Peter Plastrik - Life After Carbon: The Next Global Transformation of Cities

About Island Press

Since 1984, the nonprofit organization Island Press has been stimulating, shaping, and communicating ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide. With more than 1,000 titles in print and some 30 new releases each year, we are the nations leading publisher on environmental issues. We identify innovative thinkers and emerging trends in the environmental field. We work with world-renowned experts and authors to develop cross-disciplinary solutions to environmental challenges.

Island Press designs and executes educational campaigns in conjunction with our authors to communicate their critical messages in print, in person, and online using the latest technologies, innovative programs, and the media. Our goal is to reach targeted audiencesscientists, policymakers, environmental advocates, urban planners, the media, and concerned citizenswith information that can be used to create the framework for long-term ecological health and human well-being.

Island Press gratefully acknowledges major support from The Bobolink Foundation, Caldera Foundation, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, The Forrest C. and Frances H. Lattner Foundation, The JPB Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Summit Charitable Foundation, Inc., and many other generous organizations and individuals.

Generous support for the publication of this book was provided by Margot and John Ernst.

The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of our supporters.

Peter Plastrik

John Cleveland

Washington | Covelo | London

Copyright 2018 Peter Plastrik and John Cleveland

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M St. NW, Suite 650, Washington, DC 20036

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946757

Keywords

Austin, Berlin, biophilic urbanism, Boston, Boulder, C40, Cape Town, Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, climate change, Copenhagen, London, Melbourne, Mexico City, Minneapolis, New York City, Oslo, Paris, Portland (OR), renewable energy, Rio de Janeiro, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Seattle, Shanghai, Singapore, Stockholm, sustainable cities, Sydney, Toronto, transit, urban resilience, Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN), Vancouver, Washington, DC

For Urban Climate Rebels

our friends, tribe, and inspiration

You take delight not in a citys seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

Italo Calvino

Gaia is a tough bitch.

Lynn Margulis

People are unlikely to jettison an unworkable paradigm, despite many indications it is not functioning properly, until a better paradigm can be presented.

Thomas Kuhn

Our blue planet has become an urban world. Thousands of cities cover the surface of the earth, housing most of humanity and its economic activities. These are modern citiesdeveloped in much the same mold since the early 1800s, when the world turned to fossil-fuel energy to drive the Industrial Revolutions technologies and globalized markets, urbanization, and pollution.

But the modern city model has outlived its usefulness. It cannot solve the very problems it has helped create, especially global warming. In response, cities worldwide have developed waves of innovationsnew policies, programs, tools, business models, and moreto prevent long-term climate damage. Cities that are leading the waythose most fully committed, ambitious, and inventiveare rejecting and replacing basic ideas upon which the modern city was built.

This is not the first time cities have reinvented themselves. It is the next time.

Our story starts in a sacred place in a pioneering city where the arc of the modern urban paradigm is revealed, from its origin before living memory to the beginning of its replacement in our time.

On a riverbank in Australia, our Aboriginal guide sings the birth of a modern city.

Where all the skyscrapers are right now was a eucalyptus farm, recounts Dean Stewart, of Wemba Wemba-Wergaia heritage, motioning toward the glass-and-steel buildings framing the rivers west side. Youd have bullrushes and water reeds all around this area, as well as mangrove and red gum trees, kangaroos, koalas, pelicans, blackfish, dolphins, and thousands of indigenous people. At this very spot, he says, an ancient waterfall a meter-and-a-half tall completely cut this river in half, separating freshwater upstream from the oceans salty water.

Stewart sways rhythmically, his eyelids fluttering under a New York Yankees baseball cap, as he points into the dark waters. There, he says, the cascades stones provided a passage across the river: This waterfall was like an umbilical cord that physically connected the entire traditional population of this region for thousands of years. It was more than a place to walk over: It had profound spiritual significance for the entire humanity of this area. Every single one of us would know the ancient creation story of the waterfall. Wed know the music of this ancient river system in front of us. Wed know the songs of the mountain ranges, the music of the landscape, of the animals, of the plants. Everything was animated and bound through songs and stories.

Stewarts voice competes with the swelling noises of traffic, pedestrians, and construction. Listen, he instructs his audience of about forty people from cities on five continents. These are exactly the same sounds you hear in any major city around the world. These modern city sounds can drown out our ability to connect with country, to connect with place. One of the biggest challenges for us, as city slickers, living our urban lifestyle, is to make some of those connections. Two hundred years ago, youd be hearing the sound of this ancient river tumbling over the waterfall right here.

Not anymore. In 1835, white settlers arrived on the scene for the first time, rowing up to the waterfall. They founded Melbourne, laid out a street grid alongside the river they called the Yarra, and brought in thousands of sheep, cows, and horses. Right here, literally, travelers from another world with unimaginable technology and a completely different skin color landed and changed everything forever, Stewart says. For the Aboriginal civilization that had been here for 50,000 years, this is ground zero. When gold was discovered inland, tens of thousands of fortune seekers from around the world descended on Melbourne, turning a sleepy village into a boomtown. The city dynamited the waterfall to allow boat traffic to get up and down the river and to reduce periodic flooding. By blowing up the waterfall, Steward says, they blew up the ancient creation story and the song of this region as well.

The Melbourne that arose embraced a radically different creation story, a tale of industry, commerce, and economic wealth, development, consumption, and growth driven by fossil-fuel energy. This is the story of the modern city, emerging in the nineteenth century with the Industrial Revolution, first in London, and spreading worldwide ever since, now the common habitat for half of humanity. Today more than 4.6 million people live in greater Melbourne, which consists of thirty-one municipalities along the Yarra River and nearby coast. During the week, hundreds of thousands of people commute into the central city, whose buildings ascend from the street grid laid out more than 180 years ago. Like many twenty-first-century cities, Melbournes population is growing fast, and the city is firmly embedded at the high end of the global economy, with direct flights to Beijing, Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Vancouver. The benefits produced by modern Melbourne are evident: the citys systems house, feed, protect, transport, and employ people at an enormous scale probably never imagined by the places indigenous people or feasible under their social and economic structures.