GREEN NEW CITIES OF TOMORROW
What is the book’s big idea, thesis or argument, and what’s new about it? The book’s thesis is that it’s time to kick off a big new construction program – the creation of hundreds of U.S. all-green cities. This book specifically calls for two pilot green city projects: one of 50,000 people and one of 200,000 people. These are just starters. If our projected growth to 2060 were entirely housed in these green cities, it would mean 568 new cities in all. Even a small bite of our U.S. projected population growth could mean dozens of all-green cities.
These places will do much more than simply house their residents at zero or near-zero greenhouse gas emissions – they’ll test and showcase how it’s done, and potentially change the face of city-building forever.
What’s new is the idea of American city-building with this specific purpose – all-green development, with zero emissions as a result. The zero-emissions city of Masdar was the first, although its green goals and rate of construction have been modified some.
We’ve done whole-city-building for other purposes -- our national capital, Los Alamos, and a couple of other cities when we were building a nuclear bomb; greenbelt cities in the New Deal era, a “model cities” program as part of 1960s urban renewal. And that’s just the public sector effort. The private sector has built retirement cities (Sun City, Arizona, and many more). We’ve built some “all-green” buildings, such as the Seattle Bullitt Center, but we haven’t yet built an all-green entire city; we haven’t built any significant brand-new cities of any kind in the past 70 years.
Other big construction programs are a feature of U.S. history -- but do they have to remain only in our past? The last big program was the Interstate Highway system creation of the 1950s and 60s, said to have consumed six percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product for several years. The U.S. has embarked on other big construction programs in the past, led by both private and public sectors, usually in some kind of public-private partnership. Going back to the 19th century, the transcontinental railroads come to mind – they transformed this nation and made it one economy. Later, the 1930s New Deal rural electrification programs including the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bonneville Power Administration, through massive hydroelectric dam construction, radically altered not only rural life but the whole nature of the rivers and states they serve. This meant positive changes in farming, energy production, water transportation but also negative changes for salmon.
Since Reaganomics in the late 20th century, we’ve apparently become leery of big programs, yet something bigger than Covid-19’s Operation Warp Speed is needed to propel us out of climate change disaster. Have we forgotten how to put our national shoulder to the wheel and create something that will have a big positive impact?
Green New Cities of Tomorrow – Why and How America Should Build Some, now available at Amazon under J.F. Rodwell, sets out a recipe for how an all-green cities program can come about.
This is some of the data which underpin the book’s thesis:
1. Our Census Bureau population projections support creating homes on the scale of 17 new places the size of LA, and that’s just by 2060 – 70 million new people by 2060, and more beyond.
2. Climate change includes sea level rise. The estimates of Americans projected to be displaced by sea level rise keep climbing; at least 13 million people, and related businesses, will likely be permanently washed out by 2100; a high end projection for that year is seven feet, and thirteen feet by 2150. There are solid legal and political reasons why this isn’t much discussed. And this doesn’t even quantify the need for new communities created by recent wildfires in the western U.S., and the homelessness caused in part by too much housing being unaffordable. The book doesn’t currently discuss these two issues, but it could; they each support the need to build more and differently.
3. American carbon footprints (=greenhouse gas emissions per capita) hover at around 15 tons per year. The world average is about 3, and Americans and the world as a whole need to get to zero.
4. This country doesn’t have a federal agency tackling urban economic strategy. An easy example, likely too late now, would have been bringing high tech jobs to the Rust Belt. It already had the homes, the schools, the services and other urban infrastructure to be a great region for new family-wage industries. However, in this land of the free, nobody was directing traffic, so a lot of growth went instead to other places, these being often challenged to provide for it. For example, as climate change shrinks the volume of the Colorado River, this hurts all the communities and industries the river serves. It’s time for somebody to step up and start directing traffic. This book aims to kick off the dialog about how and what.
5. As eighty percent (and more) of us live in cities, cities are on the front lines of the climate change battle. It’s time to change how we do our cities so that we and the planet can survive. Much less than five percent of our land is urban, but some of that is going to be permanently under water. Yet there’s plenty of room for new cities.
Email julie@julierodwell.org if you’d like more information.
Coming soon: Shining Examples of existing green construction, and tales of planned new cities around the world.
