Cities must be regarded as more than engines of wealth; they must be viewed as systems that should be shaped to improve human well-being.
—Charles Montgomery1
New York City has more buildings than most cities in the world have people: one million of them. Known for its skyscrapers, the city shelters 8.5 million residents and hosts roughly six hundred thousand inbound commuters on weekdays. The buildings in which they live, work, and play consume energy for heating and cooling space, heating and moving water, lighting, ventilation, cooking, and running electric appliances, machines, and devices. The energy comes mostly from fossil-fuel sources: 60 percent from natural gas and fuel oils,2 much of the rest from a state electricity grid that generates three-quarters of its power from carbon-emitting sources.3 Buildings produce about 70 percent of New York City’s GHG emissions.
It was natural, then, that in September 2014, attention focused on the city’s building stock when Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to reduce the city’s GHG emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The plan that the de Blasio administration released, “One City: Built to Last,” called for a 30 percent reduction by 2025 in GHG emissions from energy used in buildings—on the way to a 60 percent cut by 2050 from the 2005 level. Efficiency improvement is the city’s biggest opportunity to achieve GHG reductions while it also pursues its limited options for increasing the use of renewable energy.
New buildings sprout up in New York and other cities all the time. Between 2004 and 2015, construction added 8 percent to the total floor space in the city. Many advances in design and equipment make it possible to hold down new buildings’ energy use substantially, often to nearly zero, and some buildings even produce enough energy to run themselves and send the excess into the electricity grid. But, the city projected, 90 percent of the buildings standing in 2015 would still exist in 2050. The great majority of those buildings were not designed, constructed, and equipped with energy efficiency in mind. Fossil-fuel energy was relatively inexpensive in the twentieth century; how much was used (or its impact on the environment) was not a paramount concern for architects, engineers, building owners and managers, or even many tenants paying the bills. “We’ve been living on an enriched diet of fossil fuels, because it was so cheap,” observes John Lee, deputy director for green buildings and energy efficiency at the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. “Especially in the economic boom in the 1960s and 1970s, we built buildings in a way that didn’t care about energy. And they last 50 to 100 years, or more.”
The design of buildings has been based on principles set up in the early 1900s, when modern architecture and the International Style were born, explains architect Ed Mazria. At the time, architects and planners were responding to several developments: industrialization had created overcrowded slums and heavy air pollution in cities; advances in reinforced concrete building technology and central heating, cooling, and ventilation systems allowed for the construction of high-rise buildings with glass “skins” and larger interior spaces; and the arrival of the automobile led cities to favor large blocks of tall buildings and redesign wide street grids for more efficient movement of people and goods. The International Style, Mazria says, “divorced the building from place and location, and overpowered the climate and external environment by using abundant inexpensive energy to condition and light interior space.” The same glass building could be located almost anywhere in the world.
Now, though, buildings have to be turned into much more efficient structures, retrofitted for a different world than the one for which they were designed and built. “Our buildings will need to become high-performance structures,” Mayor de Blasio’s report announced. “Walls and windows must be insulated, building equipment must become more efficient and intelligent. . . . Residents would need to conscientiously conserve energy and water, and building operators will need to become skilled in the latest energy efficiency technologies.”4 Experts estimated that existing technologies and strategies could reduce energy use in typical buildings by 40 to 60 percent. The challenge is to get these “deep” efficiency upgrades to happen in nearly every building in the city even though few building owners, managers, and occupants have compelling financial reasons to act. “We haven’t priced the energy input into buildings to the point where efficiency to cut costs matters enough,” explains Lee, noting this is true even though New York’s energy costs are among the nation’s highest. “The potential return on investment for efficiency has to compete against other, more profitable investments.”
Most innovation lab cities face a similar challenge with reducing emissions by buildings, although not at New York’s vast scale, and they have dedicated substantial resources and effort to figuring out how to boost building efficiency. In the absence of strong financial drivers for private investment, cities use government and utility programs to incentivize or subsidize weatherization and other energy-reduction projects on buildings. But they recognize that the pace of this “retrofitting” is much slower than what’s needed to achieve their goals for building efficiency—and doing a great deal more of it would require a huge amount of taxpayer or ratepayer money.
The energy consumed by buildings is just one target among many for ramping up urban efficiency to reduce fossil-fuel energy use and increase cities’ resilience to climate disruptions. Climate innovators also push to cut energy use in transportation and processing solid waste. Gradually, they have expanded their sights to cover nearly everything that a city consumes: food, water, materials, natural resources, and even the time people spend traveling. They want to reduce overall levels of consumption and waste that have been baked deeply into the physical, economic, social, and political structures of modern urban life.
