With a staggering 84 percent of North Americans living in cities today, and climate change upon us, it’s surely time for a serious new era of federal urban policy development in our country.
Though many local governments and city planners are struggling to think ahead, there’s nothing remotely like a vibrant and visionary national discussion on cities and their futures that I can see. We’re still relying on the threadbare idealism and positive vibes of the 1970s with their emphasis on historic preservation, environmental land use planning, downtown revitalization, public transit and “citizen participation in the planning process” — all of which need infusions of new energy stimulated by the kind of innovation on a federal level necessary to survive climate turmoils ahead.
Many of the 276 million Americans who live in cities must contend with monstrous messes of decaying infrastructure, heat sinks, broken neighborhoods, impossible traffic, high crime, drugs, dangerous pollution, internecine hostilities, homelessness, class inequities, demoralizing ugliness and intractable poverty.
A little metro area like ours — with slightly under a million people and a long history of creative thinking about urban planning — can still legitimately claim to be a fine place to live, despite our own kind of miserable transportation planning, cheesy sprawl, terrifying crime and tawdry infill development.
If we don’t start an aggressive national discussion about urban policy soon, monstrous cities, and still mostly lovable little places like Albuquerque, will be all but crippled by the myriad unprecedented and unavoidable transitions that face them, including curtailing greenhouse pollution from the internal combustion engine, shoring up the depletion of drinking water and agricultural water, managing drastically increasing urban density and protecting themselves from the ravages of increasingly severe storms.
Some 29 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions come from internal combustion engines. They are the nation’s largest polluter. Most cities in America and the world, of course, are built for cars and trucks. As climate instability increasingly ravages the world, the pressure to decrease the use of fossil fuels and transition from individual automobiles to public transit will critically strain the political ingenuity of most city leaders. Given the inevitable economic turmoil a transport transition will cause, it could take a revolution in political and planning dexterity on a federal level to begin to move in a positive direction.
With increasing droughts and ground water depletion in the breadbaskets of the West and Midwest, the specter of famine could force cities to try to feed themselves, perhaps for long periods of time. Vertical agriculture in skyscrapers is one possibility, as is intensifying local farming. Given the material and energy costs of local agriculture, extensive long-range planning for a transition in food supply ought to be starting right now on a federal level so cities won’t get caught tragically unprepared.
Stopping sprawl developments, and their greenhouse gas emissions, could become the most difficult political problem that transitioning cities will have to face. Stopping sprawl means developing infill, which means infringing on the perceived rights and needs of existing neighborhoods and residents. As we have seen in Albuquerque and other cities for decades, urban planners, developers, property owners, the building industry and neighborhoods are deeply suspicious of each other, so much so that cooperative thinking and mutual innovation at a local level is hard to come by. Only a national urban policy and the money to back it up will change that.
The number of billion-dollar natural disasters over the last 40 years is estimated to have increased from three times a year to more than 13 times a year. This is a kind of climate change roulette that I think only a national urban policy can help cities prepare for. The question is, of course, will managing such transitions require the kind of authoritarian muscle that’s being flexed in Southeast Asian cities, or will we overcome the morbid political divisiveness that’s ruining public life in our country and start to think and plan together? We need all the brain power we can get from everyone.
With New Mexico’s venerable history of urban survival in challenging conditions, this might be the perfect time for the state’s congressional delegation to come together and lobby for the creation of something like a federal Urban Climate Change Planning Institute to begin brainstorming strategies and passing legislation for how the vast majority of our nation’s people will be able to weather the tsunami of transitions facing them in the years ahead.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image from Copernicus Open Access Hub)
A lot to think about, and urgent for sure. It seems to me that New Mexico in general and Albuquerque in particular are ideal places to try out innovative solutions to the problems that plague US cities. We have examples of things that have worked well or failed miserably. Santa Fe’s inner core building code has kept “the city different” attractive. Albuquerque’s unnecessary ART bus system was a failure from day one, duplicating a route we already had and destroying so many neighborhood businesses. We can see what works and what doesn’t, and how important it would be to plan ahead. And the history of our cities show that we have the will. We need only begin!