It always seems impossible until it’s done.
—Nelson Mandela1
The four ideas for urban transformation that we’ve described alter cities in fundamental ways. Cities responding to the imperatives of climate change incubate business innovation so they will thrive during the economic transition brought on by global decarbonization. They reduce their consumption of the planet’s bounty. They reengage and collaborate with nature to obtain its life-enhancing benefits. They develop new capacities to prepare for a future filled with unprecedented challenges.
While these ideas are alive and well worldwide in innovation lab cities, they are also taking root in many “early adopter” cities, thanks to Rebel Alliance networks and organizations and other efforts that connect cities to each other to share information, lessons learned, and practical advice about climate innovations and other changes that improve urban livability. But cities cannot by themselves accomplish the urban evolution that has begun, not even through increased efforts. Even the most advanced innovation lab cities and early adopters can’t get all the way down the road of transformation alone. They simply don’t control enough of the factors for success, such as energy-market regulation, transportation-investment policies, corporate investments, and engineering practices. Nor can they always influence those who do command those levers.
Lack of control and influence is not the only barrier to a complete global urban makeover. The vast majority of the world’s thousands of cities are not innovation labs or early adopter cities. Their leaders may be unenthusiastic about embracing a new mind-set and approach to city affairs and going through the difficulties and risks of change. They may be politically constrained, limited by a lack of financial resources and technical competencies, or may feel that the city has more pressing priorities. Or they may be reluctant to take climate actions that increase costs to businesses or residents, fearing negative impacts on the city’s development and economy or on their own careers. These cities don’t change because of self-drive and learning what works, the main motivations that spur innovators and adopters. Some of them may decide to act when the potential economic benefits for the city are compelling because changes would save city government money, reduce the cost of living or doing business, create more jobs, or generate a favorable cost-benefit ratio for public investment. But this willingness limits them to using innovations, such as switching outdoor lighting to LEDs or substituting green infrastructure for gray infrastructure, which can meet these financial criteria with certainty. Most climate innovations do not produce easy and sure financial wins like that. And as innovation lab cities show, just adopting an innovation here and there isn’t nearly the same as transforming core city systems. It’s only a step in that direction.
The bottom line: many of the world’s cities will not transform their systems until they have no other choice. They will change eventually, but instead of inventing the future, they will be ensnared by it.
That’s how the current modern city model took hold globally. In some cases, it was imposed by national governments, such as when Western colonial empires designed Asian, African, and Australian cities in their own image or when the US government built the national highway system into and through cities. Sometimes markets acted as a driving force: businesses wanted to make new products, such as cars, and consumers wanted to buy and use them, and eventually cities changed to accommodate the new mobility. Often, architects, engineers, and other professionals adopted new standards for their practices, much as modernist design of buildings and transportation engineering for efficient movement of vehicles became urban norms. In many cities, civic activists organized to support modern development because it offered opportunities for economic gain, deployed impressive new technologies, or inspired a sense of city betterment and human progress.
These various forcing functions for modern urban development didn’t just spread city-to-city. They were part of a gestalt, a widespread way of thinking that emanated in the society’s cultures, in the hearts and minds of people. A culture’s values and beliefs guide action; they provide people with decision-making criteria that allow for local discretion. This is how an idea takes hold in the world; it lets people choose what precisely they will do in service of the idea. The key ideas of the modern age—unfettered economic growth, consumption-based abundance, financial efficiency, and the dominion of built environments over nature, for example—caught on because they appealed to many people in many different situations.
Some values and beliefs endure across generations and eons, while others change. Modern-age values—consumerism and economic efficiency, for instance—replaced traditional values of previous centuries. In our time, the rise of widely held “cultural creative” values—love of nature, awareness of planet-wide issues, embrace of cultural diversity, and gender equality—has been documented.2 This sort of sweeping change may be tied to what William Strauss and Neil Howe in The Fourth Turning call “the seasons of history,” cycles of generational change that strengthen civil order, then attack it, then give rise to new values, then replace old values with the new ones.3
Now this process of gestalt formation is happening with the new ideas that are transforming cities. It’s not just innovative and adopter cities that are using ideas that engender urban climate innovations. Businesses—large corporations, small local enterprises, and entrepreneurial start-ups—are creating products and services out of these ideas, and they look for cities to support them in doing this. Professionals—architects, engineers, real estate developers, water- and electricity-utility managers, city planners, financiers, and others—are developing new practices and standards of practice that incorporate these ideas. It was, for instance, a small group of architects, engineers, and environmentalists that developed LEED standards for green buildings that are being used worldwide.4 Consumers, community activists, and city residents are also demanding that cities embrace innovations in local policies and make investments based on these ideas, as are some state/provincial and national levels of government the world over.