This, it turns out, requires a change in modern thinking about abundance: what it is and how it can be produced.
A big gain in efficiency ignited the Industrial Revolution. James Watt, an instrument maker in Glasgow, redesigned a rudimentary steam engine that had been used for nearly sixty years to pump water out of mines. In the 1780s, Watt reduced the engine’s waste of heat, which increased the mechanical power it produced by burning coal to generate steam. The boost and other adjustments made it commercially feasible to use steam engines in mills for paper, flour, cotton, and iron; in distilleries, canals, and waterworks; and to power trains and ships.
So began the global rise in consumption of fossil fuels that continues to the present, setting a record in 2015, even as the amount of renewable energy in the world also reached a new height.5 But the past two centuries are more than a story of ever-peaking energy consumption. Before the 1800s, material consumption worldwide had been increasing for several centuries, summarizes Frank Trentmann in Empire of Things. By 1800, he says, values and practices “favored greater consumption and kept the momentum going.”6 Industrialization in Europe spurred consumption, as did globalizing markets and expanding colonial empires. This rising tide, reports another history of consumption, swept away earlier agrarian-society behaviors in which “clothing and household possessions were extremely limited [and] individual material goods were used, with repairs if needed, for decades.”7
Ideas about consumption began to change. “The new prominence of consumption was part of a mental shift in industrial societies,” Trentmann explains. Economists had previously agreed there were natural limits to economic growth, but economic expansion brought on by industrialization broke through the presumed ceiling. “Growth unsettled assumptions about the social order, the nature of wealth, its origin, use and distribution,” says Trentmann.8 The concept of a standard of living, with an emphasis on material and financial well-being, took hold as a measure of society’s performance and a priority for government policy. Economists contended that consumption helped civilize nations and generate abundance.
Potential drivers of consumption, such as keeping the cost of supplying goods low and continuously stimulating consumers’ desires, became enshrined in modern business practices and public policies. “When the Industrial Revolution manifested itself, people wanted simply to keep supply as high as demand,” observe William McDonough and Michael Braungart in The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability—Designing for Abundance.9 Increasing supply meant consuming more natural resources to make things. “Nature never said no,” recaps McDonough. “Everything was there for the taking.” The process of turning resources into products expanded throughout the twentieth century. In 1987, the Brundtland Report noted that global industrial production had grown more than fiftyfold, with most of the increase since 1950.
Along the way, economic thinking about social well-being gained dominance. “The mass of humanity,” observes Richard Heinberg, senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, “came to be motivated by . . . the belief in material progress—the notion that life itself is getting better, is meant to get better, with every passing year, with every new generation. As time goes on, technology improves, scientific knowledge accumulates, and we get richer.” To promote material progress, Heinberg adds, economists touted the idea that “the optimal benefit to humanity is to be obtained through perpetual economic growth.”10
Beginning in the nineteenth century, economic thinking also captured the concept of efficiency—the amount of useful work performed by a machine or a process compared to the total energy expended. Efficiency was worth pursuing if it cut financial costs, which could improve the bottom line of producers and reduce prices paid by consumers. Focusing on economic benefits minimized or ruled out other concerns, such as environmental and health impacts and social and racial equity. In the 1940s, when nations adopted a new measuring tool, the gross domestic product (GDP), it was a way, explains journalist Elizabeth Dickinson, to “capture all economic production by individuals, companies, and the government in a single measure, which should rise in good times and fall in bad.”11
Mass consumption reshaped cities. To meet growing demand from residents and businesses, cities had to build new systems for delivering services and goods. Urban use of water, gas, and electricity soared. “Streets, neighbourhoods and their inhabitants were networked, connected through pipes, gas lines, the omnibus and the tram,” Trentmann documents. “In the second half of the nineteenth century, any modern city worth the name aspired to be networked.”12 By 1867, Paris was lit by twenty thousand gas lamps. The use of water closets in houses and apartments spread in Boston, New York City, London, and other cities. In the 1890s, London became the first city to provide a “constant supply” of water rather than intermittent service.
