Tag Archives: urban development

The American Lawn: A Harmful Invention

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While I sat on my front porch impatiently waiting for my coffee to cool, our nextdoor neighbor turned on his lawnmower. Then, like clockwork, the neighbor across the street also brought out a lawnmower. Soon after, I watched as two men got out of a van labeled “Mike’s Lawns” and began mowing someone else’s lawn. 

But the problem with lawns is far more than just noisy lawnmowers. Subject to a third of all residential water use in the U.S., lawns strike me as impractical, unused spaces that carry no productive value. The non-native grass saturated in herbicides pollutes our air and water. Lawns are bad for the environment; this we know to be true. 

But the problem with lawns runs deeper yet. Even these boxes of seemingly harmless, perfectly manicured, velvet green boxes sitting purposeless in front of homes, carry legacies that cannot be de-historicized nor depoliticized. 

Rooted in colonialism, racism, and classism, lawns serve as status symbols. Like theatre, lawns are meticulously crafted to create a designed, controlled, and safe experience that mimics—in this case—nature, or so we think. The harmful association between grass and healthy, beneficial “nature” ignores all that is wrong with lawns (including sprinklers, lawn mowers, pesticides, etc), especially from an ecological perspective. 

To Andrew Jackson Downing’s 1841 landscape-gardening book, a town over from mine, Hartford, CT, might feel foreign from Downing’s home with a nursery in New York, (which, by the way is a state the same size as all of the lawns in the U.S.) but climate change “carries no passport and knows no borders.” 

The effects of front lawns in America have and will continue to have global impacts that exist beyond your white picket fence. In Hartford, CT, where the white picket fences and manicured lawns of the suburbs give way to unkept public parks and parking lots, signs of climate change are ever-present.  Continue reading →

The Road to a Sustainable Future: Urban Transportation Policy Reform

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Atlanta, Georgia, known as the “poster child of sprawl,” may not be the first place you think of when imagining a forward-thinking city, however, an innovative project aims to combat the issue of congestion as Atlanta’s population doubles in the next fifteen years and turn Atlanta into a walkable and bikeable city. Like New York City’s High Line or Chicago’s 606, 22 miles of disused railroad tracks are to be transformed into a greenway loop by 2030, open to pedestrians and cyclists. This so-called “BeltLine,” proposed in 2001, is a breakthrough in the way that urban planners approach cities — in terms of sustainability, livability, and coherency.

According to the United Nations, more than half of the world’s population resides in urban areas, and this number is predicted to rise to two-thirds by 2050. This presents an unprecedented opportunity for 21st-century metropolises to lessen the Western world’s dependence on fossil fuels and provide citizens with alternatives such as bicycling, public transit and walking, following Atlanta’s example. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one-seventh of global greenhouse gas emissions are caused by transportation and that number is also rising. By pursuing options that use less energy and cleaner forms of it, we will be able to not only prevent further global warming but also to improve the quality of life in cities by reducing traffic and smog.

In this beat I will explore the complex challenge of implementing innovative transportation policy reforms as well as sparking a cultural paradigm shift towards the goal of sustainable city-living. How do the obstacles facing the global South in this regard differ from those in the global North? What approaches are working well and in which areas could improvements be made? What roles will technology and lifestyle play in the future to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions? In order to answer these questions, I will examine individual cities as case studies to formulate a hopeful yet critical view of the current state as well as the future of urban transportation.

A Toolkit for Transition: A Review of Take Back the Economy

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In one of the cities most impacted by the decline of the United States’ economy, change is happening. Cleveland, Ohio used to be one of the epicenters of America’s industrial heartland– now it is serving as a model for how a city can recover from economic decline and urban decay. This model for change, known as “The Cleveland Model“, is centered within the Evergreen Cooperatives– a group of worker-owned cooperatives that are commited to building sustainable and democratic workplaces that benefit their communities.

Specifically, the Evergreen Cooperatives target the needs of Cleveland’s most dependable institutions, such as hospitals and universities, to ensure that jobs will stay in the city. Currently, Evergreen Cooperatives consists of a solar installation and weatherization program, an industrial-scale laundry service commited to a low environmental impact, and the largest urban food-producing greenhouse in the United States. Not only are these cooperatives owned by the workers themselves, but each is committed to employing those who live in some of the poorest neighborhoods of the city, where poverty rates can reach 30 percent.

