4 fresh ideas for making L.A. (and all cities) sustainable

One of L.A.'s urban wild spots, Griffith Park. Credit: Mary Forgione

This year, according to a recent report by the World Wildlife Fund, we’re living in a world where over half of all vertebrate wildlife has died off in the past 40 years. All the while, the planet is urbanizing at a breakneck pace. The data shows over 50% of the human population lives in cities, a historical first. It is from the offices, apartment blocks, shopping malls, and cul-de-sacs of the metropolis that we need to come to terms with our damaging impact on biodiversity. That is certainly the case here in Los Angeles, often pictured as an unsustainable wasteland of traffic jams, low-density development, and big pools in a drought. But there is considerable eco-friendly momentum building in this city.

To showcase his push for green solutions to L.A.'s many challenges, Mayor Eric Garcetti recently welcomed CityLab 2014, a collaborative effort between the Atlantic, the Aspen Institute, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. The event (Sep. 28-30) brought together mayors, city planners, journalists, experts, and businesspeople from around the world to exchange ideas on how to make cities more livable. Urban sustainability was high up on the list of priorities. How can we find new ways to arrange city life so we don’t overtax the planet’s resources and devastate its remaining wild lands, preferably without crippling the economy?

CityLab 2014 showcased some of the ways city leaders are coming to terms with these questions. In the environmental community, we already know we should use public transit, we should invest in rooftop solar, that living the McMansion lifestyle does the planet no favors. Here are four new ways urban thought leaders from CityLab 2014 are framing the urban sustainability debate.

Civic engagement and outreach

City planning has a reputation for arcane, legalistic complexity dominated by vested interests and self-interested politicians. In recent years, some city governments are reawakening to the benefits of listening to community priorities. Advocates of “open source” solutions believe that by making municipal data and planning practices public, companies and nonprofits outside government will find ways to address problems unavailable to the public sector.

Here in Los Angeles, the mayor’s new sustainability team, led by former Global Green CEO Matt Petersen, has elicited input from community activists and leaders to develop a Sustainable City Plan due for public release this fall. On another front, L.A. city planners are fully reworking the intractable old zoning code, first adopted in 1946, into a more streamlined set of guidelines implemented with community interests in mind.

Despite a reputation for failure and delay in the face of entrenched interests, bottom-up civic engagement may benefit from recent advances in real-time communications and data collection. It’s easier for a local environmental justice group to act when they can get a clear picture of what’s actually going on. It’s easier for positive change to happen when government is willing to take local viewpoints into account, especially from underprivileged communities at greater risk from environmental hazards. In Mayor Garcetti’s words, people want intimacy from government; they want the opportunity to participate in the turnaround of their city.

The sharing economy and local solutions

One word kept popping up in the CityLab 2014 discussions, one we don’t associate with city life: trust. We’ve grown used to the idea that one shouldn’t trust strangers on the street, that a friendly greeting always masks an angle. Recent developments in the so-called “sharing economy” like Lyft rides and Airbnb short-term home rentals allow for mediated entrepreneurship. People with assets are empowered to “share” them directly with other individuals for a price, bringing certain sectors out of direct corporate control. Along with widely used person-to-person trading through intermediaries like Amazon and E-Bay, the new urban model may depend on local brokerage of services rather than traditional brand-to-consumer interactions.

What does this mean for sustainability? Aside from the fact that marketable ride-sharing, home-sharing, and reuse of products cuts down waste, a general trend toward localism bodes well for the environment. Led by inspirational thinkers like Bill McKibben, we’ve already begun to realize the benefits to be had from local food, local power, and community-based sources of culture and recreation. The Transition movement, begun in the U.K. and recently spread into places like Culver City, organizes urban work-sharing and collaboration to lessen impact, increase resilience, and promote local production. The Transition movement is non-monetized, but it provides an incentive to volunteer on a neighbor’s greening project: your neighbor agrees to help out on your project in return.

The promise of a sharing economy is that people will be motivated by the market to make best use of the resources available to them, rather than paying more to be sustainable because the corporate mainstream throws costs onto the environment. Some are calling this trend the reemergence of the village economy in the 21st century.

Green versus gray: ecosystem services

In a big city, there are always certain services the local market won’t be able to fully provide. In Los Angeles we could install rooftop solar everywhere, sure, but in this drought there is no such thing as local water. The problem is that large-scale infrastructure has always consisted of “gray” systems. Gray, as in massive engineering projects like dams, coal power plants, and water mains with obvious negative impacts on the biosphere.

The alternative to expensive and limited-life gray infrastructure is to let natural systems filter and move water, energy, and materials. Green infrastructure systems like the Catskills watershed in New York State adapt human development to the natural ecosystem, not the other way around. Rather than ignoring or fighting ecology, green infrastructure consults it to find ways human economic activity can be integrated into natural cycles.

Even in developed places, there is ample room and need for green infrastructure. The South L.A. Wetland Park, located in an underserved area, traps and naturally filters urban runoff, recycling it for further use in the city. The park prevents the runoff from draining into the Pacific unused. L.A. River sustainability projects have the potential to magnify this effect on a citywide scale. The ultimate ideal in green city planning is to reestablish a healthy relationship between our cities and nature, one where homes and offices participate directly in water purification, power production, the growing of food, and the coexistence of humans and animal species.

The triple bottom line

These ideas all rely on the principle that environmental and social factors should influence urban decision-making, along with financial gain. This “triple bottom line” prioritizes long-term thinking about value, which is why most of the presenters at CityLab 2014 used the principle as their starting point. It’s a good ideal, but whether our institutions are ready to forgo short-term satisfaction for truly sustainable methods is uncertain.

Despite challenges, the value of civic engagement, a sharing economy, and green infrastructure – along with transit, renewables, and other conservation techniques – is that they do not require a dramatic restructuring of how we order society. Cities have the potential to become viable ecosystems, ecosystems where people live in sync with the wider biosphere and leave the natural services that sustain us undisturbed.

It’ll be a while until we achieve anything close to that ideal, if ever. Few places in the nation have the advantages of a Portland or a Manhattan, and they struggle with difficulties of their own. But we’re lucky to live in Los Angeles. It is this city, sprawling, drought-ridden, and addicted to the car, that can become a true model of how to achieve sustainability in this country under less-than-ideal conditions.

Philip Rojc is a writer and Angeles Chapter Sierra Club member. You can find him at philiprojc.com or follow him on Twitter at @PhilipRojc.