Cities enabled the movement of growing flows of people and goods. Between 1890 and 1905, for example, US cities began to deploy electric streetcars, constructing thirty thousand miles of electric street railway. By 1923, the industry’s national ridership had reached 15.7 billion passengers.13 Cities also accommodated enormous expansions of housing, industrial production, and shopping—which forced them to rethink land use, urban form, and the regulation of real estate, retailing, and other markets. “Cities served as the hothouses of consumer society” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notes European historian Deborah Cohen. “By the late nineteenth century, cities had not just lavish department stores, with spectacular window displays . . . but the infrastructure for the inconspicuous consumption that came to define a civilized life—running water on demand, gas lighting, indoor plumbing, and electricity.”14
With consumption patterns driving city development and use, New York City in 1916 introduced America’s first citywide zoning code—designed, according to a report at the time, to “check the invasion of retail districts by factories and residence districts by factories and businesses” and “prevent an increase of the congestion of streets and of subway and streetcar traffic in sections where the business population is already too great for the sidewalks and transit facilities.”15 Cities adopted zoning to keep land uses and densities separated—a regulatory model with substantial impacts. Separating residential areas from shopping areas made it “difficult to go from one to the other without a car,” note urban planners Jonathan Barnett and Larry Beasley. Zoning codes with many residential areas based on differing lot sizes, they add, perpetuated social distinctions, spread out urbanization unnecessarily, and “contributed to making new housing unaffordable for ordinary families.”16
Rising material consumption generated mounting quantities of waste—and management of waste had an economic basis. Before the 1800s, cities used a blend of methods for dealing with waste. Reuse and recycling depended on pickers and collectors taking and selling materials—coal ash, rags, bones, human waste, and horse manure—that served as inputs for industrial and agricultural processes locally and even in other countries. Paris in 1884 had around forty thousand rag pickers. London used dust as fertilizer and for the bricks used to rebuild Moscow after the 1812 fire.17 In the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai’s licensed collectors of “night soil,” human manure, wheeled their carts to the city’s docks where hundreds of farmers in boats waited for the “liquid cargo.” Shanghai’s night soil was “considered superior and especially fertile,” explains historian Hanchao Lu, “thanks to the rich diets of the people.”18
For items with no apparent market value, city dwellers routinely dumped their household waste into streets, ditches, and waterways. The growth of uncollected waste and fears about its impact on public health pushed cities into action. Odors arising from open sewage trenches in Melbourne in the nineteenth century led to the city being dubbed “Smellbourne,” with doctors urging the city to install a modern sewage system.19 When medical researchers linked human waste to the spread of cholera and other diseases, cities initiated a wave of engineering to design and build “sanitary” sewers that carried dangerous human discard away for treatment and disposal. Eventually the send-it-away approach—disposing into waterways, the ground, or the air—was applied to all manner of waste. “What started as a crusade for public health and civic renewal ended up in the hands of engineers who focused on finding the best and cheapest technologies for getting rid of waste by either burying or burning it,” Trentmann notes. British cities began to burn waste systematically in the 1870s. In 1883, all Parisians were ordered to put household refuse into waste bins for collection in the morning. Two decades later, Shanghai required households to place all refuse into iron bins for pickup; later the city introduced concrete house-refuse containers with locks to keep out the rag pickers. In 1885, New York City built the first garbage incinerator in the US. By the early 1900s, incinerators and landfills for disposal had spread through urban America.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world’s cities generated ten times more solid waste than a century earlier—more than three million tons every day.20 Around 1900, residents of Stockholm threw away an average of sixty-six pounds of waste a year. By 2017, per capita annual disposal in the city had reached more than one thousand pounds.21 New York City alone produces ten million tons of solid waste annually, according to a 2013 report—two-thirds of it from everyday activities, the rest debris from construction and demolition of buildings.22
Through a gradual process of change, modern cities came to serve as epicenters of a global consumer society in which buying, selling, and disposing of goods and services are predominantly social and economic activities.
