Interesting and impressive analysis.
http://theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/257481/why-power-density-matters
Showing posts with label urban planning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label urban planning. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 07, 2013
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
A Dictator Is Gone, but Egypt’s Traffic and Congestion Seem Immovable
CAIRO — It seems a measure of how little has changed since Egypt’s revolution that Nasr Mohammed Ghaleb still peddles tamarind juice here beneath an overpass, 15 cents a glass, amid the smog and piercing horns of the line of traffic he is blocking.
“The people in the cars coming this way are all hot, and so they want something to drink,” Mr. Ghaleb, 43, said the other day from behind his stand in Ramses Square. The people are hot, in part, because of the traffic, and the traffic is bad, in part, because of Mr. Ghaleb.
“I’m off to the side,” he insisted, smiling and looking a bit embarrassed.
So it was before the revolution, so it is now. Police officers come, sometimes, to clear out the street vendors — there are thought to be thousands, if not tens of thousands, in this massive city’s vast informal economy — and to ease the flow of traffic. The street vendors return, with nowhere else to go, and so does the congestion.
Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist leader who is Egypt’s first democratically elected president, has inherited far larger problems: an economy devastated by unrest, a broken system of food and fuel subsidies and plunging foreign currency reserves. He has turned to the International Monetary Fund for assistance in the form of a $4.8 billion loan, to Saudi Arabia and Qatar for aid and investment, to the United States for debt relief. His country is desperate to attract tourists and investors.
Mr. Morsi has also pledged to remove the street vendors and improve traffic, though, echoing the promises of decades of other officials who have sought to tame Cairo’s infamous crush of jalopies and buses and taxis and motorbikes. Mr. Morsi has called traffic a high priority for his first 100 days in office, not least because of its tremendous cost to the economy: as much as $8 billion in lost productivity, delays and excess fuel consumption, according to the World Bank. That amounts to about 3 percent of gross domestic product, putting Cairo’s rate several times higher than that of comparable cities. It is one of several basic but intractable problems still troubling Egypt, one that belies the revolutionary fervor of early 2011 and speaks to the longstanding challenges this country still faces.
Everything has changed, many Egyptians say, and nothing has changed.
“Chaos is the master of the situation,” said Saad Hagras, a columnist and the managing editor at a business newspaper, Al Alam Al Youm, describing traffic in Cairo but also life in Egypt, more generally. “Politics has been brought back to life,” to be sure, Mr. Hagras said, but the revolution has solved little else. Crime and violence are up, he noted, with fewer police officers on the streets since the uprising that deposed President Hosni Mubarak. Poverty remains extensive — more than 40 percent of the population is thought to live on less than $2 per day — and unemployment is high and rising.
“The citizen’s life is worse now than it was before the Jan. 25 revolution,” Mr. Hagras said.
Mohammed Ahmed, 31, who sells pirated software and videos in the street in Ramses Square, echoed that sentiment. “It’s no different now than under Mubarak,” Mr. Ahmed said at his stand in central Cairo, outside the city’s principal railway station. Commuters flow out into the shaded road here, between the cars and battered microbuses that crawl around the pilings of the bridge overhead. The police come most weeks to chase him off the street, Mr. Ahmed said. “We’re causing a problem, yes,” he said, referring to the traffic, “but we’re not the main reason for it.”
Designated parking spaces are difficult to come by in Cairo, so drivers park in the street. The traffic police often appear wildly unpreoccupied by traffic. Gas is subsidized and inexpensive, and stoplights are rare, the World Bank notes in a report, and the city’s transportation infrastructure was simply never meant to handle so many vehicles or human beings. While accommodations have been made — bridges, a ring road, a subway system, a bus network — they have not kept pace with the city’s growth.
About 2.2 million vehicles now ply Cairo’s streets, a number that has risen an average of 4 percent each year since the 1970s, said Safwan Khedr, an engineering professor and transportation expert at the American University in Cairo. Egypt’s population has grown by about 13 million in the past decade, a rise of nearly 20 percent; greater Cairo has absorbed much of that growth, to reach 18 million residents.
Road accidents kill about 1,000 people — half are pedestrians — in greater Cairo each year, and injure 4,000 more, according to the World Bank. Ambulances here are equipped with loudspeakers; emergency workers plead with drivers to find room for them to pass.
Local driving habits are famously problematic, too. Cairenes often shrug off stoplights and traffic rules and what more timid souls might call prudence, Dr. Khedr noted, and the revolution has done nothing to change this. Many Egyptians learn to drive from friends or family, he said, not in classes, and licenses are generally awarded without a road test.
“If a person is doing something wrong, he should know he is doing something wrong,” said Dr. Khedr, a bit exasperated.
