Stephen M. Wheeler - Reimagining Sustainable Cities: Strategies for Designing Greener, Healthier, More Equitable Communities

Imagine a city where housing is affordable, where each home produces more energy than it uses, and where people from different class, race, and ethnic groups live nearby and enjoy each others company. Bikes and pedestrians outnumber cars, the air is clean, and sounds of birds and childrens voices can be heard. Green spaces are visible from every dwelling. Little is wasted or thrown away. Women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals feel safe, respected, and empowered. Businesses make decisions based on their benefit to workers, the public, and the environment as well as their own bottom line. Leaders focus on long-term collective well-being, and everyone collaborates in planning the communitys future and undoing the wrongs of the past.

Imagine cities and towns, in other words, that will be sustainable and equitable far into the future.

This vision may seem impossible, a dream so far from todays reality that it is not even worth considering. But something like it will unfold eventually, if for no other reason than that if humanity is to continue on this planet long term it will have to figure out how to live in such ways. Business As Usual (BAU), as we know it from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, is unsustainable. The only questions are how soon societies can move onto a better path, how much damage they will do in the meanwhile, and to what lengths political forces will go to resist change.

This book seeks to take sustainable city discussions to a new level by considering the steps needed to truly address the climate crisis, social inequality, racial injustice, dysfunctional democracy, unaffordable housing, and other contemporary challenges. Past sustainable city books have often focused on topics such as green buildings, renewable energy, bike and pedestrian planning, and compact land development strategies. However, we want to go beyond those to explore more fundamental structural changes. Our belief is that it is necessary to reimagine institutional, economic, and political structureswhat we call social ecologyin order to make sustainable communities possible. This reimagining will be a creative process, meshing changes in physical form with changes in policy, codes, institutions, and power structures, hence our use of the term designing in the title.

Our audience for this book includes all those who care about the future, so that includes you and everyone you know. Each one of us has the capacity to demand change in our own lives and in the systems that structure our lives. We have tried to write in a way that will be accessible to readers at multiple levelsto academics and professionals who design and plan urban areas as well as to students who study them and people who live in, work in, and care about them. We include footnotes for readers who want to dig deeper, and anecdotes and examples to help illustrate problems and potential solutions. For readers who are in a hurry or who want to flip quickly to solutions, we have included a concise table of strategies in each chapter. We hope that this mix of approaches will prove useful to a wide audience. Our goal is to be constructive and empowering rather than depressing and paralyzing, and to challenge readers to reimagine and work toward a better world. But that means first thinking critically about the structures that have created our current economic, political, cultural, and social systems: systems that are deeply in need of reimagining.

The need for dramatic change is urgent. Problems such as global warming, pollution, social inequality, structural racism, political dysfunction, motor vehicle dependency, environmental and climate justice, and loss of community bonds between people confront us daily. These are not new problems. It has been more than fifty years since the first Earth Day demonstrations demanded more ecologically conscious societies in 1970. It has been about the same length of time since Donella Meadows and others pioneered the term sustainable development in their 1972 book Limits to Growth . Public protests against social and racial injustice are older still. However, every police killing of a person of color is a reminder that these structural problems need far more attention. The Covid-19 pandemic, the ensuing economic dislocation, and the strength of right-wing populism worldwide make the unsustainability of current social ecology trends ever clearer.

Societies worldwide are stuck in terms of addressing most of these problems. Elections come and go, but the quantity of greenhouse gases (GHGs) humanity pours into the atmosphere continues to grow almost every year. a trend that undermines marine food chains. Yet societies continue to operate as though the world will survive with minor policy changes instead of dramatic action.

Most worrisome, current societies seem unable to respond to the challenge. In particular, the constellation of political beliefs known as neoliberalism has hindered progress for some forty years now. This mindset asserts that the public sector (government) should be kept as small as possible, that voluntary action by the private sector and individuals can deal with collective problems, and that free markets exist and are the best way to allocate resources. Equally important, neoliberalism denies the centrality of power struggles based on class, race, and gender within societies and the ways that powerful interests warp social, political, and economic institutions and beliefs for their own benefit. It denies the deep historical roots of injustice and the need to proactively address them. It denies the need for a strong public sector to meet common needs. The neoliberal mindset has prevented effective social change and continues to blind many if not most of the worlds leaders. The situation is increasingly dire.