As this self-organizing dynamic advances, it will continue to result in policy mandates issued by higher levels of government, such as building codes that increase requirements for energy efficiency. It will produce more standards that are adopted and widely used by architects, engineers, water-utility managers, and other professionals. It will generate even larger markets for innovative goods and services, such as electric vehicles and on-site water reuse systems, and suppliers and customers will demand more supportive city infrastructure and policies to enable what they care about.
This dynamic accelerates the pace of change in innovation lab cities and early adopter cities by reinforcing the validity and feasibility of the transformational ideas and bringing new resources to support their application. But it will also increasingly impact decisions of other cities—by creating government mandates, professional standards, and business, consumer, and community-based demands that cities cannot ignore. This is how the next urban model will replace the modern city model worldwide.
When Boston’s Green Ribbon Commission (GRC) met in November 2017, its members—more than thirty CEOs and representatives of leading companies, property developers, nonprofits, utilities, financial institutions, and universities in the city—discussed their collective effort to support the city’s plans to achieve carbon neutrality and prepare for climate turbulence. They considered how to create a “carbon-free” city and embed climate strategies into the city’s long-term comprehensive planning, a crucial step for sustaining momentum and deepening transformational impact.5
But many commission members have other formidable goals on their minds. They are spreading climate innovations throughout the world. Some have shaped the carbon-reduction goals and plans of their large companies in multiple cities and nations and are pioneering critical innovations: offshore wind farms, district energy systems, and “zero-net-carbon” buildings that meet their operational needs entirely through renewable energy, for example. Some are bending entire US and global economic sectors—health care, commercial real estate, private capital investment—toward adopting climate-smart approaches and standards of sustainable practice. Some are teaming with Boston to develop new tools and research capacities to help other cities, as well as states and regions, decide which policies to use to reduce GHG emissions. These urban climate rebels in Boston are reaching far beyond the city’s borders, using markets, professional standards, and public policies in ways that affect cities everywhere.
Amos Hostetter, a philanthropist and longtime Boston civic leader, was a founding force in launching the commission in 2010—using his convening power to bring together leaders from multiple sectors in the city. Then the Barr Foundation, which he and his wife, Barbara, started, provided funding for the GRC, a total of almost $4 million by 2018. Mindy Lubber, a former federal environmental regulator in the Clinton administration and cochair of the citizen leadership committee that shaped Boston’s 2009 Climate Action Plan, had urged Hostetter to start the commission. “She came to me and said, ‘You’ve got to do something like this,’” Hostetter recalls. “Mindy was my rabbi. You can’t spend fifteen minutes with her without getting charged up. My role was knowing most of the movers and shakers in the city and getting them to return calls.”
Lubber is CEO of Ceres, a Boston-based nonprofit that works with some of the world’s largest corporations and public and private investment institutions on climate change and other challenges of moving toward a sustainable economy. Members such as Apple, General Motors, and Bank of America have committed to use 100 percent renewable energy, JPMorgan Chase agreed to stop financing new coal mines, and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System bought 25 percent of a 550-megawatt solar farm. Since December 2017, Ceres has been working with 225 investors with $26.3 trillion in assets under management to get the world’s largest GHG-emitting corporations to curb their discharges. “We need capital markets to be part of this fight against climate change,” Lubber says, “not only because it’s a good thing, but because there is no economy without the capital.”
Under Lubber, Ceres has become a $16-million-a-year organization with ninety staffers and broad access to business leadership in the US. It has focused on getting companies and investors to identify and assess the financial risks they face due to climate change. “I spend a lot of time in corporate boardrooms, with senior executives, with CEOs of publicly traded companies, with the world’s largest institutional investors,” Lubber says.
If I say, “We have got to stop this problem because our kids’ lives are at stake,” that will get me three minutes and thank yous, and everybody will feel good. But it will have no transference to what I want them to do with their investment portfolios. When we started defining climate as a financial, investor, and corporate risk, then it became something I could go into a corporate boardroom and speak about. If you’re The Gap and the cotton crop dies, or an insurance company and there are two more Hurricane Sandys, or an oil company and your credit rating drops: these things affect their bottom line, and that’s what they largely think about. That’s the argument we make.