Police checkpoints, to check drivers’ licenses, often cause traffic problems as well.
“To check drivers’ licenses, would you make the whole country stop moving?” asked Mohammed Hedi, 49. He stopped his white taxicab in the middle of the road along the Sixth of October bridge to point to several rows of halted midday traffic below.
There are the street vendors, too. Mr. Morsi’s government has suggested placing the vendors at designated markets once a week; the vendors complain that they would never be able to feed their families with just one day’s work. There are vague plans to build new market areas, off the pavement, but the appropriate land has yet to be identified or prepared. Nor is it altogether clear where, in central Cairo, such land might be found.
“Where do they want us to go?” asked Mr. Ahmed, the salesman of pirated software. “Do they want us to stay home?”
Business has fallen sharply since last year, he said, with customers concerned about the country’s stability. He now sells no more than about $50 of goods a day, he said, and takes home just a fraction of that to support his wife and twin boys.
But he has yet to pass judgment on Mr. Morsi, who took office in late June, despite his pledge to clear out the street vendors; two months is too little time, Mr. Ahmed said. “We’ll give him a chance,” he said. “We hope God is on his side.”
Still, Mr. Ahmed has every intention of keeping his stand here amid the traffic, where it has been for nearly eight years, though he does not much like the work or the noise.
“Every day, I wake up and say, ‘I hope God will let me stop coming here,’ ” he said, laughing. “But I keep coming.”
New York Is Lagging as Seas and Risks Rise, Critics Warn
With a 520-mile-long coast lined largely by teeming roads and fragile infrastructure, New York City is gingerly facing up to the intertwined threats posed by rising seas and ever-more-severe storm flooding.
So far, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has commissioned exhaustive research on the challenge of climate change. His administration is expanding wetlands to accommodate surging tides, installing green roofs to absorb rainwater and prodding property owners to move boilers out of flood-prone basements.
But even as city officials earn high marks for environmental awareness, critics say New York is moving too slowly to address the potential for flooding that could paralyze transportation, cripple the low-lying financial district and temporarily drive hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.
Only a year ago, they point out, the city shut down the subway system and ordered the evacuation of 370,000 people as Hurricane Irene barreled up the Atlantic coast. Ultimately, the hurricane weakened to a tropical storm and spared the city, but it exposed how New York is years away from — and billions of dollars short of — armoring itself.
“They lack a sense of urgency about this,” said Douglas Hill, an engineer with the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook University, on Long Island.
Instead of “planning to be flooded,” as he put it, city, state and federal agencies should be investing in protection like sea gates that could close during a storm and block a surge from Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean into the East River and New York Harbor.
Others express concern for areas like the South Bronx and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, which have large industrial waterfronts with chemical-manufacturing plants, oil-storage sites and garbage-transfer stations. Unless hazardous materials are safeguarded with storm surges in mind, some local groups warn, residents could one day be wading through toxic water.
“A lot of attention is devoted to Lower Manhattan, but you forget that you have real industries on the waterfront” elsewhere in the city, said Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, which represents low-income residents of industrial areas. “We’re behind in consciousness-building and disaster planning.”
Other cities are also tackling these issues, at their own pace.
New shoreline development around San Francisco Bay must now be designed to cope with the anticipated higher sea levels under new regional regulations imposed last fall. In Chicago, new bike lanes and parking spaces are made of permeable pavement that allows rainwater to filter through it. Charlotte, N.C., and Cedar Falls, Iowa, are restricting development in flood plains. Maryland is pressing shoreline property owners to plant marshland instead of building retaining walls.
Officials in New York caution that adapting a city of eight million people to climate change is infinitely more complicated and that the costs must be weighed against the relative risks of flooding. The last time a hurricane made landfall directly in New York City was more than a century ago.
Many decisions also require federal assistance, like updated flood maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that incorporate sea level rise, and agreement from dozens of public agencies and private partners that own transportation, energy, telecommunications and other infrastructure.
“It’s a million small changes that need to happen,” said Adam Freed, until August the deputy director of the city’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. “Everything you do has to be a calculation of the risks and benefits and costs you face.”
And in any case, Mr. Freed said, “you can’t make a climate-proof city.”
So city officials are pursuing a so-called resilience strategy that calls for strengthening the city’s ability to weather the effects of serious flooding and recover from it.
Flooding Threat Grows
Unlike New Orleans, New York City is above sea level. Yet the city is second only to New Orleans in the number of people living less than four feet above high tide — nearly 200,000 New Yorkers, according to the research group Climate Central.
The waters on the city’s doorstep have been rising roughly an inch a decade over the last century as oceans have warmed and expanded. But according to scientists advising the city, that rate is accelerating, because of environmental factors, and levels could rise two feet higher than today’s by midcentury. More frequent flooding is expected to become an uncomfortable reality.
