Dan Hoornweg's blog

1. Be Proactive. There’s much any city can do today. Even without sufficient budget or authorization from ‘senior levels’ of government, every city has a full menu of things that can be carried out immediately, generating positive momentum and goodwill. Business rewards the active entrepreneur, and the public desperately wants active cities. The rewards are great.
    


2. Plan – Plan Right. All cities carry out master plans for their key services, long-term infrastructure needs, and land use planning. Before starting these plans, the end needs to be clear. They are guidance documents, aspirational, and ways to rally supporters and give fair hearing to opponents. But a plan, no matter how good, can never be seen as a finished product. Before starting the plan an agreement is needed that the city is moving forward on this issue: the plan is the vehicle to bring along as many supporters as possible and identify potential potholes and trouble en route. Like a city, good plans are living documents. 

In March this year, we posted a blog on the draft edition of a global protocol for city-scale GHG emissions, announced jointly by ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, C40, and the World Resources Institute (WRI).

Yesterday, a pilot version of the protocol was released at the UNFCCC climate meetings in Bonn, Germany. And today, UNEP, UN-Habitat and the World Bank expressed appreciation to ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, C40, and WRI for this accomplishment. To learn more about the significance of the protocol, read this news feature.

Detroit: A Biography by Scott Martelle provides a unique glimpse into the life and history of one of America’s used-to-be, and maybe-again, great cities. From the outset you can tell that Mr. Martelle is more than an observant journalist; he’s a native. He’s got skin in the game.

Providing a biography of Detroit is a clever way to help the reader understand the nuances of what brought the city to where it is today. But the book reads more as an obituary than a city-in-progress biography. The closing Epilogue claims, “There is no real answer to the troubles afflicting places like Detroit”.

Sooner or later, anyone living in the US will hear a gun rights advocate say that ‘guns don’t kill people, people do.’ Semantics, but true. While we’re on semantics, strictly speaking, cities are not responsible for GHG emissions. Rather the people, or more specifically, those earning the most money, almost all of whom live in cities, are responsible for the vast majority of the world’s GHG emissions. But that is not nearly as easy to communicate, and messaging is important.

On cities and GHG emissions, what is the message we really need to communicate? First, it’s true, if you add up all the GHG emissions – direct (e.g., out the back end of our car) and indirect (e.g., the trees cut down for pasture or the belches from the cattle used in our hamburgers) – residents of cities are responsible for more than 70% of the world’s GHG emissions (and likely more than 80%). This should not be much of a surprise, as these same people are responsible for more than 80% of the world’s economy. GHG emissions are a by-product of the stuff we buy and do.

We’ve seen cafes, car sharing, cell phones, and social networking products like iPads, proliferate from the world’s rush to urbanize. So what’s next? Following is a list of top ten urban businesses that are likely to flourish over the next few years.

1. Take Two – Tablets. Just as every television now comes with a remote control, so too will every house and apartment come with a ‘control tablet’. We’ve seen the introduction of tablets as cheap as $40 in rural India. The next push will be a clever city that provides every household with a tablet to check on municipal services, emergency announcements, entertainment, and much more. Once every household has its own tablet, the impact will be enormous. The only question now is which city and companies will take a lead. Best guesses: Kitchener, Canada; Gwangju, South Korea; Bangalore, India; Kunming, China; Rotterdam, Netherlands; Thomson Reuters; RIM; Samsung; DataWind.

This month marks an important milestone – an agreed to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions protocol for cities was announced jointly by ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, C40, the big-cities climate change club, and the World Resources Institute (WRI). The protocol builds on early work by ICLEI, WRI and WBCSD’s corporate scopes model, a research paper presented by Professor Chris Kennedy et al at the June 2009 Marseille Urban Research Symposium, and a joint UNEP, UN-Habitat, World Bank guideline, supported by Cities Alliance, launched June 2010 at the World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro.

Up to now there were many different types of ways that cities were measuring their GHG emissions. A few cities were leading. Rio’s one of the first cities to complete the new inventory. New York City, Amman, Cape Town, Tokyo and Mexico City are front-runners as well. Xiaolan and Kunming are lined up to be the first cities in China to use the new protocol. Soon, most cities that complete a GHG inventory will follow a common ISO standardized approach. This will make analysis and learning across cities much easier. A common and verifiable metric is also one of the best ways to attract additional finance for cities.

One of the best things about living in Washington DC is riding your bike to work, early in the morning, past the blossoming cherry trees along the tidal basin. Sometimes you have to actually stop for a moment, the trees are so beautiful. Thank you, Governor (Mayor) Ozaki Yukio: He gave the trees to the up and coming Washington DC in 1912.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the City of Tokyo’s original gift of 3020 cherry trees. You would be hard pressed to find a more perfect gift, or a more perfect example of how the cities we live in, and the globally-minded ones overseas, improve our day-to-day quality of life.

This year marks the 200th birthday for Charles Dickens who is likely the best-known social commentator who documented the more troublesome aspects of the Industrial Revolution and the start of the world’s headlong rush to urbanize. Dickens’ writings give a ringside seat to the turmoil London, and Paris, faced over two hundred years ago. That Dickens’ vantage point was London only made sense; it had just surpassed Beijing as the world’s largest city, and arguably is the birthplace of capitalism and industrialization.

The big question now is, where in the world would today’s most important social commentator choose to live? We obviously know it would be a big city as cities are the most powerful determinants of our futures. But what city best captures today’s and tomorrow’s social milieu?