The growth of material abundance has been a double-edged sword. One edge is the production of undeniable benefits for humanity. “In 1665, half a billion humans sweated to sustain the species near subsistence with their crude implements,” notes philosopher Leif Wenar. “Now our global economy is so productive that 16 times that number—some 8 billion humans—will soon be alive, and most will never have known such poverty.”23 It’s an affirming judgment often made. In 2017, writes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, “a smaller share of the world’s people were hungry, impoverished or illiterate than at any time before.”24
Abundance’s other edge produces downsides, especially in cities. But global warming due to fossil-fuel burning is not the only danger that consumption has brought to our door. The processes of taking wood, coal, and other natural resources laid waste to vast ecosystems and continue to do so. Since the 1970s, according to the Global Footprint Network’s calculator, humanity has been consuming resources at a faster rate than the planet can resupply them—a chronic “ecological overshoot” of consumption. “It now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year,” the network reports.25 In 2005, Calgary, a city of 1.2 million, used the network’s calculator to assess its footprint. “If everyone on earth had the same Ecological Footprint as the average Calgary resident,” the analysis concluded, “we would need five Earths to maintain that level of resource consumption.”26 The barely constrained taking of natural resources is simply not sustainable. It’s possible, McDonough and Braungart note, that “humans will run short on easily accessible, clean biological and technical materials from which to build and create a beneficial civilization.”27
At the same time, the processes of making, using, and disposing of goods releases pollution and hazardous and toxic wastes that further damage the environment. Government regulation has had some mitigating effect, but every day seems to bring headlines of growing or newly detected problems: mounting plastic waste in the oceans, for instance. Researchers recently identified the four-thousand-mile-long Yangtze River, flowing near Shanghai and other Chinese cities, as probably the planet’s top waterway carrier of plastic pollution.28
Of course, consumption-driven abundance and its economic and environmental effects vary greatly among and within modern nations. “Industrial countries and the world’s richest people consume and pollute far more than other nations and groups,” notes ecological economist Robert Costanza.29 In 2011, points out urban designer Peter Calthorpe, the average person on earth accounted for 4.9 tons of carbon emissions, but the bottom quarter of the world’s population by income emitted only 0.3 tons per capita; they “do not own cars or air conditioners, live in large homes, or eat steaks.”30 Uneven levels of consumption and GHG-emissions production are also evident within cities.
These and other severe environmental, social, and economic problems with the consumption-abundance model have inspired a new set of ideas that radically redefine what abundance is and how it is produced.
Abundance is not abundance if achieving it depletes and pollutes the environment—the natural systems and resources on which we depend for future abundance. The rate of consumption of natural systems should not outpace the systems’ capacity to renew themselves, as the Brundtland Report specified: “A new era of economic growth . . . must be based on policies that sustain and expand the environmental resource base.”31
The design of products should avoid unnecessary resource inputs and minimize, if not eliminate, waste. “As modern engineers and designers commonly create a product now,” explain McDonough and Braungart, “the item is designed only for its first use, not its potential next uses after it breaks, or grows threadbare, or goes out of fashion, or crumbles.”32 Products become waste that has to be put somewhere else. But there is no “away” to which waste can be sent without environmental repercussions for someone. Instead, McDonough and Braungart argue, all products can and should be designed for complete recycling and reuse: “If human beings were to devise products, tools, furniture, homes, factories, and cities more intelligently from the start, they wouldn’t even need to think in terms of waste, or contamination, or scarcity. Good design would allow for abundance, endless reuse, and pleasure.”33
Abundance is more than material and economic well-being: it includes human health, social well-being, happiness, environmental conditions, and the way people use their time. “‘Bounty’ doesn’t mean simply more cheap consumer goods and empty calories,” say Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age, noting other types of abundance that matter: “It also means simultaneously more choice, greater variety, and higher quality in many areas of our lives.”34
To increase abundance requires more than ever-increasing consumption of goods and services. “Consumerism replaced satisfying experiences of making, growing, repairing, and sharing with the momentary buzz of buying a new manufactured product,” says Heinberg. People want “more,” he continues, but more can be redefined “in terms of relationships, community solidarity, and shared experiences rather than the mere acquisition of stuff.”35
The theme of nonmaterial abundance resonates with millennials worldwide. “This generation has an abiding interest in looking out for the welfare of the group, not just their own satisfaction,” notes Morley Winograd, coauthor of three books about millennials. “As the results of overconsumption and unsustainable growth become more apparent to young adult millennials, their consumption patterns shift to focus on how the goods they buy are produced, the ethics of the companies they do business with, and extracting the maximum value for the least amount of cost. Often this leads them to spend more heavily on experiences and less on ‘stuff.’”
Critiques of the abundance-is-economic-value school of thought abound. The gross domestic product is “notorious for overweighting market transactions, understating resource depletion, omitting pollution damage, and failing to measure real changes in well-being,” Costanza says.36 A more holistic version of abundance would recognize values that have been sidelined but are critical for cities, says Richard Florida: “Back in the industrial age, pounding out more steel, more cars, and more consumer durables seemed good proxies for growth. Wasted energy and pollution were accepted as unfortunate but unavoidable byproducts. That no longer holds today in an era where knowledge, innovation, creativity, and human potential drive the economy.”37
The failure to broaden the base of beneficiaries of abundance, the Brundtland Report contended, is unfair to the poor and weakens the prospect of sustained economic growth. More widespread abundance would minimize problematic disparities in society, especially those driven by economic and social discrimination against particular categories of people and places. In the US and in other nations, more and more cities have taken up this argument for increased economic and social equity in the use of resources.