With higher seas, a common storm could prove as damaging as the rare big storm or hurricane is today, scientists say. Were sea levels to rise four feet by the 2080s, for example, 34 percent of the city’s streets could lie in the flood-risk zone, compared with just 11 percent now, a 2011 study commissioned by the state said.
New York has added bike lanes, required large buildings to track and reduce their energy use, banned the dirtiest home heating oils, and taken other steps to reduce the emissions that contribute to global warming. But with shoreline development that ranges from public beaches to towering high rises — and a complex mix of rivers, estuaries, bays and ocean — the city needs to size up the various risks posed by rising seas before plunging ahead with vast capital projects or strict regulations, city officials argue.
Yet the city’s plan for waterfront development dismisses any notion of retreat from the shoreline. Curbing development or buying up property in flood plains, as some smaller cities have done, is too impractical here, city officials say, especially because the city anticipates another million residents over the next two decades.
Rather, the city and its partners are incorporating flood-protection measures into projects as they go along.
Consolidated Edison, the utility that supplies electricity to most of the city, estimates that adaptations like installing submersible switches and moving high-voltage transformers above ground level would cost at least $250 million. Lacking the means, it is making gradual adjustments, with about $24 million spent in flood zones since 2007.
Some steps taken by city agencies have already subtly altered the city’s looks. At Brooklyn Bridge Park, a buffer between the East River and neighborhoods like Dumbo, porous riprap rock and a soft edge of salt-resistant grass have been laid in to help absorb the punch of a storm surge. Sidewalk bioswales, or vegetative tree pits that can fill up with rainwater to reduce storm water and sewage overflows and also minimize flooding, are popping up around the city.
Over all, the city is hoping to funnel more than $2 billion of public and private money to such environmental projects over the next 18 years, officials say.
“It’s a series of small interventions that cumulatively, over time, will take us to a more natural system” to deal with climate change, said Carter H. Strickland, the city’s environmental commissioner.
Planning experts say it is hard to muster public support for projects with uncertain or distant benefits.
“There’s a lot of concern about angering developers,” said Ben Chou, a water-policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
New York planners have proposed requiring developers to assess the climate-change risks faced by new buildings so they can consider protection like retractable watertight gates for windows. But no such requirements have been imposed so far.
While some new buildings are being elevated or going above current required flood protections — like a new recycling plant on a Brooklyn pier and the Port Authority’s transit hub at the World Trade Center site — most new construction is not being adapted to future flood risks yet, industry representatives said.
Some experts argue that the encounter with Hurricane Irene last year and a flash flood in 2007 underscored the dangers of deferring aggressive solutions.
Klaus H. Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, said the storm surge from Irene came, on average, just one foot short of paralyzing transportation into and out of Manhattan.
If the surge had been just that much higher, subway tunnels would have flooded, segments of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and roads along the Hudson River would have turned into rivers, and sections of the commuter rail system would have been impassable or bereft of power, he said.
The most vulnerable systems, like the subway tunnels under the Harlem and East Rivers, would have been unusable for nearly a month, or longer, at an economic loss of about $55 billion, said Dr. Jacob, an adviser to the city on climate change and an author of the 2011 state study that laid out the flooding prospects.
“We’ve been extremely lucky,” he said. “I’m disappointed that the political process hasn’t recognized that we’re playing Russian roulette.”
With more rain and higher seas, some envision more turmoil — like mile after mile of apartment buildings without working elevators, lights or potable water.
“That’s a key vulnerability,” said Rafael Pelli, a Manhattan architect who serves on a climate-change committee that advises the Department of City Planning. “If you have to relocate 10,000 people, how do you do that?”
Barriers to Block Tides
Some New Yorkers argue that the answer lies not in evacuation, but in prevention, like armoring city waterways with the latest high-tech barriers. Others are not so sure.
At a recent meeting of Manhattan community board leaders in Harlem, Robert Trentlyon, a resident of Chelsea, argued for sea gates.
A 2004 study by Mr. Hill and the Storm Surge Research Group at Stony Brook recommended installing movable barriers at the upper end of the East River, near the Throgs Neck Bridge; under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge; and at the mouth of the Arthur Kill, between Staten Island and New Jersey. During hurricanes and northeasters, closing the barriers would block a huge tide from flooding Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and New Jersey, they said.
City officials say that sea barriers are among the options being studied, but others say such gates could interfere with aquatic ecosystems and with the flushing out of pollutants, and may eventually fail as sea levels keep rising.
And then there is the cost. Installing barriers for New York could reach nearly $10 billion.
