A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.
—Patrick Geddes1
Urban climate innovations for transportation and other city systems generate what innovators call cobenefits—positive effects that go beyond carbon reduction.
You can see this in Mexico City’s Zócalo, a central district of narrow streets, one of the largest city squares in the world, the seat of the city and national governments, as well as an important political, commercial, and tourist area. The district had lost nearly all of its residential population, was notorious for traffic congestion, and couldn’t be reached easily on public transportation. But the city’s transportation innovations have had a big impact, reports Mary Skelton Roberts, codirector of the climate program at the Barr Foundation in Boston, who has visited the city’s bus rapid transit system three times with delegations from Boston: “They put a BRT station not far from there, made the area completely walkable, widened the sidewalks, and created parklets for people to just sit and congregate. It is one of the most vibrant sections of Mexico City today.”
A big change in the use of city space is what Vancouver was hoping for when two auto-carrying viaducts were removed and replaced with parks and a new neighborhood. “It’s a step that creates opportunities,” says Mayor Gregor Robertson. The highways, he explains, have “a lot of wasted space underneath” that will be used instead for more green space and to increase density, with projected new housing for as many as eight thousand residents, plus shops and businesses.2
Oslo expects this sort of improvement when its ban on driving in downtown takes effect. The city center, says Anja Bakken Riise, a former political advisor to Oslo’s vice mayor for environment and transport, will be “more attractive and more accessible without car traffic. We want to make the city come more alive. We have very few playgrounds for children. There is not enough emphasis on how to develop an attractive city for elderly people. How do we create spaces where people can enjoy themselves without necessarily having to buy something?”3
It’s also what Chinese cities are seeking as they dismantle a legacy of oversized highways and “superblocks” of residential high-rises isolated from the rest of the city—in favor of walkable, mixed-use, transit-oriented urban models. Guidelines for “green and smart urban development,” issued in 2016 by the China Development Bank, promote complete neighborhoods, public green space, walking, biking, public transit, energy efficiency, and renewable energy.4
A shift toward “zero-emission mobility,” declared mayors of seven innovation lab cities in 2017, “will result in less congestion and less pollution, while making our roads quieter and the air we breathe cleaner.”5 It also means fewer deaths from traffic accidents, while more walking and bicycling make people healthier.
Cobenefits also result from a city’s other climate actions, analysts report. C40 Cities identified these as increased healthiness, economic efficiency, innovation, productivity, growth in the technology sector, and quality of life.6 “A well-designed city can reduce congestion, improve air quality, reduce noise pollution, and decrease energy use,” state the China Development Bank guidelines. “It can create enjoyable spaces for everyone, from children to the elderly, and increases options for daily life. It makes neighborhoods more attractive and livable, and creates cities with more vitality and economic prosperity.”7 These benefits sound much like those extolled in the GHG-reduction plan of Seattle, a city of more than seven hundred thousand: “Residents who can meet many of their daily needs by walking, bicycling, or riding transit also benefit from lower overall household costs, improved health, thriving local business districts, and increased opportunities for housing and jobs.”8
Cobenefits from climate action are so evident and compelling that they have become a key way that leading-edge cities frame the purpose of climate action when they seek support of residents. They want to make the cities better, not just carbon-free or climate ready.
No lab city we know has more explicitly and fully embraced the risk taking and discipline of climate innovation than Copenhagen. This nine-hundred-year-old city of 760,000 souls, a longtime trading center on an island commanding an approach to the Baltic Sea, isn’t just innovating in the era of climate change. It serves as a climate-innovation supplier to cities worldwide. The city is intentionally using—benefiting from—climate innovations to make itself into a better city.
“We are a city in a hurry, because of the circumstance of climate change,” says Jørgen Abildgaard, who shepherds implementation of the city’s climate-action plans. A former energy planner for the Danish government and business consultant, Abildgaard, like so many city residents, travels by bicycle to work and anywhere else in Copenhagen.
Like other innovation lab cities, Copenhagen has set radical goals, taken a systemic approach, and aggressively tackled both GHG reduction and climate adaptation. Its most immediate target is to be “carbon neutral” by 2025—to reduce GHG emissions and offset those that remain by producing more clean energy than the city needs and selling it to others. The city’s outpouring of innovations has attracted worldwide attention: offshore wind farms, district-scale heating systems for nearly every building, bicycling as a preferred in-city travel mode, and citywide storm-water management through green infrastructure. “We can show visitors that a small city can make big changes,” Abildgaard says.
