Sustainable cities are closer than we think

A QUICK scan of the headlines paints a bleak picture of the environment. Oceans are filling with plastic, aging cities are grappling with failing infrastructure, and air pollution is blackening the skies. But there is hope. Steven Cohen, public affairs professor at Columbia University and senior adviser at the school’s Earth Institute, believes big cities are leading the way to a more sustainable planet by making innovative changes. His book, The Sustainable City, takes a public policy perspective on fixing the planet. He spoke on the Knowledge@Wharton show, which airs on SiriusXM channel 111, about how to make sustainability a reality.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@ Wharton: Why is this change happening in big cities more than in rural areas?

Steven Cohen:

Because of their density, cities provide the opportunity to have costeffective delivery of services such as water, energy, waste management and transportation. As the population of the planet has grown — it’s now at 7.5 billion and will probably peak to 9 billion — the best way for us to live the way we live today is to concentrate population and use that concentration to apply technology to reduce our impact on the biosphere.

Knowledge@Wharton: Are cities aware of this and making plans?

Cohen:

Yes, but they’re not necessarily doing it for the reason I’ve outlined. They’re doing it because cities are now part of a global competition for business and people. If you get off the plane in Beijing and the air is orange, you’re not going to bring your business there. I think [former Mayor] Mike Bloomberg recognized that in New York City. He was no famous environmentalist, but when his deputy mayor said, “We’re going to increase by 1 million people in the next 20 or 30 years,” the mayor started thinking about the energy, the water, the traffic, the housing, the parks and other quality- of- life elements.

That’s really a part of what’s driving this, and you see signs of it in the transportability of business. Amazon can conceive of taking 50,000 people for its second headquarters and locating it anyplace in the United States. That’s not something you saw back in the Industrial Age.

Cohen: New York is doing well. We didn’t realize it, but we almost went broke moving from being a manufacturing city to being a post- industrial city. At the end of World War II, almost half of the gross domestic product in New York City was in making clothing. Last year, it was less than 2%. We don’t make cars, we don’t make clothing in New York. We make ideas. We make public relations. We do finance. We do all sorts of technology- oriented functions, health care. But we don’t make things here anymore because that’s not the high- value- added part of the economy.

We inadvertently moved in the right direction. We almost went bankrupt in the process, but losing all of these businesses was actually a good thing because it freed up the space for what they’re doing now. The cover from my book is from the new park called the High Line. The High Line was a freight train from the West Side docks to the factories we used to have on the West Side of Manhattan. The docks are all gone because containerized shipping made New York’s port no longer viable. We were too small.

The factories are gone, and now you’ve got high-end boutiques, art galleries, great restaurants. New York has 50 million tourists and a very different kind of economy than we used to have. Frankly, this is the way the economy has moved. In the U.S., 80% of the economy is in the service sector now, so the part of the economy you want to be in is the part that New York has found itself in. Part of what attracts people into this kind of post-industrial city is the sustainability factors, like air you can breathe, water you can ride your bicycle next to, good park access and all the other things I talk about in the book.

Knowledge@Wharton: But those changes have an impact on the cost of housing. We see that here in Philadelphia, where certain areas have been revitalized and now it costs $400,000 for a townhouse.

Cohen:

The issue that we’re facing is a public policy issue, not that different than after World War II. Because of federal housing policies, like guaranteed mortgages and deductions on taxes and interest, we went from being a nation of renters to owners. Now the issue is the poorer people, working people who service this economy, are going to have to live so far away that their quality of life will deteriorate. What has to accompany this gentrification is an effort to have some kind of public investment, either through tax expenditures or just through