Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1
As climate innovations proliferate in cities, it has become common to hear urban innovators talk about the “transformation” of urban systems, neighborhoods, the economy, and the entire city. But what exactly about the city is being transformed, and how does transformation happen? The answers lie in our understanding of the essence of both cities and innovation.
Cities arrange their built and natural space in ways that establish the fundamental elements of urban life—the underlying economic activities, life-maintaining metabolism, use of natural systems, and inhabitants’ capacity to shape a shared future. For instance, when Boston created more and more land during the last centuries by filling in its harbor, it generated enormous new economic activity and value. When newer Chinese cities erected “superblocks” of apartment buildings distant from workplaces and shopping, they ensured high rates of energy consumption by people who had to travel by car to meet their needs. When cities the world over dedicated space for roads to accommodate vast numbers of automobiles, they enabled levels of air pollution that damage natural ecosystems and people’s health. When cities in the US located infrastructure, such as highways and roads, and used zoning to concentrate and isolate poor, minority, and immigrant populations in less desirable areas, they marginalized entire social groups.
When the design and use of urban space changes, so may a city’s fundamentals. “Space can change people’s lives,” says Bryan Koop, senior vice president of Boston Properties, one of the biggest developers of green-certified office properties in the US. This was the effect in Copenhagen, as Jørgen Abildgaard points out, when that city built harbor-crossing bridges for bikers and pedestrians only: the way people move around the city and what they experience changed.
It wasn’t the first time that designing and constructing a new bridge has altered a city’s fundamentals. When Pont Neuf opened for traffic in 1604, spanning the Seine River in Paris, it was unlike other bridges: Much wider than city streets, built of stone, not wood, its entire surface was paved. No houses lined its sides, so anyone crossing could take in the urban river landscape. Its raised spaces, such as sidewalks, were reserved for pedestrians. The bridge “had a direct and profound impact on the daily life of Parisians. It introduced them to a new kind of street life, and it transformed their relation to the Seine,” observes professor Joan DeJean. “Parisians rich and poor came out of their houses and began to enjoy themselves in public again after decades of religious violence. The Pont Neuf became the first truly commercial entertainment space in the city: since access cost nothing, it was open to all.”2
A city’s broad plans for the use of space may also have transformational impacts, which can endure for centuries. About three thousand years ago, China’s Shang dynasty placed temples at the center of its cities and, reports Joel Kotkin in The City, “great cities throughout most of classical Chinese history would be dominated by adherence to the ‘cosmic pattern.’”3 When William Penn drew up plans in 1682 for a 1,200-acre city in the New World—Philadelphia—he envisioned “a greene country town” with wide main streets arranged in a rectangular grid, a central square of ten acres, and four squares of several acres each providing additional open space. More than three hundred years later, Philadelphia has grown into a city of 1.5 million residents, but its underlying spatial design remains. “The Penn grid is a gift from the past,” says architect Alan Greenberger, chairman of the city planning commission. “It created a rational, highly dense fabric of streets that facilitate the movement of people, goods, and ideas.”
In the following chapters, we show that the climate innovations of pioneering cities are changing underlying fundamentals of cities. The cities are still cities, of course—densely populated and thickly built environments within distinct geographic and governance boundaries. But as their underlying elements change, the cities will not be the same as they were before. They are being transformed.
But what are they being transformed into by innovations?
Every urban climate innovation is a method wrapped around an idea.
In the case of city climate innovations, the methods are designed to affect people’s decisions and actions in four ways.
Innovations engage and stir people with information and encouragement, using why-to and how-to campaigns to provide details about how to, for instance, cut energy consumption at home or floodproof a building, and sometimes describing other people who are doing the same.
Innovations motivate people with financial incentives or deter them with increased expenses—subsidizing the cost of, say, purchasing and operating electric vehicles or, for instance, levying congestion fees.
Innovations entice people with new and more appealing options—faster bus service, expanded subway service, attractive green infrastructure for streets, and more.
Innovations command people with mandates—for example, policies limiting the amount of energy a building may consume, requiring restaurants and households to separate food waste so it can be composted, or banning vehicles from parts of the city.