There is more agreement on how to protect the subway system. Several studies have advised the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to move quickly to increase pumping capacity at stations, raise entrances and design floodgates to block water from entering.
In 2009, a commission warned that global warming posed “a new and potentially dire challenge for which the M.T.A. system is largely unprepared.”
Five years ago, a summer-morning deluge brought about 3 1/2 inches of rain in two hours and paralyzed the system for hours, stranding 2.5 million riders.
That prompted the transit agency to spend $34 million on improvements like raising some ventilation grates nine inches above sidewalks and building steps that head upward, before descending, at flood-prone stations. All the money came from the agency’s capital budget, which also pays for subway cars and buses.
“This is a vicious circle of the worst kind,” Projjal Dutta, the transportation agency’s director of sustainability, said of the financial effect. “You’re cutting public transportation, which cuts down greenhouse gases, to harden against climate change.”
Friday, September 07, 2012
Streetlights: Changing our night sky, one lamppost at a time
Edward Smalley
The Boston Globe
8/2/12
Cities could be saving millions in infrastructure costs annually — while saving valuable energy resources. There are an estimated 26 million streetlights in the United States, consuming as much electricity annually as 1.9 million households and generating greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 2.6 million cars. At least 60 percent of these streetlights are owned and operated by the private sector. However, nearly all are paid for with public dollars, costing the United States more than $2 billion annually in energy alone. For many cities, street lighting is the largest fixed annual general-fund expense. Put simply, the lights must be on, and taxpayers have to pay for them.
The nation’s streetlights are part of an aging infrastructure, just like our bridges and roadways. Averaging more than 25 years old, their energy and maintenance costs are escalating, even as cities face decreasing general fund revenue. Replacement of this street lighting network is overdue.
Decreasing public funds, increased public scrutiny, and customer expectations have led to heightened interest in LED street lighting. However, competing priorities like public safety, homelessness and other concerns have made initial funding difficult, even for a program with the potential to generate positive cash flow in year one. Some cities have found that converting to LED street lighting has allowed them to meet economic and efficiency expectations within the first year by immediately reducing energy and maintenance costs.
For example, after installing 21,000 LED streetlights, Seattle reduced its streetlight bill by 50 percent, saving more than $1.2 million annually. The city will save more this year after installation of 12,000 to 15,000 more lights.
Despite these challenges, cities have developed creative funding solutions. For example, the Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C., hired a maintenance contractor requiring installation of LED streetlights as part of the program. The contractor pays initial costs and retains a percentage of the energy and maintenance savings over the length of the contract, for an immediate cost reduction. At the end of the five-year contract, the maintenance costs are reset, and the city sees greater reductions.
New York City uses existing capital program funding to install LED streetlights. Along with immediate savings, the city maintains funding levels so additional lights can be converted to LED. With this, New York is showing conversion to LED can be affordable within the current budget without a loan.
Joint purchasing is another option that helps towns like Pocahontas, Iowa — population 1,700. In Iowa, 15 small municipal utilities cooperated to leverage American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to purchase 1,154 LED streetlights.
Many cities lack the resources or technical knowledge to undertake an LED street lighting conversion project. Others are unaware how much it can reduce their costs. How do these cities develop an effective LED street lighting program, and what resources are available?
To answer these questions, the US Department of Energy created the Municipal Solid-State Street Lighting Consortium. Managed by Seattle City Light, the consortium has more than 360 member cities, utilities and other street lighting owners. Its mission is to increase knowledge and accelerate adoption of this technology by guiding system owners in the proper selection and application of LED streetlights; bridging the knowledge gap by sharing information and experiences.
Consortium members are taking what they learn and putting it to immediate use. Several cities, big and small, have already adopted the consortium’s Model Specification for LED Roadway Luminaires to purchase LED streetlights.
This movement is growing. The US Conference of Mayors passed a resolution supporting the consortium’s efforts to educate members on the appropriate use and application of LED streetlights; and calls for adoption of LED streetlights for lighting public streets wherever practical. On Thursday and Friday, the consortium and the City of Boston are presending an LED street lighting workshop.
So, with all things considered, there is no reason to delay this journey and every reason to begin. When cities are looking to create efficiencies, installing LED streetlights provides immediate results. Unit cost is at an all time low. Dollars saved on street lighting today are dollars invested in other city programs tomorrow.
Edward Smalley is a streetlight manager at Seattle City Light, Seattle’s publicly owned power utility. He is also currently the director of the US Energy Department’s Municipal Solid-State Street Lighting Consortium, a national consortium that seeks to accelerate the deployment of energy-saving LED streetlights.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
New Research Finds Urban Form Plays Little Role in Sustainability
Nate Berg
The Atlantic
One need not look far to find a passionate argument that the compact city is the green city. Having more people in a smaller area results in less energy use for transportation purposes, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and greater efficiencies in the use of various resources. Cramming more people into a smaller space makes our cities more sustainable. Or does it? New research published in the spring issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association finds that – unlike today's dominant narrative of the green city – urban form may actually have very little impact on energy use and other measures of sustainability.