Seattle has been a global leader in publicly acknowledging disparities due to racial discrimination. On Earth Day in 2016, then-mayor Edward Murray released Seattle’s Equity and Environment Agenda, acknowledging that the city’s progress in reducing pollution and energy consumption and its investments in public transit had not addressed evident inequities. Residents in low-income neighborhoods “often deal with higher levels of pollution,” Murray said. “They often face greater risk of severe health problems, and have limited access to healthy foods and open space. Yet, they benefit the least from our environmental progress. This is particularly true for communities of color.”38
Urban disparities come to light especially when cities consider their vulnerability to climate changes. In most cities, the populations and neighborhoods most vulnerable to climate impacts also face other significant economic, social, and health inequities. “Conventional approaches to adaptation and mitigation view vulnerability as a characteristic or condition of groups of people and not as a circumstance or consequence of the ways social groups have been historically and systematically marginalized and excluded from opportunity,” explains an overview on climate resilience by the collaborators in the Movement Generation project.39 Boston’s resilience plan notes that expected climate impacts “will disproportionately affect communities of color, and overlapping socially vulnerable communities such as older adults, children, people with limited English proficiency, people with low to no income, and people with disabilities.”40
Cities also are increasingly concerned about how their climate actions affect affordability—the cost of housing, energy, and transportation for people with low incomes, for instance—and might cause displacement of low-income people. Portland’s climate plan stresses that energy-efficiency upgrades should not result in increased cost burden to low-income populations and communities of color that are already under financial stress. Austin, one of America’s fastest-growing cities, unveiled a plan in 2017 to allow developers to build larger housing projects as long as they ensure a portion of the units will be affordable to renters or they build affordable units elsewhere in the city.41
In innovation lab cities, these new ways of thinking lead to three approaches to generating abundance in climate-smart ways. The cities reduce consumption of energy, water, and other resources, conserving in ways that save money as well as materials. They reduce waste disposal by developing “circular” pathways to recycle and reuse products and materials. And they redesign urban compactness—the proximity of people to necessities—to reduce the use of automobile transportation that consumes energy, city space, and people’s time and money.
Different motivations may fuel people’s efforts to reduce their consumption. Some individuals and businesses value having a small environmental footprint or rejecting wastefulness. For them, this is personal, a way of being—call it green, responsible, or sustainable—and they will often go out of their way, experiencing inconvenience or additional cost, to enact it. When New York City analyzed the “greenness” of its residents, it found that about 40 percent were “young urbanites” or “aspiring greens” who felt “high concern for the environment” and empowered to act.42
Some people want to do what others are doing; they are motivated to be with or join others—and many green behavior-change campaigns tap into this social desire by communicating to target audiences what their peers are doing or saying.
A powerful motivator is the financial savings that can be obtained by reducing consumption. Efficiency gains in the US save electricity customers $90 billion a year, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.43 Some savings may be “free” thanks to behavior changes—using less heat or water, turning lights and appliances off when they’re not needed. But most energy savings require investments in equipment that reduces consumption: insulation for buildings, more-efficient appliances for homes, or less-wasteful machines for industrial processes.
In many innovation lab cities, the combination of these motivations has spurred development of new or retrofitted green buildings with high levels of energy efficiency. In 2017, seven of the top ten US cities for energy efficiency were innovation lab cities, according to a scorecard released by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.44 But the payoff for energy efficiency in buildings has not yet motivated anything like the widespread and immense gains in reduced energy consumption that innovation lab cities need to meet their GHG-reduction targets. The average building energy retrofit in the US typically involves “shallow” improvements that only reduce energy use about 15 percent.45
New York’s John Lee estimates that a minority of building owners in the city voluntarily invest in efficiency. “It happens at the margin of the market,” he says, mostly by owners who intend to hold onto the building for several decades—long enough to benefit financially after making the necessary investment. “Retrofitting is expensive and the payback period is long,” Lee notes. At the same time, because the cost of energy is a relatively small portion of a building’s overall cost, most owners won’t see big financial gains from acting, Lee adds: “If I can command $100 per square foot in rent and my energy expenditure is $3 per square foot for that space, and I can cut it to $2, it only adds up—maybe to millions of dollars—if you’re a big owner who commands enough space.”
In US cities, says Vincent Martinez, COO for Architecture 2030, commercial buildings are sold every eight years on average, and residential buildings sell every nine to twelve years. “This timeframe pushes longer-term investments in energy efficiency, such as replacement of the building’s whole energy system or improvements to the building’s exterior, off the table,” he explains, because building owners won’t capture the financial return on these big investments with longer payback periods.
