GREEN cities!!

From the book "More Good News"  by  David Suzuki and Hooly Dressel

GREENING THE CITIES

Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean

 (without dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, teaching its children. 

 Number 11 of Wendell Berry's 17 Rules for a Sustainable Community¹⁷

As we noted in Chapter 1, municipal governments all over the world are leading the growing movement for sustainability. Organizations like the Mayors' Hemispheric Forum and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group are simply bypassing presidents and prime ministers like George Bush and Stephen Harper, who dragged their feet on climate change legislation. It's surprising to see who's really getting on with the business of hard goals and multilateral agreements. But it makes sense if you know the rules of sustainability—that the best solutions will always come from the less powerful, from people on the ground, and from local communities that are closest to individual ecosystems and most aware of their needs. In the world of elected governments, that's municipalities.

PORTLAND  AND  OREGON

Today both the city of Portland and the state of Oregon are recognized as having some of the most progressive environmental legislation on the continent—legislation that helps jobs, businesses, and cities go green. Portland has managed to make itself probably the most car-unfriendly city in car-crazy North America, without angering residents or slowing down its tourism industry. That's because it approached the situation with carrots instead of sticks. Its methods have won over even hard-core motorists with an excellent (and free) system of light rail in the downtown core. Large parking lots are located strategically outside of and around town to make the transition from car to transit more attractive, and the trains come so often that a laden shopper need hardly wait three minutes. The city's narrow, tree-lined streets give electric buses, bicycles, and pedestrians priority in two lanes out of three. All these friendly nudges have inspired both residents and visitors to leave their cars and cycle, walk, or use public transit. Not surprisingly Portland has one of the most beguiling downtowns in North America, filled with friendly pedestrians enjoying the shops, restaurants, and pretty side streets, and especially enjoying the fresh air and lack of traffic noise.

CAR  SHARING

Less than a decade ago, car sharing, which we had found only in Europe and Portland, was a new way for urban residents to share a fleet of small and fuel-efficient cars for an annual fee. Today car sharing has spread all across North America. In addition many cities also have partially free bike services, with tough city bikes parked in strategic shopping, school, or entertainment areas, so you can leave downtown, ride to your girlfriend's, drop off your bike, have a long dinner, and get yourself home by grabbing another bike after the buses have stopped. Montreal's service is so popular it was expanded almost immediately.

BOSTON

Even neighborhoods within cities are beginning to take control of their surroundings. In the 1980s the Dudley Street neighborhood in Boston had become one of the worst urban war zones in the U.S., a result of racism, crime, and neglectful and absentee landlords engaging in speculation and using arson to collect insurance. In the 1970s realtors had forced minority white homeowners out of the neighborhood, even orchestrating break-ins to do so, in an effort to play cards with properties being sold at a fraction of their value. When collapse followed, the scammers passed the costs of foreclosure on to the federal government, and Dudley became a wasteland of abandoned houses and vacant lots—hundreds of them.

The remaining residents didn't want to be cleared out for "urban renewal," however, so they organized the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (dsni) and started gathering the low-hanging fruit, beginning with a simple campaign to prevent garbage dumping in their burned-out, vacant lots. That success quickly led to the creation of a comprehensive revitalization plan, presented to the city of Boston only two years later. Boston accepted it, making Dudley Street the first community group in the country to "win the power of eminent domain to acquire vacant land for resident-led development." Absentee-owned properties were seized and awarded to the new Dudley Neighbors community land trust. Residents got to choose to stay and develop their vacant lots as homes or gardens, but the speculators from outside lost theirs, DSNI proceeded to rebuild this vacant land with low-income housing, and created a commons, green spaces, a farmers' market, playgrounds, and more community services.

When the sub-prime mortgage crisis came along in 2008, this thriving community was able not only to withstand it but also to help homeowners beyond its borders avoid foreclosure. Dudley lot owners aren't allowed to gamble or speculate with their land-trust properties; they have to agree that all future sales will be made to a low- or moderate-income buyer and follow a resale formula that permits price appreciation—but at a modest and sustainable rate. These restrictions also get them a lower property tax rate from Boston and allow dsni to support tenants' rights in apartments. Today the initiative is working with the city of Boston to buy and repair foreclosed properties and add as many of them to the land trust as possible.

The social effects of such policies are profound. Kids who grew up in Dudley have become community leaders, politicians, and teachers. John Barros only left his home neighborhood to go to Dartmouth; now he works on the dsni board. He says the main "sign of progress [is] that so many kids move up [in society] and stay in Dudley." And Dudley is spreading its model, showing other inner-city neighborhoods how to forestall "the storm of predatory lending, fraud, and foreclosures sweeping the country." Its approach, countrywide, has seen only two foreclosures in a sample of more than three thousand land trust homeowners.¹⁸

^EUROPE

As we've emphasized in examples throughout this book, Europe still has the greatest number of truly green cities. What European cities have in common is citizens who have all agreed that their ecosystem needs, as well as their garbage and wastes, must be dealt with; and the efforts they make will enable them to have decent lives for a long time into the future. Their efforts are causing neither personal suffering nor national economic problems. Despite them, or arguably because of them, Germany and other countries with exemplary green cities are among the most prosperous nations on Earth. Striving to do what European cities do already has to become the norm across the planet because it's the right, just, and most prosperous way to build the future. Painstaking studies undertaken by the Wuppertal Institute in Bonn in the mid-1990s demonstrated that real, equitable sharing of the planet's natural resources could enable every starving,,sick human on Earth to live just as well as middle-class Germans did back in the early 1970s. That is, we could all share a future with comfortable, private homes, good diets, nice clothes, and electronics. With serious efforts toward steady-state economies and populations, the only real sacrifices would be less per capita in terms of private transportation, luxuries, and waste. That doesn't sound too bad for anybody—even those of us currently taking more than our fair share.¹⁹

......................................