will make available to everyone all that is beginning to happen in the eco-enclaves of cities growing in their demonstrations of resilience.

My next blog post will start to show what this can mean and how we can begin to change our cities towards resilience…

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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.

The financial crash is developing a whole industry of responses that can tell us where we went wrong and what we must do to make our future more resilient, especially in our cities where so much of the crash is hurting. Finance and economics dominate this discussion. We believe that a better understanding of what makes cities work will help in this debate, especially how urban transport and energy are fundamental to how the urban economy works or doesn’t.

What caused the crash?

Toxic loans are the target of most crash analysts. However although they locate the areas where these toxic loans were mostly taken up, they rarely show why these particular locations were so much more vulnerable to mortgage foreclosure. These locations were invariably in peri-urban areas which were often quite distinctly removed from the main metropolitan areas that developers assumed for the jobs and services of those living there. Whilst the post war suburbs are often called urban sprawl these areas could only be called urban scatter. These areas invariably had nothing other than houses, they had no real employment, shops or services, and transit was non existent. These were highly car dependent places where people had to travel long distances for anything.

Such urban areas are highly vulnerable to the multiple problems of car dependence, particularly peak oil. In recent years their financial fragility has been pointed out through a number of studies which have shown that household budgets needed to find 40% of their income to pay for transportation. Large houses with big heating and cooling bills made it worse. Doubling and tripling of the oil price set in motion the end of so many toxic loans but they occurred mostly in areas where the land development was just as toxic.

As the fall out from the toxic loans rolled across the US economy it began to pick up bad debt estimated at over $18 trillion – The Wall Street Journal estimates about 16% of Americans now own homes worth less than they owe. From there the crash spread out into the highly linked global economy, picking up similar kinds of debt in cities around the world and leading inevitably to the September 15th 2008 Wall Street crash.

Peak oil over the next decade will ensure that fuel prices will rise again. The International Energy Agency are estimating oil will go into permanent decline of between 6% and 9% per year soon. Climate change will only exacerbate this trend away from highly fossil fuel-dependent urban and building design. As global governance on climate change sets in there will be increasing costs right through the housing and transport system that will further challenge the development of cities through high capacity roads, peri-urban scatter and large fossil fuel-hungry houses.

Crashes in Urban History

The coming of industrialism can now be seen to have occurred in a series of waves of technological innovation. These waves show the booms and busts of the economy based on technological systems that boom in the adoption phase and then bust as they reach limits. The first waves were based on water power, then coal and steam boilers, then electricity, then oil…. At each stage the city adapted to the new energy and transport system after they went through a crash based on the end of the previous system.

The shift in oil prices has exposed the underlying vulnerability of highly car and oil dependent urban development from the Fourth and Fifth Waves. Once the fuel price increased, the loans which were used to form these suburbs became toxic. At the same time a more global limit was reached with climate change and the cities of the world faced a new limit whereby they must phase out all fossil fuels. Although not yet part of the main market place, the undermining of confidence in the long term future of heavily-fossil fuel dependent industry and land development, was already underway. The crash of September 2008 signals the end to the urban economy based around oil in particular but all heavily fossil fuel-dependent urban development as well.

What is next?

What is next for urban development? The Sixth Wave replaces oil and all fossil fuels with radical resource productivity eg 50 to 80 percent less fossil fuels by 2050 as many countries are now committed and which has been set as the goal by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) through the United Nations processes. Critical to this will be fast electric rail with Transit Oriented Development as its focus for development in a poly-centric city and supplemented with electric vehicles. The new wave of industrialism also includes a new series of sustainability technologies related to renewables and distributed, small-scale water, energy, and waste systems (building on clever control systems and Smart Grids) all of which are more local and require far less fuel to distribute. We have called this the Resilient City in our new book from Island Press.

At the transition point between the different waves, the crash was followed by a new boom. But the swing back was based around the new technologies (not based around propping up of the old systems). The 1890s depression was severe as the world’s cities moved away from horses, wood and the first steam-based coal-fired industries into the much more extensive use of electricity, tramways and electric trains. Then the 1930′s saw the transition to oil and motor vehicles with cities spreading out as though these could be used in limitless amounts. The 2008 crash signals that this era is over and the birth pangs of the new Resilient City are emerging in our cities – if we let it.

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Peter Newman is Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is the co-author of Cities as Sustainable Ecosystems, Green Urbanism Down Under, and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.