These methods reflect an understanding of human nature and strategies for influencing decisions and behavior. When people are told what to do, for instance, they may instinctively come up with counterarguments. “People are wired to refute imperatives,” explains climate-change communications strategist Lisa Bennett. “Passing a law that requires people to change their behavior is one effective way around this.” But, she adds, “efforts to attract people to a cause are much more likely to yield a positive response than those that threaten or make demands.”4
The climate innovations surging out of city labs are not distinguished by their motivational methods. You can use these methods to shape people’s behaviors for most any purpose, not just climate action. What distinguishes climate innovations are the particular ideas that they contain. These ideas address more than climate change. They are new ideas about the essence of cities—their economies, metabolism, nature, and social capacities. As the climate innovations that contain them gain traction in cities, they are replacing the ideas from which the modern city developed.
A little more than a century ago, few cities in the world had electricity, cars, or skyscrapers.
When the first central power station went online in New York City in 1882, thanks to inventor Thomas Edison, it lit up four hundred lightbulbs in nearby buildings, and Edison had no way of measuring the energy supplied or of billing his customers. Today, New Yorkers spend $15 billion a year on electricity—to do a lot more than just keep the lights on.
When five European-made cars arrived in Beijing in 1907 for the start of the first “Peking-to-Paris” race, they were the only cars in the city. Local officials didn’t want them to be driven in the streets; they were supposed to be pulled by mules. Today, Beijing contains five million cars, which contribute so much exhaust emissions to the city’s hazardous air pollution that they are sometimes banned from the roads.
In the early 1900s, few buildings stood more than ten floors high. But the use of reinforced steel frames and other construction techniques produced the skyscrapers that now form signature skylines in most major cities worldwide. Today, Shanghai’s stunning twenty-first-century skyline contains more freestanding buildings above 1,200 feet than any city other than Chicago, where some of the first skyscrapers rose more than a century ago.5
Time-travel back a little further, to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. You would easily recognize the cities of those times as cities: dense hives of energized humanity; massive infrastructures of streets, roads, alleys, buildings, bridges, plazas, and more; swarms of people, vehicles (mostly horse drawn), and ships in constant motion; lighting and noise everywhere; ceaseless economic and cultural activity. But they were not the modern cities we live in today, with electricity, cars, and skyscrapers.
Zoom in on London during the early 1700s and the details reveal arduous conditions for most of its several hundred thousand inhabitants. The narrow, cobblestone streets, alleys, and bridges are congested with pedestrians, vendors and their carts, and horse-drawn transports. Roads become muddy and flooded in winter, impassable, and unpleasantly dusty in summer. Dirt and pollution fill the air so much that candles are sometimes needed at midday in busy shops, and travelers approaching the city note its smell, a sooty odor. Streets at night are lit with oil lamps, a technology thousands of years old. Buildings are constructed poorly and with shoddy materials—crumbling bricks and knotty timber—and then patched up; it is not unusual for them to collapse. Within buildings, burning coal provides the main source of heat, belching thick clouds of irritating, choking black smoke into the city’s air. There is no indoor sanitation and people commonly empty their chamber pots out of their windows and leave garbage on the streets to rot. Open sewers run through the middle of many streets and gutters carry away human waste, while offal from butchers’ stalls and horse manure by the ton fill streets daily. London delivers water from the Thames to some residents through hollowed-out tree trunks running underneath the streets. The river, the main thoroughfare for commercial shipping, receives the city’s discharge. To avoid drinking the water, residents turn to gin; eight thousand places in the city sell the unregulated intoxicant. Many of the area’s wealthy residents avoid these conditions by living outside of the city, commuting by regular coach services into the commercial center and exclusive shopping districts, and navigating the streets in sedan chairs carried by porters.6
From this premodern starting point, it took some 150 to 200 years—seven or eight generations of people—for modern cities to fully take shape. Many accounts describe the rise of the modern city as being driven by the Industrial Revolution’s technological innovations, starting with the steam engine powered by burning coal; they made mass production, electricity, cars, skyscrapers, and other new things possible. But this urban transformation was not just driven by technological advances.
Modern cities were built on a mix of ideas that began to take hold in the nineteenth century. These ideas worshipped the use of markets and capital to create massive wealth and meet social needs. They celebrated the role of ever-increasing material consumption in producing personal and societal benefits. They revered the control of the planet’s natural systems through science and engineering. And they admired acts of will that sought to shape the future.
