Guns Don’t Kill People: Nor do Cities Generate 70% of the World’s GHG Emissions

Sooner or later, anyone living in the US will hear a gun rights advocate say that ‘guns don’t kill people, people do.’ Semantics, but true. While we’re on semantics, strictly speaking, cities are not responsible for GHG emissions. Rather the people, or more specifically, those earning the most money, almost all of whom live in cities, are responsible for the vast majority of the world’s GHG emissions. But that is not nearly as easy to communicate, and messaging is important.

On cities and GHG emissions, what is the message we really need to communicate? First, it’s true, if you add up all the GHG emissions – direct (e.g., out the back end of our car) and indirect (e.g., the trees cut down for pasture or the belches from the cattle used in our hamburgers) – residents of cities are responsible for more than 70% of the world’s GHG emissions (and likely more than 80%). This should not be much of a surprise, as these same people are responsible for more than 80% of the world’s economy. GHG emissions are a by-product of the stuff we buy and do.

Earth Day: Bah Humbug

April 22 is celebrated as Earth Day 

I have a love-hate relationship with Earth Day (April 22^nd) . The concept and enthusiasm are great; but the faux commercial interests and token personal efforts make me uneasy. True, every little bit helps, but the ‘lots of little efforts’ are still way too little, and may actually distract us from the big changes needed.

A Top Ten of New Urban Businesses

We’ve seen cafes, car sharing, cell phones, and social networking products like iPads, proliferate from the world’s rush to urbanize. So what’s next? Following is a list of top ten urban businesses that are likely to flourish over the next few years.

1. Take Two – Tablets. Just as every television now comes with a remote control, so too will every house and apartment come with a ‘control tablet’. We’ve seen the introduction of tablets as cheap as $40 in rural India. The next push will be a clever city that provides every household with a tablet to check on municipal services, emergency announcements, entertainment, and much more. Once every household has its own tablet, the impact will be enormous. The only question now is which city and companies will take a lead. Best guesses: Kitchener, Canada; Gwangju, South Korea; Bangalore, India; Kunming, China; Rotterdam, Netherlands; Thomson Reuters; RIM; Samsung; DataWind.

Together Much is Possible – A New GHG Emissions Protocol for Cities

This month marks an important milestone – an agreed to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions protocol for cities was announced jointly by ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, C40, the big-cities climate change club, and the World Resources Institute (WRI). The protocol builds on early work by ICLEI, WRI and WBCSD’s corporate scopes model, a research paper presented by Professor Chris Kennedy et al at the June 2009 Marseille Urban Research Symposium, and a joint UNEP, UN-Habitat, World Bank guideline, supported by Cities Alliance, launched June 2010 at the World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro.

Washington’s Cherry Blossoms: The Gift that Keeps Giving

One of the best things about living in Washington DC is riding your bike to work, early in the morning, past the blossoming cherry trees along the tidal basin. Sometimes you have to actually stop for a moment, the trees are so beautiful. Thank you, Governor (Mayor) Ozaki Yukio: He gave the trees to the up and coming Washington DC in 1912.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the City of Tokyo’s original gift of 3020 cherry trees. You would be hard pressed to find a more perfect gift, or a more perfect example of how the cities we live in, and the globally-minded ones overseas, improve our day-to-day quality of life.

A Tale of Too Many Cities: Happy Birthday Charles Dickens

This year marks the 200th birthday for Charles Dickens who is likely the best-known social commentator who documented the more troublesome aspects of the Industrial Revolution and the start of the world’s headlong rush to urbanize. Dickens’ writings give a ringside seat to the turmoil London, and Paris, faced over two hundred years ago. That Dickens’ vantage point was London only made sense; it had just surpassed Beijing as the world’s largest city, and arguably is the birthplace of capitalism and industrialization.

The big question now is, where in the world would today’s most important social commentator choose to live? We obviously know it would be a big city as cities are the most powerful determinants of our futures. But what city best captures today’s and tomorrow’s social milieu?

Urbanization: The Half-Time Score

Personal affluence up 3000%; people living in extreme poverty down from about 75% to 20%; atmospheric CO2 concentration up from 280 ppm to 393.5 ppm; at least 700 known species lost; 1.3 billion hectares with moderate to severe soil degradation; big fish in the oceans – more than 90% gone.