Researchers from the universities of Cambridge, Newcastle, and Leeds looked at three English metropolitan areas of various sizes and ran them through computer models that imposed three different urban forms over the course of 30 years. Each area was modeled as a hyper-dense city with tight restrictions on land use, an urban growth boundary and prioritized transit development, a sprawling, market-driven urban form that had few restrictions on land use, and a middle ground based on English new towns, or those planned suburban-style developments on the outskirts of larger cities. Each urban form – compaction, dispersal, expansion – was modeled on the three areas between the years 2001 and 2031 and evaluated on the basis on 26 different measures of sustainability – from pollution levels to degradation of water systems to the energy consumption of buildings and people. The models showed only very slight differences between the three urban forms.
"To our surprise, if you compare the compact form versus the current trend, the difference in reduced transport by automobile is very minor. And if you allow the city to expand, the increase in the use of the car is only marginal," says Marcial Echenique, a professor at the University of Cambridge Department of Architecture and one of the authors of the report. "If you make the city more compact, it doesn't mean that people will abandon their car. Only 5 percent of people abandon the use of the car. Ninety-five percent carries on using the car, which means there are more cars on the same streets, therefore there is much more congestion and therefore there is much more pollution and no great increase in the reduction of energy."
Echenique says he and his team have been working on this research for about 4 or 5 years, and continued modeling and analysis has only backed up their findings.
"We are not very convinced of the idea that compacting cities will make very much difference in terms of environmental quality. But it will have severe consequences in terms of economics and social issues," Echenique says.
Of particular concern for these researchers is that restricting development to only high-density, urban locations could greatly increase the cost of land and housing, causing both the cost of living and the cost of doing businesses to skyrocket. Echenique worries this will cause cities to become less competitive over the long term.
In terms of reducing the environmental impacts of human development and lifestyle, Echenique says his numbers indicate that we might be better off focusing our effort on improving technology and energy efficiency. He says we'll have a much better chance of reducing the negative impacts of modern living by focusing on automobile technology and reduced energy usage in buildings. He and his team are currently working on research on the effectiveness of focusing on the technology side. Results are expected to publish later this year.
Echenique argues and his research indicates that greater gains can be achieved by making more efficient cars or better insulation for buildings than by trying to reshape the urban landscape."We believe that we can reduce by 50 percent or more the use of energy in a fairly short time, within the next 20 years or so," he says. "It's much more effective than compacting or dispersing cities, because there's only a five percent difference either way."
"Technology offers a much better future than trying to constrain behavior of the market," he says.
The result of this work will likely be somewhat frustrating for urban boosters arguing for an increased emphasis on density and city living. Echenique recognizes that urbanization is underway, especially in developing countries, and that density will likely be the development paradigm in many of these places. But he also observes that urbanization is happening on a metropolitan scale, and that means development is occurring at a variety of densities within a region. Valuing one over the others as the sustainable model is unwise, he argues. He says this research shows that creating sustainable places has little to do with what they look like and far more to do with their energy use.
Friday, April 20, 2012
Monday, November 28, 2011
Could big cities lead the fight against climate change?
November 28, 2011 6:33 a.m. EST
(CNN) -- They are the world's cultural capitals, the nerve centers of innovation and the engine rooms of economic growth, but could cities also hold the key to cutting carbon emissions long-term?
A 2010 study from the World Bank found that the 50 largest cities and urban areas on the planet are now home to roughly 500 million people and spew out some 2.6 billion tons of greenhouse gasses every year.
As urban migration continues apace, these figures are only expected to rise in the short term. While this may initially lead to more pollutants being pumped into the earth's atmosphere, some experts believe it could work out better in the long term. They say that the ecological efficiencies cities can offer, aligned with their financial and political influence, could lead to the development of more effective ways to curb carbon emissions.
As the world's leading environmental figures gather in Durban, South Africa for the 2011 United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP17), CNN asked two urban climate change experts to explain the complex role of cities.
Dr Stephen Hammer is co-director of the Urban Climate Change Research Network, a consortium of academics and institutions dedicated to the analysis of climate change mitigation, and an adviser to New York City's Energy Policy Taskforce.
Mike Hodson meanwhile is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures at the University of Salford and co-author of the book, World Cities and Climate Change.
How much do cities contribute to climate change?
Stephen Hammer (SH): Cities are the where the majority of global energy use occurs, by far.