These ideas had an underlying theme: the power of human beings to shape their individual and collective well-being. As philosopher Richard Kearney explains in The Wake of Imagination, the idea took hold, especially in Western society, that human beings have the power “to create a world of original value and truth,” rather than being subordinate and accountable to a higher power.7 Emerging scientific knowledge about the material world provided people with the means to manipulate physical reality for their purposes, especially the creation of economic abundance. Construction of the Eiffel Tower in Paris for the 1889 World’s Fair exemplified this worldview, as critic Robert Hughes notes: its unique architecture contained “the promise of unlimited power over the world and its wealth.”8
The developing field of economics, points out social thinker Jeremy Rifkin, celebrated the idea of self-regulating markets driven by man’s innate competitive self-interest, saw property acquisition as an inherent biological drive, and proclaimed that nature had value only when people transformed it into productive assets. Founders of economics modeled their thinking on the field of physics and its mathematical certainties, Rifkin explains, and they concluded that, “just as the laws of gravity govern the universe, an invisible hand rules over the affairs of the marketplace.”9
The idea of engineering all of nature became pervasive. The nineteenth century “was the century of the engineer,” notes historian John Barry in Rising Tide, a history of efforts to control the Mississippi River. The idea prevailed, he explains, “that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world.”10 In 1900, as industrialization was still gathering steam, American historian Henry Adams experienced its remarkable sway. As he toured the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition in Paris, examining engines, machines, and electricity-generating dynamos, Adams wrote that he “began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s length at some vertiginous speed. . . . One began to pray to it.”11
The idea arose that consumption by individuals and nations was a “civilizing force” and that increased consumer demand could drive economic growth, says historian Frank Trentmann in Empire of Things, his panoramic account of the past seven centuries of consumption.
These and other big ideas molded thinking about practically everything of concern to people: economic well-being, social order, nature, disease prevention, religion, and more. They inspired numerous innovations in the design and function of urban spaces and systems in existing, expanding, and new cities. Three fixtures of modern urban living—department stores, sewers, and automobiles—provide examples of how new ideas underpinned innovations that altered cities’ spaces and, in turn, transformed their economies, metabolisms, nature, and civic cultures.
The emergence of department stores in Paris, London, New York City, Berlin, Shanghai, and other cities brought fixed prices, customer service, and the world’s goods to urban retailing. “What the department store did was to bring together various innovations under one enormous glass roof supported by a massive iron frame,” explains Trentmann. “The biggest stores imposed themselves on the urban landscape like civic buildings and royal palaces. . . . The key to success was flow—flow of people and of goods. Cheap prices demanded large, rapid turnover, and this fundamentally changed the atmosphere inside the store as well as its relationship to the urban environment outside. In comparison to early modern shops, the department store was an extrovert. Instead of creating an exclusive, semi-private space for elite customers, it reached out into the city to grab the masses and pull them in.”12
Other forms of urban retailing—small shops, local co-ops, markets, and street vendors—competed with department stores. “Cities were battle zones between rival visions of spatial order,” Trentmann documents. “More than anyone, it was street sellers who were in the firing line, and their fate shows us both how urban authorities tried to regulate the flow of goods and people, and how difficult that proved to be.”13 As ideas about public health took hold, street hawkers were considered to be carriers of disease and disorder: “Across the world, cities turned to market halls to bring them under central control.”14 The halls made it easier to license retailers, control quality and prices, and regulate the behaviors of sellers and buyers.
As US cities grew in the 1800s, they began to establish public water systems. As supply increased, notes historian Ted Steinberg, households began to connect water closets, precursors to modern toilets, to the water systems: “There was only one problem: the cesspools and privy vaults [that the water closets drained into] could not handle all the waste.” In some cities, residents secured permission to hook their drains up to existing sewers. But these had not been designed to “transport glutinous torrents of human waste. As sewers backed up and cesspools oozed, cities across the nation began to drown in their own filth.” City officials, engineers, and sanitary experts “rallied around the idea of more underground plumbing,” Steinberg says.