The starting gun for the first half of industrialization – globalization – urbanization sounded in 1784 when James Watt, William Murdoch and Matthew Boulton’s efforts culminated in a patent award for the “steam locomotive”. That’s when the urbanization race began in earnest. Half of us now live in cities, with 185,000 more streaming in every day.

Love and the City: Happy Valentine’s Day

Urbanists are quick to champion the benefits of cities and how they drive economic growth, education, health improvements, and if built and managed well are the best way to achieve ‘sustainable development.’ But rarely do we talk about how cities nurture and encourage love, not to mention great parties, rock and roll, and all those passionate sporting events.

Cities don’t make love possible, but they sure do make it easier. Cities are all about connections, opportunities and logistical challenges. Take Valentine’s Day and the ‘average guy’ in the US. He will spend about $168 this year to celebrate, and woo, his love (women spend about half that). Over the last six weeks about 700 million fresh cut flowers passed through Miami International to be processed at one of the 23 chilled warehouses within five miles of the airport. Making sure no pests or contraband were brought in with the flowers required several thousand US Customs and Agriculture officers working round the clock.

My Father’s Ford – A New Model for Cities

My father is a Ford man he's driven nothing but since 1958. When I was a kid I would go with him every fall to the new models showroom party at Lange and Fetter Ford Motors in Trenton, Canada. I would get a balloon, some cake and maybe get to sit in a new car (spilled the cake on the new seat one year). Since being a kid I’ve always been amazed how car manufacturers manage to come out with yet another new version every year. Some years it would just be the lights that changed, in other years there might be a whole remake of the model, or an entirely new model might be introduced.

Big Mac Dan and the Conversations of Cities

My lovely wife recently gave me a MacBook Air for my birthday. She debated a Mac Air or iPad but went with the Mac Air since we had ‘free’ Microsoft Office software available from an earlier 3-copy purchase. All was going well until I went to install the software. After hours of trying to download the software, cryptic Microsoft internet messages, and a very unhelpful phone-in customer ‘service’, we were left with one remaining option: endure the Mac store and trade it in for an iPad or figure out the software. This is where we met Big Mac Dan (BMD).

Amsterdam Smart City

Amsterdam is aggressively developing its ‘smart’ electrical grid. The smart part is the inter-linked power system, and the efforts made to involve all parts of the community. The result to-date is impressive: in just two years 71 partners have joined (and growing), pilot energy savings of 13 percent were achieved, and a possible reduction of 1.2 million tonnes CO2e already identified if pilots scaled-up city-wide. The program grew from a smart electrical grid to a ‘smart city’; in eighteen months Amsterdam Smart City or ASC, hosted or attended more than 50 smart city conferences.
The four pillars of ASC program are: (i) cooperation; (ii) smart technology and behavior change; (iii) knowledge exchange; and (iv) seek economically viable initiatives. Much of the impetus of ASC came from the establishment of a Euro 60 Million catalytic climate and energy investment fund created when the electricity and gas company was privatized.

d’Urban: Cities Leading at COP17

I learned this week that Durban got its name in 1835 from Sir Benjamin d’Urban, the first governor of the Cape Colony. His name seemed particularly apt as COP17’s urban-in-Durban yielded important contributions. During the first weekend at Durban City Hall, just next to the COP17 venue, 114 local governments signed the Durban Adaptation Charter, committing signatory cities to accelerate local adaptation efforts, including conducting risk assessments and more city-to-city cooperation. An impressive complement to last year’s Mexico City Pact that calls for similar efforts to measure and promote mitigation in participating cities. More than 200 cities have now signed on to the Mexico City Pact.

Smart Cities for Dummies

I grimace when I see those ads to ‘Build a Smarter Planet’. It seems to me the planet was working pretty well before we started messing with it. But ‘Build a Smarter City’ – now that’s something I can get behind. Cities are humanity’s grandest creation. They reflect us, sometimes smart, sometimes not. Cities reflect our civilizations, and when working well cities are the most efficient way to help the poor, the fortunate and unfortunate, and the environment. And without a doubt every city in the world would benefit from smarter design and smarter management.

There’s a bit of smoke and mirrors on some of today’s smart city claims. Selling more IT and sophisticated algorithms might help a few of the very fortunate cities. Building a smart-city suburb next to a very unsustainable city can yield important lessons but can also be a useful distraction. Being really smart about cities is improving basic service delivery to the 1 billion urban-poor now going without clean water, or the 2 billion without sanitation. And we need big-time smarts as we build cities over the next twenty years for an additional 2 billion residents – this time locking in energy savings and a high quality of life for all.