Lubber urged the creation of Boston’s Green Ribbon Commission because, she says, it was yet another way to get the private sector to work on climate change, bringing its substantial resources to the city’s important effort: “You have to show what addressing climate change looks like as a comprehensive model in a place, and Boston is such a great laboratory for change.”
For another GRC member, Bryan Koop, change due to global warming was a personal experience before it became about how his business and sector operate. Koop is executive vice president of the Boston region for Boston Properties, one of the biggest developers of large office buildings in the US, with 164 properties in Boston, New York City, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles.6 For the first fifteen years of his three-decade career, Koop says, “I was hanging around with just real estate people, and you’d think that the purpose of real estate is to make a profit and get wealthy.” When he first encountered the topic of sustainability, he says, “a little bit of green was being discussed in real estate. My inclination was, this is kind of bullshit.” But he read more about it, talked with people outside of real estate, and then a friend suggested he watch An Inconvenient Truth. “I watched it five times,” Koop recalls. “I started to realize that sustainability principles were really in keeping with what I hold dearly. Why wouldn’t I want to develop property while doing as little harm as possible to the environment and the community around me?”
Koop became an evangelist in his sector, bucking the status quo, seeking a broad transformation: “The industry will be changed by a few people standing up, and I want to be one of those people.” He also started to incorporate energy-efficiency and climate-adaptation innovations into buildings. He took business risks such as developing the first green office building in New England “on spec,” meaning it had no rental customers lined up before his company spent $150 million to build the facility. Making the building conform to LEED Gold standards added to its cost, and Koop told his bosses they’d earn the money back with premium pricing. But when the first large potential renter, a technology firm, took a tour of the space, he had a moment of severe doubt. The company CEO cut off his pitch about the building’s sustainability features: “All of a sudden the CEO goes, ‘Bryan, just stop for a minute. I don’t believe in all this stuff. Let’s go take a tour and then talk about price.’” During the tour, Koop recalls, “two of the young leaders of this company pulled me aside and whispered to me, ‘We’re really sorry about that.’ I go, ‘No, no, no, not a problem.’ And they go, ‘It is a problem and we’re going to enlighten him on this.’”
Months later, Koop continues, the company moved into the space, and the CEO addressed a ribbon-cutting ceremony: “He says, ‘One of the things I’m most proud of is that this building is LEED Gold certified. I’ll be the first to say that I didn’t value it.’ And he turns to his board of directors and these young leaders and says, ‘But I was educated otherwise.’” The triumph Koop felt at that moment, he says, was more than about making a sale: “I went from severe doubt to, oh my god, it worked—and we changed a company. If we can change them, we can change others. We can provide leadership to our customers, because it isn’t our customers’ responsibility to know this stuff. It should be our responsibility.”
Other global activists on the GRC include David Torchiana, CEO of Partners Healthcare, the largest employer in the State of Massachusetts, and one of the leaders in Health Care Without Harm, a nonprofit working with thousands of hospitals worldwide to reduce their carbon footprints and press for public policies to reduce GHG emissions; Thomas Brostrom, representing Ørsted Energy, the Danish firm that is the world’s leading offshore wind developer, now entering US and Asian renewable-electricity markets; Robert Brown, a chemical engineer and president of Boston University, which is developing a center to provide cities, states, and regions with state-of-the-art modeling capacity to assess the potential impact of policies for reducing GHG emissions; and Jeremy Grantham, chief investment strategist for a $77 billion asset management firm and founder of a research institute on climate change at the London School of Economics.
These activists wear two hats in the Rebel Alliance of climate-change agents—city and world. Many more like them are busy all around the planet, pushing ideas and innovations into markets, professions, public policies, and communities, making it possible for cities to go further and faster toward transformation.
A world that is more renewable, efficient, green, and adaptive: nearly every day brings news that these ideas and their innovations are advancing—and not just in cities. Some are particularly important for the evolution of cities, supporting both the urban innovation leaders and early adopters but also signaling changing conditions for all cities to consider.
Energy-supply markets are shifting toward renewable-energy production, driven by investor and corporate decisions and technological advances in generation and storage, despite weak or nonexistent carbon-pricing incentives and regulatory mandates.7 Half the coal plants in the US have closed or are being phased out.8 Large pools of capital—Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, European insurance giant Axa, the World Bank, New York State’s pension fund—are turning away from fossil-fuel investments. “Something big is starting to shift,” notes Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org. “There are signs that the world’s financial community is finally rousing itself in the fight against global warming.”9 In December 2017, the US Congress was on the verge of eliminating tax credits for investment in and production of solar and wind energy and purchase of electric vehicles, until an alliance of companies committed to producing and using renewables stepped in and persuaded legislators to relent.
