The stimulus package passed by Congress last year included $43 billion in sustainable-energy investments, and a bill meant to reduce the country's contribution to climate change now waits in the Senate. But is national policy keeping pace with the strides many cities are taking toward sustainable development?
A January 2007 Prospect special report explored contemporary efforts in sustainable urban development throughout the U.S. One of the report's contributing writers, Joan Fitzgerald, is also the author of Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development, which borrows its title from the report. TAP asked Fitzgerald, a public-policy program director at Northeastern University and professor of urban economic development, about what an emerald city looks like and what we need to do on a national level to help cities get there.
What makes an emerald city? What's the difference between your urban ideal and ongoing city-planning efforts in the United States today?
Emerald cities would be those that were doing good things in terms of planning around climate change or sustainability but also making that extra link to economic development.
I start with Freiburg, Germany, in the book. That would be exactly my idea of a green city, one that had developed its own energy plan (Solar Siedlung in Freiburg) that was about reducing its carbon imprint. There are no cars in the whole downtown area. It has an extraordinarily high level of bicycle and public-transportation usage. So everything you could want a city to do in terms of climate change or sustainability, Freiburg was doing it, plus it was turning it into an economic-development agenda.
So my thought was, I'll look around the U.S. and find cities that are doing this. But one of the interesting things that I found is that some of the cities that were doing a lot in terms of trying to promote green technologies, or what we'd call green economic development, weren't necessarily the most sustainable cities. So some of the cities that were working the hardest on the green front aren't exactly emerald cities in the sense that I originally thought.
Do you think the history and infrastructure of former U.S. industrial hubs put them at an advantage in taking the lead in green production?
There is in some cases real potential if one is innovative in looking at ways to retool existing industries to meet the needs of the clean tech economy.
The jury is still out on Toledo, [Ohio], for instance. They are building around an auto glass industry, which had many of the same worker skills that would be needed for solar production. The research around glass technology was most important. If you think about a car windshield and how all kinds of things get embedded in that, a sonar panel is the same process. It's a glass product.
Right now there's been a series of articles in the Toledo Blade criticizing Toledo, criticizing the governor, saying, you're not offering enough subsidies, plants are moving elsewhere. It's not really because of anything Toledo did or didn't do. The forces of the kind of investment being made in Germany, elsewhere in Europe, in Japan, and in China just overwhelms anything that any one state or city could do.
One of the things that's going on [in Detroit] now is there's a very wealthy man who has bought up a lot of property in Detroit and in the spring plans on planting it and doing urban agriculture and even some kind of fast-growing trees for biofuels. It's a total experiment: Will urban agriculture revitalize Detroit? No. Will it be able to cash in on something else green? I don't know. I don't see anything else in particular going on there.
What national policies do you think we most need to pursue green city-planning efforts at the local level?
The importance of things at the federal level is you've got to create demand for the products -- most cities, the markets just aren't big enough to create demand.
Investment in transportation would be another area that would help cities a lot. The transportation bill is going to be one of the ones that are up next, and how that gets framed both at the federal and city level will depend on how much is invested in high-speed rail, which again the stimulus put $8 billion into that, which was important as a down payment.
But there also needs to be emphasis at the local level, and I think if you look at what LA is doing -- they passed Measure R, which dedicates about $40 billion for development of a rail system in Los Angeles. So the mayor is able to go, which in fact he did a week or two ago, to the federal government and say look, this is important to us, we passed this ballot measure, we're willing to make an investment here in rail. Now what he was asking for was a very interesting kind of policy at the federal level -- that they would have an investment bank that would lend money to cities so that they could move much more quickly on their public-transportation measures. That would mean more jobs quickly and getting the system up and running more quickly.
So I think that's a very creative way of combing local and state funds and national investment.
How do you balance the desire to produce well-paying jobs in these industries with the need to be competitive internationally?
Many of these technologies are being produced quite profitably in high-wage countries. In Germany, they understand that there are some aspects of the technology that will move to China, but their goal is to keep the high-end manufacturing -- the innovative part -- in country. That's part of their national strategy, partly in policy, but partly that's just how German manufacturers think, that you've got to keep the high-end at home.
