In this series of blog posts I will discuss some of the assigned readings for the Sustainable Planning Seminar (Urban Planning/Geography/Landscape Architecture 446) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
This week’s readings were:
- “Planning for Metropolitan Sustainability” by Stephen Wheeler (2000)
- “Guide to Climate Action Planning” by David Eagan et al. (2008)
- “Why New York is the Greenest City in the U.S.” by David Owen (2004)
- “Research Themes and Challenges” by Matthias Ruth and Fang Rong (circa 2003)
- “The Myth of the Compact City” by Randal O’Toole
- “Growing Cooler” by Reid Ewing et al.
Thoughts and Notes
These readings survey a couple of different debates about “sustainable” urban planning. Owen, Ewing, and O’Toole debate the “green-ness” of urban environments. Ewing and Owen both take the position that
- large cities are “green,”
- society needs to urbanize further. Cities are considered “green” simply because the transportation footprint is smaller than in other places since most denizens commute via public transport (Owen). Further, that the United States will fail to decarbonize its transportation sector if it relies on vehicle and fuel technology alone. On the other side is Randal O’Toole, who argues that cities and urbanization are expensive distractions. Although, I’m highly suspect of O’Toole’s motivations since his work was funded by the Cato Institute (ahem, Koch brothers). There is some substance to the argument that compactness leads to more expensive housing (consider the cost of living in Urbana-Champaign vs New York), I’m still skeptical about O’Toole’s other arguments.
As an aside, I recently did some simulations for energy system planning and found that adding a carbon price ($40/ton) had a negligible impact on emissions. The net effect was that coal capacity retired more quickly, but natural gas capacity exploded. There was no cost incentive to build renewables under a carbon price alone. When I constrained natural gas capacity (simulating a strong climate policy), the net effect of a carbon price was building more wind than solar energy. All of this is to say that a carbon price, in absence of other policies, will likely not have a meaningful impact on climate change .
Wheeler’s recommendation is to educate citizens of urban areas on their regional environmental context. This education is motivated by the observation that many of the environmental successes have been the result of “grassroots citizen activism.” I agree that education is important and people should be empowered to act on behalf of just causes, but sometimes grassroots activism gets it wrong. The premature closure of nuclear plants in Germany is evidence of this.