A diagram depicted the exchange of resources in the Cleveland Model.

A visualization of the Cleveland Model via community-wealth.org

The Cleveland Model demonstrates how a community can ethically and sustainably redevelop, but how do other communities follow suit? In their book, Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide to Transforming our Communities, a team of geographers shows how people around the world are building such resilient community economies. Although the authors J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy are all geographers with specialties ranging from feminism to the environment, the book is not a scholarly review. Rather, Take Back the Economy tells the stories of successful and inspiring projects while also providing tools and resources to help guide readers to make change themselves. In that way, Take Back the Economy is more than a book– it is a toolkit that can be used by activists, leaders, students, and academics alike.

The book explores how communities can make change happen in five different sectors of our community economies: work, business, markets, property, and finance. Each of these sectors is reframed to take into account our ethical responsibility to one another and our natural world. This approach helps us to see that places like Cleveland can serve as a compelling model for rethinking both work and business. Far beyond Cleveland, the book provides countless examples of groups of people who are making change happen in each of the five sectors of our community economies.

For instance, Take Back the Economy reframes work as a means to surviving well, which can benefit our material, social, community, and physical well-being. With the Cleveland Model, the cooperative-style of business gives marginalized workers a means to improve their material well-being, build stronger interpersonal relationships, and give back to their communities.”Evergreen has changed my life. It enabled me to be a contributer, not only to the community, but to society as well,” stated one worker. With the Cleveland Model, work is not just a means to make income, but it is also a way to increase personal well-being.

Take Back the Economy additionally provides tools that help us to rethink the different sectors of our community economies. In the case of business, the book provides an exercise called the “People’s Account” which breaks down business models to see how much revenue workers generate versus how much they actually get paid. In a typical corporation, minimum-wage earning workers only receive a small fraction of the profits they generate from working, leading to surplus profits that don’t always benefit the workers. While some surplus may be used to sustain the business, a lot is left to accumulate in the pockets of CEOs. Even so, CEOs can pack up and leave a community when a business model in another part of the world becomes more profitable, making these business models even less sustainable.

However, in cooperatives like those used in the Cleveland Model, workers collectively determine their wages so that they earn a reasonable income for the value of their work. At the same time, the cooperatives can generate collective wealth that can be invested back in their business and in their community. Especially important to Cleveland, the businesses are owned by members of the community, meaning the businesses are more likely to remain invested in the city, creating long-term and reliable jobs. As one worker in Cleveland noted, “I am an owner, not just a worker. I help to make decisions within the community.”

Take Back the Economy goes even further to explore redevelopment strategies ranging from alternative currencies to communal ownership of land. No matter the topic, the stories, tools, and frameworks provided by the book are both accessible and empowering to the reader. While considerable engagement, organizing, and work is needed to transform our communities, the ideas and examples in Take Back the Economy can serve as a starting place. With many communities already paving the way, more can work together to a build a more ethical and sustainable world.

Can Megacities Be Sustainable?

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Skyline of Tokyo during the night

Picture taken by toykoform (flickr.com)

9/15/2015 by Alisha Pegan

As the plane descends for landing, what is your first thought when you peek out the airplane window and take in the countless lights, cars, and buildings living below?

A common reaction is “WOW. There are so, so many!”. Yes, so many things and people buzzing about and taking up resources, water, energy, human capital. So, what feeds it all? Where does the supply begin and where does it end? And in the perspective of sustainability: is there a way to make it full circle? Is there and could there be a self-sustaining megacity?

This question is a global concern. The WorldBank statistics indicate that currently 54% of the global population lives in urban areas and by 2030 it will increase 66%. As urban density increases, county and city governments are investigating and applying strategies to manage the people, as well as their short and long term needs, while providing a high quality of life. Navigating the intercept of quality of life and sustainability on a city-wide level can provide systematic solutions, such as livability, green infrastructure, and resilience. Various megacities will serve as case studies elaborating best and worst cases for different mitigation and adaption strategies, and since these diverse solutions need diverse input from politicians, citizens, intellects, and artists, there will also be investigations of why the strategies may or may not work from social, environmental, and economic factors.