The irony is, however, that the dense nature of cities can actually reduce the level of carbon emissions by introducing different kinds of efficiencies. The sheer number of people, however, just means that you just end up with a large volume of energy use and emissions.
Mike Hodson (MH): Cities are increasingly being characterized as significant producers of climate change.
Just over half the world's population lives in cities, around three-quarters of global energy consumption is linked to cities and around four-fifths of global greenhouse gas emissions are linked to cities.
In what ways can cities help to address the issue of climate change?
SH: Cities are often the laboratories for central government policies. Central governments don't often create these things on their own. They're looking at what others have done including sub-national governments and saying "well if it worked there, we can make it work nationally."
Therefore, in the absence of national-level action, it is possible for cities to take very concrete steps to influence overall emission levels.
MH: The biggest cities are pretty powerful in terms of positions within their national economies.
They've got pretty well-developed government structures; they've got mayors and related agencies. But not only have they got those sorts of resources -- and therefore the ability to lobby and influence central government -- they also encompass quite significant national resources, whether it's financial centers, centers of business and centers of media.
Given that they've got that range of expertise, knowledge, social networks and financial resources ... they can start to paint that picture that they are the places that can actively and effectively start to build (climate change) strategies and deliver on them.
Why is it in cities interest to act in a way that negates the impact of climate change?
SH: I think it's very safe to say that climate change threatens the long-term economic viability of many cities in addition to creating public health risks.
Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is a great example of that ... although not an event that was necessarily caused by climate change. The city suffered hugely in terms of the economic impact of an extreme weather event ... and these types of events are assumed to become more commonplace as the climate changes.
MH: I think the flipside of this sort of argument about cities being producers of climate change is that they're also increasingly being seen as victims of climate change.
This is particularly the case with rising sea levels, coastal cities and riverside cities that are at risk from rising sea levels but also those susceptible to drought or urban heat islands.
What can cities do to negate or prepare for the impact of climate change?
SH: It becomes particularly important for cities, as they expand rapidly, to make the decisions today that will constrain emissions in the future.
So, again, going back to some of the first things I was talking about, the way the city is designed, having it so that it promotes density that that then supports public transportation ridership; designing the city in a way that makes it bicycle-friendly or eco-friendly or pedestrian friendly, so you're not always forcing people into automobiles.
You must make the right decisions right now and as the city expands going forward you must constantly revisit them to see how can we be changing the old city to be more efficient but also how it can maintain efficiency when we are designing the expanding city or the new city.
MH: One of the things that strikes me is that, whether it's global cities or more ordinary cities, to different degrees they have started to get their strategic act together by developing strategies, setting targets, setting timelines.
But as of yet, they've not managed to translate that into any sort of effective way. They've really got to get to the more practical elements of how to translate that into tangible actions and deliver on them.
Monday, November 07, 2011
The Dark Side of the ‘Green’ City
By ANDREW ROSS
New York Times
THE struggle to slow global warming will be won or lost in cities, which emit 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. So “greening” the city is all the rage now. But if policy makers end up focusing only on those who can afford the low-carbon technologies associated with the new environmental conscientiousness, the movement for sustainability may end up exacerbating climate change rather than ameliorating it.
While cities like Portland, Seattle and San Francisco are lauded for sustainability, the challenges faced by Phoenix, a poster child of Sunbelt sprawl, are more typical and more revealing. In 2009, Mayor Phil Gordon announced plans to make Phoenix the “greenest city” in the United States. Eyebrows were raised, and rightly so. According to the state’s leading climatologist, central Arizona is in the “bull’s eye” of climate change, warming up and drying out faster than any other region in the Northern Hemisphere. The Southwest has been on a drought watch 12 years and counting, despite outsized runoff last winter to the upper Colorado River, a major water supply for the subdivisions of the Valley of the Sun.
Across that valley lies 1,000 square miles of low-density tract housing, where few signs of greening are evident. That’s no surprise, given the economic free fall of a region that had been wholly dependent on the homebuilding industry. Property values in parts of metro Phoenix have dropped by 80 percent, and some neighborhoods are close to being declared “beyond recovery.”
In the Arizona Legislature, talk of global warming is verboten and Republican lawmakers can be heard arguing for the positive qualities of greenhouse gases. Most politicians are still praying for another housing boom on the urban fringe; they have no Plan B, least of all a low-carbon one. Mr. Gordon, a Democrat who took office in 2004, has risen to the challenge. But the vast inequalities of the metro area could blunt the impact of his sustainability plans.
