The Urban Green Revolution

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The green cities movement has been slowly building for decades, as Lerner and others began to re-imagine transportation, land use, urban food systems, and alternative energy. Since the 1980s, groups like the Toronto-based International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) have been bringing city leaders together across borders to share innovations -- a trend that went largely unnoticed beyond a few interested planners and academics. Meanwhile, activists and the public remained focused on big-picture environmental issues like climate change, species decline, and deforestation.

But as the Bush administration and other national governments blocked real progress on global environmental accords, local efforts moved to the fore. London's iconoclastic mayor Ken Livingstone grabbed headlines in early 2003 when he imposed a "congestion charge" of $12 a day on cars driving into the city center. Suburban drivers howled in protest, but many switched to public transit, and car trips in central London have dropped more than 15 percent, greatly reducing the city's greenhouse gas emissions. The experiment has been widely hailed as a success, and cities around the globe -- including New York and San Francisco -- are considering similar measures.

More recently, on the last day of February, when the Kyoto Protocol went into effect, Seattle mayor Greg Nickels pledged that his city would meet the treaty's goal of reducing carbon emissions to below 1990 levels by 2012. He also challenged other mayors to do the same. At a June gathering in Chicago, the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously endorsed a climate protection agreement that 171 mayors had signed by midsummer.

The U.N. summit was a coming-out party for the global green cities movement -- a chance for participants to share ideas and show the world that cities have unique power to improve the environment. Cities have always been laboratories for political and social reform. And city officials are more accountable to their constituents than state and national officials.

At the summit, some 68 mayors -- including many from urban giants like Sao Paulo and Mumbai and those from environmental leaders like Vancouver and Stockholm -- gathered to draft and sign a bold manifesto for urban sustainability. The San Francisco Urban Environmental Accords (www.wed2005.org) lay out 21 concrete steps to a greener city, grouped into seven broad categories -- energy, waste reduction, urban design, urban nature, transportation, environmental health, and water. The actions range from enacting strict new construction guidelines to protecting critical habitat and urban wildlife corridors.

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