These daunting financial barriers set the stage for cities to use another type of motivation for reducing consumption. Even as they increase incentives for efficiency—tax rebates, loan programs, and eased development regulations—some cities are turning to mandates. “The market is far from perfect, so policymakers have to go beyond the normal market influencers like information and prices,” explains Lee.
In September 2017, for instance, New York Mayor de Blasio proposed that the city require twenty-three thousand existing commercial buildings—apartment houses, office buildings, and warehouses—to cut their carbon emissions by 2030 or face significant financial penalties. The mandate would cover buildings with more than twenty-five thousand square feet of floor space, setting caps on their energy consumption. If buildings exceed the cap, then owners would be fined. New York would be the first US city to use this approach to get buildings to make GHG reductions.46
About two months earlier, Vancouver adopted a plan that requires all new buildings in the city to produce no GHG emissions at all, the toughest building code in North America. The Zero Emissions Building Plan phases in the zero standard by 2030, starting mostly in 2020.47 “This is a Plan to fundamentally shift building practice in Vancouver in just under 10 years,” says Sean Pander, the city green-building manager, estimating that by 2050 about 40 percent of all floor space in Vancouver will be in buildings built after 2020.48
Embedded in these two cities’ aggressive approaches to boosting energy efficiency in buildings are key elements of the approach that innovation lab and other cities increasingly use:
Local real estate market conditions can affect just how far cities will go with introducing mandates. Most lab cities’ markets have strong demand for housing and office space, which tends to allay building owners’ concerns about small cost increases due to efficiency. In Vancouver, Doug Smith, director of the city’s sustainability group, says that meeting the zero standard for new buildings will add 2 to 5 percent to the cost of construction: “In Vancouver’s market this has a negligible impact on housing prices as the prices are based on what the market can bear and are not directly linked to the price of construction, which only accounts for one quarter of the cost of a single-family home. High-performance buildings actually improve affordability, health, and equity, since the reduction in utility costs is typically larger than any potential increase in mortgage costs. Combine this with having healthier, more resilient buildings for owners and renters and there is no reason not to pursue these standards.” In cities with weak housing markets, however, there may be more pressure from owners and occupants to avoid policies that increase buildings’ costs and prices, whatever the long-term benefits and financial gains might be.
Even as lab cities focus on electricity use in buildings, they also seek to cut GHG emissions by reducing consumption of other types of energy—gasoline, natural gas, and fuel oil—and of water, food, and other goods. They use an array of behavior-change campaigns, financial subsidies, public investments, pricing signals, and regulatory mandates. Some also look to sharing-economy models as a way of reducing consumption.
But these efforts also face obstacles. Water utilities, for instance, built their business models on encouraging more consumption and have difficulty shifting to a model that promotes reduced use of water. Using carbon-emissions trading markets or congestion fees to cut consumption will have little impact if the prices are too low, but high prices can generate political opposition. Analysts of sharing-economy models see conflicting impacts on efficiency. Some members of car-sharing programs sell their cars or avoid purchasing a car. But there’s evidence that ride programs like Uber actually increase vehicle traffic on streets and take away passengers from mass transit. Similarly, space sharing through, say, Airbnb, increases the use of existing space but also increases the consumption of energy in the space.
Lab cities’ aggressive efforts to curb energy use have important limits. Most target energy and emissions used operationally within their borders—to heat and cool buildings and move vehicles, for instance. This is the internationally recognized way of measuring and inventorying emissions by cities. But it doesn’t include emissions generated outside of the city to produce or deliver what is used and consumed within cities, such as food. San Francisco, Vancouver, London, Portland, Seattle, and other cities have pioneered the development and use of consumption-based inventories that include the full life cycle of emissions of products consumed in the city wherever they were released. This approach, San Francisco notes, is especially relevant for affluent places “where the high level of income enjoyed by many households leads to increased consumption of goods and services, as well as more spending on leisure activities such as vacation travel.”51 Typically, a consumption-based analysis reveals that a city has a much higher level of GHG emissions than previously recognized.
As innovation lab cities push harder for consumption reduction, they are also innovating at other stages of the consumption cycle—before use, when goods are being designed and produced, and after use, when they are being disposed of.
In 2013, Oslo’s bus company made an announcement that puzzled city residents: “Now buses are fuelled by your banana peels.”52 The explanation lay in a climate innovation: a year earlier, households in the city had been required to put their food waste into special green plastic bags for collection. The city wanted to use the organic material to produce biogas to power its buses—a way to reduce GHG emissions from decaying waste and burning fossil fuel in the vehicles. But it’s also part of a greater effort the city and other innovation labs are pioneering to eliminate waste completely—to conserve valuable resources and reduce environmental impacts.