Distributed production of solar and wind power is moving toward notable size. According to Bain and Company’s Global Utilities practice, the proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs) and the smart software to manage decentralized electricity is creating demand for more investments in redesigned electricity grids “to accommodate and integrate a growing influx of supply from these distributed sources of electricity.”10 Graham Richard, former CEO of Advanced Energy Economy, notes that as the cost of “clean-economy” technologies comes down, especially battery storage costs, more companies are stepping into the distributed renewables market with products and services for consumers, communities, and utilities. In March 2018, the California electricity-grid operator cancelled or modified $2.6 billion in planned transmission projects, in part because an increasing amount of residential rooftop solar-energy generation was reducing forecasted local demand for electricity.11
China is fueling a boom in electric vehicles, as other nations announce future bans of fossil-fuel vehicles. China had more EV sales in 2017, some three hundred thousand vehicles, than the rest of the world combined and is recruiting electrical engineering talent from around the world.12 Norway, which intends to phase out sale of diesel and gasoline cars by 2025, reported that in 2017 more than half of the vehicles sold in the country ran on alternative fuels.13 By 2018, automotive producers have turned away from the internal combustion engine, as more and more of them announce they intend to electrify their entire product lines in the next two decades. Germany’s highest administrative court ruled that cities can ban vehicles from streets to reduce air pollution.14 Even oil companies have noticed the emerging EV market; in 2017, Royal Dutch Shell purchased one of Europe’s largest car-charging companies.15
These and other developments support growth of clean-energy and “smart-tech” businesses—potential opportunities for cities to grow economically.
Real estate markets are moving toward greater energy efficiency—despite weak and misaligned financial incentives. That momentum is especially strong in new construction, where the increased cost can be relatively low and “green” new facilities can command premium prices. LEED standards for green buildings have been used worldwide in more than ninety-two thousand projects.16 In September 2017, in Shanghai, Chinese architects, planners, and building-sector professionals attended the nation’s first-ever training session for the design of low- to no-carbon buildings. Chinese architecture and design entities and Architecture 2030 cohosted the event and have developed for worldwide use a new “zero-net-carbon” building code—for highly efficient buildings that produce on-site or procure enough carbon-free energy to meet their annual operating needs.17
Health Care Without Harm members—735 health systems in forty countries, representing more than twenty-one thousand hospitals and community health centers—have pledged to adopt “green and healthy” procedures, including increasing energy efficiency and reducing food waste.
In 2015, the European Commission adopted a comprehensive Circular Economy Package designed to stimulate recycling and reuse. “Many cities across Europe have started their journey of transition to a more circular economy,” says Amsterdam Deputy Mayor Abdeluheb Choho. “Some have engaged in small projects in specific sectors, whereas others have taken more holistic approaches by developing circular strategies.”18 Meanwhile, some companies are taking more responsibility for the life cycles of their products, efforts that usually come company-by-company, product-by-product. In October 2017, for instance, IKEA U.S. announced that, in keeping with its corporate zero-waste goal, it would recycle all old mattresses, of any brand, that are picked up when it delivers new mattresses. About 80 percent of a mattress can be recycled, according to the company, which noted that roughly eighteen million mattresses are disposed of in the US every year.19
Hundreds of European cities have committed to plan for climate change, and many have started the process, most without waiting for a catastrophic event to trigger action. “In recent times,” reports the European Environment Agency, “cities that have not suffered such an event had started to take action too. Increasingly, they see climate change adaptation as an opportunity to create a more attractive and vital city.”20
In December 2016, Mexico City issued a city green bond, raising $50 million from private sources to fund energy efficiency, public transportation, and water-treatment projects. A few months later, Cape Town issued its first green bond for $77.2 million to finance low-carbon public transit and water-treatment projects.
In a prod to US cities, in November 2017, Moody’s Investors Service, a leading credit-rating agency, cautioned cities, especially those on seacoasts, that their access to long-term loans for infrastructure and other uses could be damaged by failure to increase their resilience to climate changes.21 Also in 2017, a Swiss foundation issued a new standard for assessing the climate resilience of physical and digital infrastructure. Projects voluntarily submitted for certification must demonstrate the ability “to withstand identified climate change risks and hazards in plausible scenarios throughout [their] lifecycle.”22
Along with these developments, work continues in academic and professional communities on a set of analytic and management frameworks and tools relevant to key transformational ideas for cities, including the measurement and monitoring of urban metabolisms, the flows of materials and energy within cities, and the assessment of return on investment in environmental services, the range of economic and noneconomic benefits created by natural systems.