The idea of cleanliness shifted from a focus on appearance and clothing to a concern about the body’s health, as germ theorists and epidemiologists promoted regular washing to improve public health. “Eventually thousands of miles of sewer pipe were laid, as human waste went flushing into rivers, lakes, and harbors,” Steinberg notes. But sewers only went in at the request of property owners who paid for them: “Only those who could afford better public health received it.” Discharging untreated sewage into waterways damaged the environment—causing algae blooms, oxygen-poor water, fishery declines, garbage-strewn beaches—and polluted the water supplies of users downstream.15
Cities old and new succumbed to the automobile in the twentieth century. Making room for cars and trucks was an essential element of being a modern city. The vehicles were faster and could carry more weight than other transportation methods, and they provided users with more freedom and range of movement, which many people found desirable.
Histories make it clear that the mass motorization of cities resulted from multiple forces and intentions and interwoven developments. Scientific knowledge provided new technologies for energy use, new materials and engineering techniques, and new management methods to boost industrial efficiency. Enormous sums of private capital provided investments to deploy mass-manufacturing methods and promote consumption, generating profits, jobs, wealth, and economic growth. In 1939, automaker General Motors sponsored the highly popular Futurama pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, its model of the “city of 1960” featuring a network of highways cutting through the city to connect numerous scattered residential and commercial towers.16
Government policies from local to national levels, often swayed by moneyed interests, provided public investments, such as those in the US interstate highway system ($128 billion for forty-seven thousand miles), and regulations and incentives that paved the way for technologies and capital. The rising professions of urban and transportation planning and highway engineering brought their expertise and authority to bear on the redesign of space in cities. A culture that endorsed economic growth and consumption and idolized science and new technology, as well as the “freedom of the road,” reinforced the notion that enabling more people with more cars was a sign of society’s progress.
As new ideas and the system-changing innovations they spawned took hold and accumulated in cities, they transformed the underlying order of the premodern London and other cities and put into place the blueprint for new cities like San Francisco, Melbourne, and Vancouver.
Over time, the ideas that formed the modern city turned into a global juggernaut. As we became an urban-dwelling species, we made cities worldwide in the same basic modern image with the same modern systems.
The similarity of modern cities is pervasive, observes Wade Graham, a Los Angeles–based writer on urbanism: “These days, local variation is hard to spot. In the modern era (since about 1850 in Western Europe and America and now everywhere), cities look more alike than they do different, from Singapore to Ulan Bator to Boston to Moscow to Buenos Aires. Aside from those parts of them built before the modern era—the odd churches, squares, and low-rise historic districts—there is a remarkable, global urban monotony: here are tower blocks, there freeways, there shopping malls, over there pseudo-historic suburbs, here a formally ordered civic center, beyond that, mile after mile of car-dependent sprawl.”
In some parts of the world, the modern model was imposed by colonial force. Journalist Daniel Brook recounts in A History of Future Cities how Western powers “began dotting the globe with Western-style neighborhoods to make their far-flung businessmen feel at home and impress the locals with their technologically sophisticated civilization.” In Shanghai, for instance, “the British, French, and Americans carved up open land to build their colonies, each based on the cities of their home country. The British built a bustling port with a pagoda-free skyline and set aside grassy areas for sports fields. The French built gracious tree-lined boulevards sporting elegant cafes while the Americans slapped together a hodgepodge settlement like something out of their Wild West, all laid out along a central spine they dubbed Broadway.”17
Generally, though, modern cities arose because the new ideas we’ve described became a widespread way of thinking that urban leaders—elected and appointed government officials, entrepreneurs and business owners, architects, engineers, and other professionals, consumers, and civic activists—found extremely appealing and used to make decisions. These decisions changed city space and, in turn, reshaped cities’ economic, social, and environmental fundamentals.
