Ten projects that point the way to a cleaner urban future

The model green city of the future already exists, but you can't yet find it on a map. It remains in pieces, scattered in urban areas around the world. As novelist William Gibson quipped, "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." If you want to glimpse the future of the sustainable city today, these projects are good places to start.

Portland
According to data released in June, Portland, Oregon, is the first U.S. city to meet the Kyoto Protocol's target of reducing carbon emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012, with seven years to spare. Contrary to President Bush's contention that "Kyoto would have wrecked our economy," Portland's leaders say the city has benefited from better public transit, lower energy costs, more green space, and valuable expertise in energy efficiency and green building that is helping local firms win business around the globe. "People have looked at it the wrong way, as a drain," Mayor Tom Potter told The New York Times. "Actually, it's something that attracts people," he said of the effort to lower emissions. "It's economical; it makes sense in dollars."

Los Angeles
This desert city that epitomizes car-dependent sprawl is dying of thirst under a layer of concrete. "The rainfall we lose to runoff could provide up to half the water Los Angeles needs," says Andy Lipkis, head of the group TreePeople, in the Canadian ethical business magazine Corporate Knights (Winter 2005). Lipkis is working with the Los Angeles County government to transform the city from a sea of impermeable pavement into a porous tree-lined sieve that naturally captures, treats, and reuses rainfall. New street drains empty into gravel pits that recharge the water table and prevent flooding, while surface trees absorb floodwater, sequester carbon, and beautify the city.

Pittsburgh
Drawing on the region's Amish and Dutch agricultural heritage, this Rust Belt metropolis puts every other U.S. city to shame in the category of local food systems, according to a recent ranking of America's greenest cities by the group SustainLane. The Burgh boasts seven farmers' markets, all of which accept food stamps, and a whopping 188 community gardens -- one for every 3,000 inhabitants and almost four times as many as runner-up Seattle.