Copenhagen has built a strong reputation for linking environmental and economic performance. It is “one of the greenest and most economically productive metropolitan regions in the world,” concluded a 2014 London School of Economics study.9 The city’s global positioning is enviable: a highly skilled workforce with nearly half of all adults holding a university degree, a high rate of entrepreneurial activity and relatively low unemployment, a world-class clean-technology cluster of businesses and research assets, and strong flows of private investment and public funding for research. Copenhagen’s population has been growing, and the city’s density is similar to Boston’s and San Francisco’s. Consumption of energy, electricity, and water has declined, and so has waste production. The city’s per-capita GHG emissions fell 40 percent between 1991 and 2012.10
Copenhagen’s flow of climate innovations doesn’t just happen; it has to be planned and managed. “We have more than 60 GHG-reduction projects running,” says Abildgaard, “and when I set up the city’s implementation plan I told the city council it would be a step-by-step learning process. We would test solutions and see if they work, and then take the next step. There would be mistakes and failures.” The city’s climate roadmap classifies each of these projects by its stage of innovation development: “analysis and strategy,” “tests and demonstrations,” and “implementation.” Among the thirty tests and demonstrations are ways to reduce energy consumption in existing buildings, use large-scale heat pumps in the district heating system, reduce driving needed to deliver freight to large businesses in the city center, sort and recycle more plastic waste, and design and build a transit station for bicycle- and car-sharing along with trains. Meanwhile, the city is researching what to do with organic solvents that emit GHGs and the development of biogas from waste. The city budgeted nearly $150 million for the three-year plan, while city-owned utilities were expected to invest almost $1.8 billion, mostly for wind turbines and a biomass-burning plant for the district heating system. And the city’s cloudburst plan is implementing three hundred projects in neighborhoods—fifteen a year—to keep rainwater out of low-lying areas and sewer pipes.
Abildgaard takes us on an afternoon bicycle ride to experience the city’s world-renowned passion for bike riding. Traffic lights on some stretches of the specially designed bicycle network, which extends into the suburbs, are timed so cyclists moving at twelve miles per hour never hit a red light. Bicyclists have their own lanes, separated from other street traffic. At intersections, they get a head start over cars when traffic lights turn green. The city has about fifty-four thousand parking stands for bicycles. In winter, it removes snow from bicycle paths before clearing it from most car lanes.
“We have a lot of bikers, and it is the preferred mode,” says Abildgaard. “The biking culture is really all kinds of people—the CEO from the big bank, the mayor, the worker in the factory, the students—because it is the most convenient way to go.” Nearly everyone says it’s the easiest and quickest way to get around, and 29 percent of all trips are taken on bicycles.11 “For the last two to three decades there’s been support for developing biking from the city council,” says Abildgaard. The city constantly adds to and tweaks the bicycle system. Since 2014, it has built ten bridges in the harbor area for use only by bicycles and pedestrians.12
We cycle around new low-carbon developments and cloudburst projects in neighborhoods and through pedestrian-only streets overflowing with shoppers. Along the way, we watch teenagers swim in the harbor’s clean water and catch glimpses of offshore wind turbines in the distance. Finally, we take a breather on a bridge, from which we can look across the harbor at the city’s blend of historical and contemporary architecture.
“For me,” Abildgaard says, “this bridge is about the city’s focused priority on the way I move around in the city. The bridge and the marked bicycle lanes show me that biking is a priority. There are no cars behind me or on the side of me. The noise is completely different. On the way here, we took a street that was closed to cars. The priority is for biking, walking, and public transport, and that changes the street a lot. It changes the feel of the city. The city’s space is used differently now. There are many more people out in the space than there were 20 years ago. Instead of sitting at home looking at TV, people are outside. We do the counting and we can see that the time that people are using urban space is increasing.”
As we head back toward the city center, Jørgen Abildgaard shares a final thought that captures Copenhagen’s spirit of climate innovation: “We want to make a better city.” In spite of all the attention paid to the city’s leading green performance, he adds, “We are well aware that we also have to learn to do better.”
To learn how to do better, Copenhagen eagerly connects with other cities around the world.