The Future is Urban. Will it be Green or Grunge?

NYTimes:

THE struggle to slow global warming will be won or lost in cities, which emit 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. So “greening” the city is all the rage now. But if policy makers end up focusing only on those who can afford the low-carbon technologies associated with the new environmental conscientiousness, the movement for sustainability may end up exacerbating climate change rather than ameliorating it.

While cities like Portland, Seattle and San Francisco are lauded for sustainability, the challenges faced by Phoenix, a poster child of Sunbelt sprawl, are more typical and more revealing. In 2009, Mayor Phil Gordon announced plans to make Phoenix the “greenest city” in the United States. Eyebrows were raised, and rightly so. According to the state’s leading climatologist, central Arizona is in the “bull’s eye” of climate change, warming up and drying out faster than any other region in the Northern Hemisphere. The Southwest has been on a drought watch 12 years and counting, despite outsized runoff last winter to the upper Colorado River, a major water supply for the subdivisions of the Valley of the Sun.

Across that valley lies 1,000 square miles of low-density tract housing, where few signs of greening are evident. That’s no surprise, given the economic free fall of a region that had been wholly dependent on the homebuilding industry. Property values in parts of metro Phoenix have dropped by 80 percent, and some neighborhoods are close to being declared “beyond recovery.”

In the Arizona Legislature, talk of global warming is verboten and Republican lawmakers can be heard arguing for the positive qualities of greenhouse gases. Most politicians are still praying for another housing boom on the urban fringe; they have no Plan B, least of all a low-carbon one. Mr. Gordon, a Democrat who took office in 2004, has risen to the challenge. But the vast inequalities of the metro area could blunt the impact of his sustainability plans.

Whereas uptown populations are increasingly sequestered in green showpiece zones, residents in low-lying areas who cannot afford the low-carbon lifestyle are struggling to breathe fresh air or are even trapped in cancer clusters. You can find this pattern in many American cities. The problem is that the carbon savings to be gotten out of this upscale demographic – which represents one in five American adults and is known as Lohas, an acronym for “lifestyles of health and sustainability” – can’t outweigh the commercial neglect of the other 80 percent. If we are to moderate climate change, the green wave has to lift all vessels.

Grist:

For those who argue that city living represents the Great Green Future, Urbanized, the latest from filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Objectified) is pure eye candy. It’s a sensuous, slant-lit tour of the urban world and all its promise and problems. Workers labor like ants on a Beijing skyscraper. Kids chase kites through a shantytown in Santiago. The camera slides silently along a train line through an eerily vacant downtown Detroit. (For a taste, check out the trailer, below.)

The clips of cyclists in Copenhagen alone make the film worth watching. Copenhagen is a city of 1.2 million people where 37 percent of commuters commute to work by bike. (One student toldReuters, “Only when there’s half a meter of snow outside would I consider using the underground.” Talk about Viking heritage — that shit’s just burly.) And a bike ride around Bogotá with former Mayor Enrique Peñalosa will get even recreational cyclists all giddy with possibility.

We need to figure out how to make cities work, lest we end up with a planet of slums and inhumane, automobile-centered megalopolises. But what the film doesn’t mention is that, in much of this accounting, “urban” or “metropolitan” areas include suburbs, and, at least in the U.S., suburbs continue to cast a long shadow over cities.

Between-year Census numbers stoked much excitement last year (from this corner, among many others) when they suggested that, for the first time in a generation in many metropolitan areas, white people were shunning the suburbs in favor of city living. “A new image of urban America is in the making,” William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, told the Associated Press. “What used to be white flight to the suburbs is turning into ‘bright flight’ to cities that have become magnets for aspiring young adults who see access to knowledge-based jobs, public transportation, and a new city ambiance as an attraction.”

Richard Florida, king of the “Creative Class,” was probably doing parkour he was so happy.

But oops: We spoke too soon.

When the final 2010 Census came in, it made clear that we’re not walking away from our lawn tractors and two-car garages anytime soon. An analysis of eight metro areas, including Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Austin revealed that in the past decade, 96 percent of the population growth occurred in the suburbs. Some took great exception to this analysis, but Brookings’ Frey laterconfided, “The sad truth of the matter is that there’s really very little information on this back-to-the-city thing, at least from a demographic standpoint.”

That’s not to say that we’re not on the verge of something here. A huge majority of Millennials — and a goodly number of their Boomer parents — say they want to live in cities. It just appears that, by and large, it’s an aspirational notion. Life’s not so bad out on the fringe: The schools are good, crime is infrequent, there’s room in the driveway for the Jetski and the quads …

http://vimeo.com/1258989