Those looking for ecotopia can find pockets of it in the prosperous upland enclaves of Scottsdale, Paradise Valley and North Phoenix. Hybrid vehicles, LEED-certified custom homes with solar roofs and xeriscaped yards, which do not require irrigation, are popular here, and voter support for the preservation of open space runs high. By contrast, South Phoenix is home to 40 percent of the city’s hazardous industrial emissions and America’s dirtiest ZIP code, while the inner-ring Phoenix suburbs, as a legacy of cold-war era industries, suffer from some of the worst groundwater contamination in the nation.
Whereas uptown populations are increasingly sequestered in green showpiece zones, residents in low-lying areas who cannot afford the low-carbon lifestyle are struggling to breathe fresh air or are even trapped in cancer clusters. You can find this pattern in many American cities. The problem is that the carbon savings to be gotten out of this upscale demographic — which represents one in five American adults and is known as Lohas, an acronym for “lifestyles of health and sustainability” — can’t outweigh the commercial neglect of the other 80 percent. If we are to moderate climate change, the green wave has to lift all vessels.
Solar chargers and energy-efficient appliances are fine, but unless technological fixes take into account the needs of low-income residents, they will end up as lifestyle add-ons for the affluent. Phoenix’s fledgling light-rail system should be expanded to serve more diverse neighborhoods, and green jobs should be created in the central city, not the sprawling suburbs. Arizona has some of the best solar exposure in the world, but it allows monopolistic utilities to impose a regressive surcharge on all customers to subsidize roof-panel installation by the well-heeled ones. Instead of green modifications to master-planned communities at the urban fringe, there should be concerted “infill” investment in central city areas now dotted with vacant lots.
In a desert metropolis, the choice between hoarding and sharing has consequences for all residents. Their predecessors — the Hohokam people, irrigation farmers who subsisted for over a thousand years around a vast canal network in the Phoenix Basin — faced a similar test, and ultimately failed. The remnants of Hohokam canals and pit houses are a potent reminder of ecological collapse; no other American city sits atop such an eloquent allegory.
Monday, May 02, 2011
China Plans to Have 100 New Energy Demonstration Cities by 2015
27 Apr 2011
April 27, China, the world’s second-largest energy consumer, will choose 100 new energy demonstration cities by 2015 as a vital component of its new energy strategy outlined in the 12th Five-Year Plan.
New energy technologies to be demonstrated in the 100 cities include geothermal energy, solar energy, wind energy, biological energy, new energy vehicles and smart grids, said Hu Runqing, deputy researcher at the Center for Renewable Energy Development under the Energy Research Institute, National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).
The cities will focus on demonstrating the application of new energy technologies, instead of equipment manufacturing and energy production.
Industry experts generally agree that China’s new energy industry is limited by underdeveloped domestic application of new technologies. Official data show China’s production of solar-cells accounted for 50% of the world’s total output in 2010, but 95% of that was exported.
“In terms of application [of new energy technologies], the demonstration cities will change the old mode of large scale transportation and emphasize distributed energy resources to produce locally and consume locally,” an official at the National Energy Bureau (NEB) told the 21st Century Business Herald.
Distributed energy resources are small-scale power generation technologies located close to where electricity is used to provide an alternative to or an enhancement of the traditional electric power system.
The central government is currently compiling an index and support policies for new energy demonstration cities, which are expected to be published before the end of this year, sources with knowledge of the matter said.
Researcher Hu said conurbations of all sizes, including metropolises and prefecture and county-level cities, are all welcome to apply.
The index will be established by CECEP Consulting, a subsidiary of the state-run China Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Group.
The proportion of new energy in primary energy consumption will be a key indicator as it directly reflects the level of new energy development in an area, said director Guo, who is heading up the project at CECEP Consulting.
Some experts suggest setting the new energy proportion at 8%-10%, but this has not been decided, Guo said.
Meanwhile, related support policies are also being researched.
At the end of 2010, China’s Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Agriculture and NEB jointly issued a notice to start building 108 green energy demonstration counties across the nation.
Under that scheme, the central government will provide a subsidy of RMB 30 million for each participating county, with a cap of RMB 50 million, and local financial aid in central and western regions will not be less than 30% of that provided by the central government.
Based on that, local officials are expecting a similar subsidy for the 100 demonstration cities.
“The subsidy for the demonstration cities may by higher than that for counties, as cities have a higher administration level,” said an official from a local NDRC bureau.
Some cities are rushing to take part in the project, although no policy details have been finalized.
Last May, Zhang Guobao, who was then head of the NEB, said at a forum during the Shanghai 2010 World Expo that Turpan, a county-level city in Xinjiang autonomous region, had received approval to build a national new energy demonstration city.
The NEB has also approved a plan for a national energy demonstration city submitted by Dezhou, a city with a solid new energy industrial base in Shandong province, sources said.