In one of the more noticeable global trends, urban green infrastructure is no longer a luxury or just an idealistic value or aspirational goal. It is happening now in many different urban contexts and at every urban scale because cities need it for dealing with climate change, and it generates a range of demonstrated, tangible, and desirable financial and cobenefits that the engineering profession has begun to promote. A 2014 publication, “Cities Alive,” produced by Arup, a London-headquartered engineering firm with offices in thirty-five countries and a staff of thirteen thousand, uses one hundred fifty pages and numerous examples to extol the emergence of urban greening in terms that green urbanist Tim Beatley might favor: “The approach seeks to create healthier, more socially connected cohesive and biodiverse urban environments and a connected city ecosystem for people and wildlife that also builds in resilience measures against climate change.”23
Greening is becoming a mainstream professional practice with extensive practical know-how, replicable methods, planning processes, measurable standards, and dependable cost advantages. “Professions must fundamentally rethink ‘green,’ not as an optional add-on, a desirable enhancement or a dutiful nod towards biodiversity, but as a fundamental part of the solution,” says Sue Illman, president of the Landscape Institute, a British professional body for six thousand landscape architects.24
European, Chinese, Australian, and US governments have bought into urban greening with regulations, guidance, and support, although to varying degrees.25 Increasingly, the business case for investing in green infrastructure shows that cities can save money and realize cobenefits such as improved health and increased value of property, although this raises concerns about increased property values leading to displacement of low-income residents. There is growing interest among city dwellers for green, healthy living conditions, not just places in which to live and work. More and more people want green products and services—organic food, renewable energy, for instance—and they extend this desire to the buildings and streets they use. In many cities, community groups representing low-income neighborhoods are demanding environmental justice, which includes the fair spatial distribution of and access to a city’s green infrastructure and environmental services.
These market, professional, and other developments aren’t a substitute for cities making key decisions now about their future, but they inspire confidence that widespread reinvention is in the cards, even though it is still happening much too slowly. Transforming energy supply, real estate, mobility, and other markets will take much bolder measures. “Even if many of the companies are getting it,” says Ceres’s Mindy Lubber, “there are many more companies behind them who don’t have a sustainability officer, who don’t know climate change. In the end you’re going to need changes in the law. You cannot have radical change without it.”
We agree, but telling people what they have to do and giving them financial reasons to do it are only a part of how to accelerate progress. They also have to be aware of and understand what is in it for them—and for others—beyond money, and this requires painting a credible picture of a desirable future. It means understanding what community members want and helping them to have it. Greening in Singapore, says Tim Beatley, “is being driven by a sense of the positive draw of the vision itself. You can only do so much by hitting people over the head by telling them to stop driving and turn down the thermostat. They’re going to be motivated by wanting to live in a particular place because of its positive, uplifting qualities.”
Transformation of the commercial real estate business, says Boston developer Bryan Koop, will be sparked by what more and more customers—businesses, schools, and other organizations—want in the future: “They will want to know how they can get the most out of their human talent. They will want space that enhances productivity.” That’s not a demand for the cheapest possible space or for climate-friendly space; it’s a growing market willing to pay for the type of space that the real estate industry doesn’t yet provide much of. It is space that can be climate smart.
Koop offers the example of designing space to maximize natural light, which reduces the need for energy-consuming artificial light: “We know that people produce better with natural light. But our industry doesn’t believe it. Whenever I bring this up, people say, ‘Prove it, Koop.’ The other day we gave a pitch to potential renters, which included lots of natural light in the space. For a week they kept calling us about the natural light: could we get them another case study about its benefits? My team said, ‘They’re becoming a nuisance.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not. They’re becoming aware.’”
For now, though, building professionals, real estate markets, and potential driving forces of urban change are themselves in an early stage of a long-term innovation transition. The decision to apply the transformational ideas and innovations of urban climate action remains mostly in the hands of city leaders. The most innovative cities are deciding to develop clusters of cutting-edge climate-oriented businesses, initiate consumption-reduction efforts and foster circular economies, install green infrastructure and promote biodiversity and biophilic immersion, and invest in communities’ future-making capacities.
These decisions, the cities realize, are crucial for their own well-being in the coming decades.