For similar reasons, San Francisco implemented a program for composting food scraps, collecting from residents and businesses and turning the material, along with yard trimmings, into compost used by local farmers on their soil. This initiative, too, was part of a bigger plan for the city that in 2002 set a 2020 goal of “zero waste,” defined as “nothing going to landfill or incineration.”53 By 2012, about 80 percent of the city’s waste met that standard, the highest “diversion rate” of any North American city. About half of what still goes to landfill, the city says, can be recycled or composted, which would boost the city’s rate to 90 percent.
Reusing food waste—turning it into fuel or fertilizer—is one way that cities are experimenting with “circularity,” replacing the modern city’s linear take-make-dispose model with an approach that changes what and how things are taken, made, and used so that nothing needs to be disposed of. “We transform a big problem, waste, into a massive opportunity,” explains William McDonough. Circular systems build on cities’ traditional recycling and reuse systems, of course, but go further “upstream” to the development and use of products. They look at how products can be initially designed for durability, reuse, and repair. Circularity “is designed to mimic the material and energy flows in mature ecosystems where resources are continuously appropriated, used, redistributed, and recycled for future use,” notes Jeremy Rifkin.54 It also defines waste as more than just what cities’ waste-management systems handle. “The things we make are consistently underutilized,” notes a 2017 report for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. In Europe, for instance, the average car is parked 92 percent of the time, and the average office space is used only 35–50 percent of the time.55
Circular systems generate abundance by reducing the unneeded consumption and cost of materials and energy for producing goods and decreasing the cost of waste collection and management. A recent European Commission study projects that the circular economy for manufacturing in Europe alone could save $630 billion a year.56 As fewer new materials are needed for production, circularity also reduces society’s environmental footprint. The value of materials that can be reused numerous times increases, and some recycled materials, such as biogas, can be used as renewable energy. In the case of composting food waste, fertilizer can have a regenerative impact on soils. The system can also stimulate development of more locally based production and repair of goods, functioning as a local “closed loop.”
Oslo and other cities are pioneering circularity with four types of experiments, explains Håkon Jentoft, senior executive officer of Oslo’s waste-management agency and chair of the European Union Partnership for Circular Economy.
“To have better resource management, you have to talk to industry about how things are produced and encourage them to change the way we are producing the goods we consume,” Jentoft says. “We use our knowledge of waste management to say, ‘See what problems your products are creating for us.’ What can you do about that?” To start this sort of exchange, Jentoft adds, a city “must know what the company is doing and how they are thinking and planning.” These efforts are crucial because development of circular markets depends on actions by businesses to design their products and take “producer responsibility” for the entire life cycle of products.
“Cities are big consumers; there’s a lot of power in their procurement,” Jentoft says. Oslo is one of the biggest procurers in Norway, “from buildings to daily life things, for schools and homes.” Previously, the city focused on green procurement, which applies environmental criteria, including carbon emissions, to products: “Now we want to introduce the circular idea into procurement, looking at the life cycle of the product, adding the production and waste phases of the product to our criteria.”
“This is about offering guidelines and recommendations about how my fellow citizens are consuming, and gaining their acceptance,” Jentoft says. “This is difficult. There are such strong forces every day trying to get us to consume more.”
“Instead of looking at what they will be discarding tomorrow from the waste coming in every day,” says Jentoft, “they look for what could be the resources of tomorrow that are in the waste flow. We know what people are throwing away, what products are ending up as waste, and if they could be reused or not.”
Oslo’s circular system for food waste has been gaining traction. More than 150 city buses run on biogas from food waste and wastewater, while biofertilizer is sent to farms. Since 2012, when Oslo residents started to separate food waste and plastic at home, the rate of material recovery has increased. But by 2016, it had only reached about 40 percent—and the city’s biogas plant, the largest in Norway, had unused capacity.57 Even so, this system was a good starting point for Oslo’s innovative efforts, because the city could generate both supply from its residents and demand by converting its bus fleet and waste-hauling trucks to use biogas. The city had to invest in the technology and facilities that could separate the green bags from households’ other waste. “You have to make investments to create a circular market,” Jentoft points out. Getting farmers to use the biofertilizer the city produces hasn’t been easy, he adds: “It’s a huge step for them to move from industrial fertilizer to our product when they don’t know the quality and the reaction that their crops will have.”