Dunhuang, a city in China’s western Gansu province, is actively applying to participate in the NDRC’s demonstration project.
Local governments may rush headlong into the project, but their support mechanisms will decide the success or failure of the program, said Yang Fuqiang, a senior adviser on climate and energy to the Natural Resources Defense Council in China.
“What needs to be solved in the future is how to integrate distributed energy resources with power grids, construction departments and urban planning,” said researcher Hu.
Friday, December 03, 2010
How will cities be shaped by transit in the future?
According to Chris Borroni-Bird, director of GM's advanced technology vehicle concepts work, we're about to see a new chapter in the story of cars and cities. "In the past 100 years, the automobile has shaped the city ... in the future, the opposite will be the case: cities will shape mobility."
Sounds interesting -- but if it's true, how will we get about in 2040? With most big cities already struggling to provide effective mass transit, and the world's population growing and converging on urban areas, there's a crisis of mobility heading our way. At Forum for the Future, we've just constructed four scenarios for the future of urban mobility in megacities(i.e. those over 10 million), speculating about how these and other forces, including declining fossil-fuel availability and patterns of city governance, might play out in the next 30 years. The work has yielded four rather different future megacity scenarios, brought to life as animations.
"Renew-abad" is a city where alternative energy–fueled, high-tech, clean transport gets everyone around. Under strong leadership, the city's confidence and autonomy has grown and urban density is increasing. Sophisticated augmented reality systems reduce the demand for physical travel, but for essential journeys, computer-guided electric and hybrid vehicles rub along with cyclists and pedestrians on massively improved infrastructure.
In "Sprawl-ville," the dominant urban form is huge low density suburbs, and mobility is still dependent on fossil-fuel powered cars. The elite still get around, but it's a 24-hour city with never-ending congestion, and poor public transport infrastructure means the majority are either stuck in ghettos or reliant on unregulated paratransit. Nomad businesspeople sit in armored cars, working while moving slowly from meeting to meeting. Others return to buses and bicycles as their principal means of mobility.
For the citizens of "Planned-opolis," high energy prices and continuing reliance on fossil fuels mean transport is tightly organized and rationed. To meet carbon targets, the central district is closed to cars and 10 million newly planted trees shade the walkways. Many people have moved out to join the millions in new cities -- some floating off the coast, others entirely virtual.
You will search in vain for the center of "Communi-city," where devolved power, localized energy generation, and a DIY approach to life mean the city is a cluster of autonomous communities. The roads are a chaotic racetrack for buses running on home-brew biofuels, kit-made bicycles, covered scooters, pod cars, and motorbikes, but somehow it all works through the smart use of IT to avoid collisions and optimize routes.
Entertaining viewing, we hope. But what use is it to dream these dreams? The point of scenario planning is to use plausible futures to test strategy now. What are the sensible next steps for megacities planning for an uncertain future and wanting to avoid a mobility crisis? The study proposes a to-do list that includes curbing car use, prioritizing the mobility needs of the poor, sharpening up integration between modes, refueling vehicles with low-carbon alternatives to gasoline, and changing behavior so that people travel fewer miles and by less damaging modes.
Whether our growing ranks of megacities will be able to apply this advice remains to be seen. But they can't simply carry on as they are and hope for the best -- the changes coming at them are too great and too serious to leave future mobility to chance. And the prize for getting it right is enormous. As Sue Zielinski, sustainable mobility expert at the University of Michigan and one of the experts interviewed for the project, puts it, "The goal is not transport but accessibility -- more productivity, more mobility, more beauty in one day." Quite so. But the gap between that vision and present reality is enormous and growing for the 3 billion of us urbanites, never mind the further 2 billion or so who will be joining us by midcentury, mostly in developing countries.
Confirmation, once again, that the battle for sustainability will be won or lost in cities. This point is not lost on the many businesses -- among them GE, sponsor of our Sustainable Cities Index -- tooling up to provide the integrated city solutions of tomorrow. It's also not lost on the mayors of 135 big cities who met in Mexico City at the invitation of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard last week. The World Mayors Summit on Climate saw Ebrard and many of his peers sign a pact on climate action and issue a call to national governments go further in the run-up to Cancun. That such huge cities still feel hamstrung by national and international inaction is worrying, but their growing confidence and significance on the world stage points to a more promising future. Even London, hardly a bastion of sustainability, now has some good stories to tell, not least the huge popularity of Mayor Boris Johnson's rent-a-bike scheme, which has put him on the map in much the same way the congestion charge did for his predecessor Ken Livingstone. Small steps toward sustainable urban mobility, perhaps, but progress nonetheless.
Check out the full report: Megacities on the Move: Your Guide to the Future of Sustainable Urban Mobility in 2040 [PDF].
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