Community Connections in a Changing Climate: Engineers Without Borders and the World Bank

I have a confession: I’m an engineer. Wandering the halls of the World Bank it’s sometimes best to hide this. After all economists, and more recently, graduates of international policy programs, run the world, and ‘thinking like an economist’ is a powerful skill. Engineers are usually not the glitzy ones; we are more akin to beavers - hard working, somewhat plodding, and dutiful.

Engineers are so innocuous we don’t even have a good set of jokes like lawyers. Everyone who’s gone to university with engineers will have a story or two about too boisterous an engineer, maybe with insufficient social graces, who was painted purple or put a cow in the library as part of some initiation right. When engineering first started there were only two types, military and civil. Civil was a discipline, not a character trait.

Cities and the Human Spirit

I’m not Catholic. Not even much of a practicing Christian, but I must confess I felt a little chill the other night walking past Köln’s Cathedral. Not from the cold of the night, nor from fear. My engaging German hosts had just informed me the Cathedral was built with sufficient grandeur to house the relics of the Three Magi spirited away from Milan in 1164. For hundreds of years pilgrims from around the world have converged on the Cathedral, adding to the 20,000 visitors a day. The site is sacred and steeped in history. For a few years it was even the tallest building in the world until eclipsed by the Washington Monument in 1884. I couldn’t escape the Cathedral’s history as we walked past it on this cool, clear October night.

A League of their Own: Cities Working Together for a Better World

In 1845 Alexander Cartwright, a Brooklyn shipping clerk, drew up a formal set of rules and established the Knickerbockers Baseball Club. Before that baseball, or rounders, had players in different cities running in different directions, using different size balls on different size fields. Cities like Philadelphia and Boston all had their own rules, but in the end New York City’s rules prevailed and a common game was launched.

Cities now need a new league to foster cooperation and clearly pursue a set of common objectives. Cities count, and the world is increasingly counting on them. The world’s 600 largest cities make up more than 60% of the world’s economy. Even more striking, the world’s 50 largest cities, by population, are home to more than 500 million people, have an annual GDP more than $9.6 trillion (larger than China), and generate more than 2.6 billion tonnes of CO2 per year (more than the world’s 100 smallest countries combined, and if a country, these cities would be the third largest emitter).

Engineering Civility: A Lesson in Civics

Civil Engineering students graduate knowing at least three things: you can’t push a rope, gravity never takes a day off, and a three-legged table won’t wobble. They are now learning a fourth: You can’t build a city without civility.

Civil engineers are largely responsible for our built environment. Generally they’re a studious and busy lot; and they are about to get a lot busier – in the next twenty years they have to help build cityscapes for about 2 billion new urban residents. But today what’s needed even more than civil engineers is more civility. A few recent examples, big and small, come to mind.

A Tale of Three Men and 40 Cities

Driving through Sao Paulo yesterday, I was struck by the power of cities. While cities are part of the climate change problem, they need to be part of the solution too. They are bigger and more energized than any individual or organization. Cities push and cajole; and cities act. Cities are where it all comes together.

Even more so when former President Bill Clinton, World Bank President Robert Zoellick, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg joined forces in Sao Paulo. The accomplished gentlemen born less than a dozen years and 1,500 miles apart spoke and fielded questions with a worldly and gracious informality. The pleasant exchanges sat in contrast to the underlying gravity of their mission. Together they have determined to access their considerable resources to tackle one of the biggest challenges they’ve ever faced: climate change.

Masdar: Mirage or Green-City?

Masdar City

Recently I saw Masdar City for the first time.  I was excited to visit since over the last few years at almost every ‘Green Cities’ Conference I attended someone mentioned Masdar. Masdar City seemed the big hope: with potential and excitement of a whole new city in the desert. After $20 Billion in infrastructure investments, 50,000 people would live in this “emissions free”, closed-system suburb of Abu Dhabi. Masdar is to be a city of the future; a living laboratory to develop new technology. Planners, engineers and financiers are rushing to get in on its development. Easily a dozen times in the last two years someone enthused over coffee or lunch. ‘You need to visit’, I was told many times.