Density of population and buildings defines cities in general, but for urban climate innovation labs, it can be a crucial advantage. A city’s density of habitation, especially its quantity of high-occupancy buildings, generally makes the city more efficient in using energy. When journalist David Owen writes that “New York”—with its miles of concrete, air pollution, and traffic congestion—“is the greenest community in the United States,” the idea may seem preposterous. But not when density and public transit are part of the equation. As Owen explains, “New Yorkers, individually, drive, pollute, consume, and throw away much less than do the average residents of the surrounding suburbs, exurbs, small towns, and farms, because the tightly circumscribed space in which they live creates efficiencies and reduces the possibilities for reckless consumption.”58
Urban compactness offers an efficiency advantage that builds on density, one that many cities had before they were designed for the automobile and that innovation lab cities are busy reclaiming. Compactness refers to the proximity of stores, jobs, and amenities to where people live—a development pattern that shortens routine travel distances and changes how people travel. “Mixed use is a rarity in sprawled cities where homes, workplaces, schools, hospitals, and shops are segregated from each other,” notes Michael Renner, senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute. The more compactly these necessities are located, the less often and less distance people must drive to get what they need. Instead, they may choose more often to walk or bike to nearby destinations, which reduces energy consumption for mobility.
Compactness can also decrease traffic congestion, which wastes human time and reduces economic productivity. Research shows that congestion-related problems cost US drivers nearly $300 billion in 2016 in lost time and economic productivity.59 In Seattle, for example, the average commuter wasted an estimated sixty-three hours a year stuck in traffic in 2014.60 Urban compactness can also reduce the cost of living, since a car-free lifestyle (no purchase, insurance, or garaging) becomes more feasible and attractive. And it may enable the repurposing of public space dedicated to cars—roads, streets, and parking spaces.
“Mixed-use, walkable, economically integrated, and transit-rich places define good urbanism in any city,” says Peter Calthorpe, a founding member of the Congress for the New Urbanism and a global advocate for transit-oriented development (TOD).61 China’s newer cities, says Calthorpe, have high density, but they also sprawl: “Single-use residential blocks of largely identical units are clustered in superblocks surrounded by major arterial roads. Vast distances separate everyday destinations and create environments hostile to pedestrians. Sidewalks rarely are lined with useful services, and crossing the street is death-defying. Job centers are distant and commutes are long, especially for low-income people.” This urban design reflects a desire “to move cars efficiently; people are an afterthought,” Calthorpe concludes.62
In 2015, however, China’s national government adopted a version of TOD standards for cities’ growth. “All future urban development must feature dense road networks, small blocks, and other sustainable urban design principles,” notes Energy Foundation China. “The new guidelines prioritize walking, biking, and public transit. . . . This is a radical departure from the country’s last 30 years of urban development.”63 A year later, a street-design guide for Shanghai focused on reclaiming streets from automobiles by “paying attention to how people meet and live” and “promoting the joint development of neighbourhoods and streets.”64
In Portland, a growing city with 640,000 residents, a push for compactness began four decades ago—before climate-change awareness—when a coalition of farmers and environmentalists got the state to adopt an urban-growth boundary around Portland and other cities in the region to prevent sprawl. “It was assumed that how we grow and accomplish this regional objective was inextricably tied to our transportation planning,” says Joe Zehnder, Portland’s chief planner. “It’s the bedrock of our compact planning.” To reduce dependence on automobiles, the city embraced mass transit: “There’s a very strong transit culture in the city, and support for continuing to build out that system.” But having mass transit isn’t enough, Zehnder says. “We need to design transit to support compact development, so the benefit of being a household in one of the city’s centers is that you’re less dependent on the car.”
As Portland expanded its transit system, it also promoted the idea of the “20-minute neighborhood,” places where residents can meet their daily nonwork needs by walking or cycling. Portland’s Climate Action Plan calls for neighborhoods in which 90 percent of residents can walk or bicycle to meet these needs. The city’s long-range, comprehensive plan envisions “complete neighborhoods” with “multi-story buildings, well scaled streets and businesses and shops and restaurants that meet the everyday needs of residents.”65
Urban abundance generated through efficiency, not consumption; circularity, not take-make-dispose; and compactness, not spread: this is more than an ideal or a far-off vision. It’s an emerging reality in leading-edge cities, the beginning of new ways of managing urban consumption in the climate-change era. It aims to change habits of consumption and disposal, the design of products and services, and the underlying economics of using materials and producing goods. It raises the development of a new abundance, a new quality of life, above the accumulation of material wealth.
But if consuming and wasting far fewer natural resources is a critical part of the urban future, so is the even-larger relationship that cities have with natural systems. What cities use nature for is the subject of another transformational idea.