In the last century, for instance, automobile dependence became standard urban practice. American cities led the way because the nation was the first with mass car ownership, and its young, growing cities could be readily adapted to the automobile’s needs. Some European cities resisted the trend, as urban planner and historian Peter Hall details in Cities of Tomorrow, by controlling suburban growth, investing in public transit systems, and launching large-scale urban renewal and housing projects. But, Hall adds, they only delayed the change: “All that happened was that the automobile revolution came to Europe 40 years later. In the process, it began profoundly to affect both traditional lifestyles and traditional urban structures.”18 Car ownership and driving, and accompanying single-family-home construction, soared; suburbs sprawled; vast networks of urban highways surfaced; and traffic engineers dominated city planning.19
The pattern spread worldwide: a 2016 ranking of the cities with the worst traffic congestion placed Mexico City, Bangkok, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, and Moscow in the top slots—all worse than Los Angeles, the most congested city in the US.20 In China, where half of the world’s new cars are sold these days, “from Guangzhou to Beijing, Shanghai to Chengdu, there is a common and serious problem: the density of traffic,” observes Chinese-city watcher Wade Shepard. “The rapidly rising number of personal cars on the roads . . . are clogging the country’s highways and jamming its streets.” Not long ago, he adds, 60 percent of the residents of Beijing commuted to work by bicycle, but bike use has dropped to 16 percent.21
The modern-city phenomenon has encircled the planet, observes global strategist Parag Khanna: “The lives of any two people in cities across Europe and Asia are increasingly more similar than the lives of fellow citizens living in rural areas.” Cities became the places where new and enormous private wealth and public revenues could be generated through real estate development and services for large populations. And they became indispensable hubs in emerging global economic and social networks—connected centers of commercial power, technological development, and cultural invention.
But as modern ideas and innovations reached global scale, they also produced the global warming that now disrupts urban life. This process started with the emergence of factories for mass production in London and other British cities in the early 1800s, an economic innovation that spread into cities in Europe, North America, and Japan before becoming a worldwide phenomenon. Modern cities became the places where the embryonic fossil-fuel economy could organize and obtain the mass labor and consumer markets that factories needed, while not being held responsible for the environmental damage it caused. The interests of capital investors sparked the burning of enormous quantities of coal to power manufacturing machines, explains Andreas Malm in Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Capitalists in Britain favored coal over water, the prevailing energy source, because coal was mobile, while water’s power was limited to where and when it could be harnessed. By using coal, investors could concentrate industrial production at the most profitable sites and the most convenient hours. “It becomes imperative to reside in the most favourable place,” Malm says, “where the largest markets can be courted, the latest machines purchased, the maximum surplus-value squeezed out of labour.”22 In other words, capital focused on cities. Coal and then also oil replaced firewood as cheaper, abundant, and more transportable energy sources. This “logic of capitalism” entwined with urbanization and spread a fossil-fuel economy worldwide.
Today, cities that are aggressively following a climate-innovation pathway are abandoning the very ideas that made them modern and got them this far. They are turning to a set of new ideas—four transformational ideas that are embedded within the hundreds of climate innovations emerging in lab cities and spreading from city to city. These are not just ideas that cities should in theory be using; they are in play in the cities responding most ambitiously to the imperatives of climate change. In the next chapters, we closely examine each of these four ideas, showing how they came alive and are beginning to inhabit innovation lab cities and their systems. They underpin these cities’ efforts to radically alter their business-as-usual trajectories by finding ways to decarbonize and strengthen resilience. We will also show that these ideas are gaining traction in markets, in professions, and with consumers and national and state levels of government, an essential development for supporting and accelerating change by cities.
We frame these transformative ideas as new roles and capacities of cities for the climate-change era.
Modern economic ideas have treated cities mostly as an afterthought: companies, markets, and nations were the drivers of economic growth, and cities were supposed to facilitate companies’ efforts by holding down local costs and providing the infrastructure needed for commerce. More recent thinking, however, recognizes that the city is a primary driver of economic innovation and growth. Cities “are assuming an even greater importance in today’s knowledge-driven innovation economy, in which place-based ecosystems are critical to economic growth,” explains urban studies professor Richard Florida. “Cities are the key economic and social organizing units of the Creative Age.”23
The primary reason that cities pursue carbon-free energy systems is to address the problem of excessive GHG emissions, but the many innovations they use—offshore wind turbines, on-site solar installations, and more—provide more than clean energy at competitive prices. They also provide local and regional economies with transformational economic opportunities. Cities are developing local clusters of “clean-economy” businesses that sell products and services worldwide. They are localizing and decentralizing the production, storage, distribution, and management of renewable-energy supply, in a shift that creates jobs. And they are becoming increasingly appealing to young, talented entrepreneurs and employees attracted to carbon-free urban lifestyles.
In the modern-city era, economic ideas about abundance drove vast increases in material consumption and shaped worldwide supply about rising standards of living and social progress. Pursuit of this type of abundance brought on improved living conditions for many, but in the process, it sacrificed environmental, human health, and other noneconomic values, promoted short-term growth at the expense of long-term sustainability, and yielded pervasive economic disparities that hobble social well-being and individual development.
Now cities pursue greater efficiency in their core systems, especially energy for buildings and transport, and seek to eliminate all waste, which reduces GHG emissions and increases climate resilience. In the process, they are redefining abundance to embody long-term sustainability of resources, a comprehensive set of noneconomic values, and a wider base of participants sharing in the bounty. “It’s a world of sharing and abundance,” declares world-renowned architect and product designer William McDonough. “We imagine our cities reducing the things we don’t want, increasing the things we do want, and letting our children lead us into this future.”
The huge expansion of built urban space in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries embodied the idea that a city’s physical, economic, and social needs were to be met by dominating natural systems near and far—sweeping away, reengineering, or overriding them. “Man’s dominion,” boosted by philosophies that promoted human agency, was facilitated by emerging engineering and scientific prowess. As a result, observes biologist Edward O. Wilson, an early conceptualizer of biodiversity, “humanity has destroyed a large part of the natural world and withdrawn from the remainder. We have also expelled it needlessly from our daily lives.”24
Cities that once turned their backs on nature are now turning back to nature to provide environmental, social, health, and economic benefits, as well as reduced GHG emissions and greater resilience to climate impacts. Their renaturing innovations—use of living infrastructure, stewardship of ecosystems and biodiversity, and provision of “biophilic” immersion in nature—invert the modern idea-hierarchy by restoring nature, instead of the city, as the dominant context for urban development.
As modern societies developed, they embraced the idea that people could create the future they desired by planning for it, instead of waiting to see what nature’s cycles, divinity, or fate imposed upon them. Planning practices emerged as a way of actively constructing the future—to discern the possibilities, assess potential benefits and risks, and decide what to achieve. In cities, planning took on the role of articulating the public interest in determining a collective future.
Now however, given the global unfolding of climate change and destabilizing social and economic forces, the future seems less knowable and controllable, more uncertain and riskier. “The ideal of progress and a blind faith in social control no longer guide our collective futures,” observes professor of environmental planning David Connell.25 The uncertainties of climate change, notes professor of urban planning Yosef Jabareen, “challenge the concepts, procedures, and scope of conventional approaches to planning.”26
Urban planning has begun to emphasize preparing for and adapting to unpredictable change and minimizing risks. Cities are investing in the capacity of residents and civic leaders to understand, deliberate about, and collectively determine responses to complex, changing problems. They are designing the physical infrastructure and service capacities of urban systems so they can be readily adapted as climatic conditions change and technological advances emerge.
During the modern-city era, new methods of thinking about economic growth, efficiency, abundance, nature, and shaping the future became cornerstones of globally used ways of understanding the world and valuing parts of it. These modes of thinking became mental habits, and habits are hard to change. But they are changing, thanks to innovations built on the four ideas we’ve identified.
New ideas and their innovations usually disrupt a city, but over time, they can settle into place. Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa, once a Green Party candidate for president of Colombia, saw a radical idea take hold in his city: “When I was mayor 18 years ago, we created a network of more than 250 kilometers of bikeways. Then, there were no bikeways in New York or in Paris or in Madrid. At that time, I was almost impeached. Now, there are dozens of young people’s organizations for cyclists. It’s a new consciousness.”27
Oslo Mayor Raymond Johansen, asked about his city’s dramatic decision to ban driving in its central district, points to the normalizing power of time: “I think 10 years from now, people will take this as natural, like not smoking in a restaurant.”
Gradually, transformational ideas are becoming a new standard for cities—not just a toolbox of innovations but a radically different way of thinking about, a model for, city development and urban achievement around the world. And businesses, professionals, consumers, community activists, and government policymakers are applying these ideas in ways that help expand and accelerate urban transformation.
The successor to the modern city is busy being born.