SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES IN THE U.S.
There are many examples of communities on the sustainability path in the U.S. Portland, Oregon has won recognition for its region-wide metropolitan planning effort which includes a comprehensive urban growth boundary and a strategy for integrated land use and transportation planning. Seattle, Washington was one of the first cities to develop a community indicators program, and it has spurred on numerous similar efforts from places as diverse as Pasadena, California, and Jacksonville, Florida. Community indicators are a tool which is increasingly being utilized by communities to gauge local progress on moving toward or away from a sustainable future, and are important for building greater community participation, interest, and understanding of environmental matters.
The San Francisco Bay Area is a focus for much progress on the sustainable communities front. A Sustainable San Francisco plan has been developed through support of the City of San Francisco and grassroots environmental agencies. In 1996, the nonprofit agency Urban Ecology released 'Blueprint For A Sustainable Bay Area', which documents and promotes sustainability efforts throughout the Bay Area, mainly in areas of sustainable urban design. More recently, a cross-sectoral collaborative of regional leaders called the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Development (BAASD) has come together to work out a sustainability vision for the region. BAASD hopes to develop a regional strategy for the Bay Area similar to that developed nationally by the President's Council on Sustainable Development.
A sustainable communities 'movement' is emerging in the U.S. that integrates a range of contemporary social, economic, and environmental concerns, including: the social and environmental impacts of uncontrolled and low-density urban development ("sprawl"); a lack of civic leadership and the rise of a 'civic entrepreneurialism' movement; increasing demand for more participatory and informed decision-making processes (such as the indicators programs mentioned above); and an increasing realization that regional problems require regional solutions.
Perhaps the greatest sustainability challenge at the community level is the pattern of low-density, automobile-oriented urban growth which has become the norm in U.S. metropolitan areas since WWII. Indeed, the Sierra Club recently named sprawl as the most important environmental issue facing the U.S. in the 1990s (See: The Dark Side of the American Dream: The Costs and Consequences of Suburban Sprawl, by the Sierra Club, available on-line at their website). At the heart of the problem is the average American's overdependence on the automobile; the U.S. is the only nation in the world where the vast majority of people travel to work by private automobile. In Europe, not one country makes more than half their daily journeys by automobile (see: "Ahwahnee Principles for Resource Efficient Communities", an article from the Local Government Commission website) As a result, the 'ecological footprint' (or daily resource consumption) of the average American is embarrasingly out of kilter with the rest of the world: for example, the average American is responsible for 19.1 tons of CO2 global greenhouse gas emissions per annumthe equivalent of 3.5 Europeans or 20 people in India.
As a result of the growing disenchantment with the effects of sprawl, 'smart growth' has emerged as a popular new approach to urban growth management and open space preservation. Groups such as the Local Government Commission in California advocate for smart growth that leads to resource efficient and more livable communities. Nationally, a 'Smart Growth Network' has been established, lead by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) and US EPA (see website: www.smartgrowth.org).
Smart growth promotes a range of urban design and management techniques that improve resource efficiency and community livability. The Sierra Club sprawl report includes a discussion of smart growth solutions, including the following: Open space preservation through land purchasing programs targeted at environmentally sensitive areas and endangered farmland; Establishment of urban growth boundaries to protect open space and funnel growth to areas with existing infrastructure capacity; Revitalization of existing towns and cities, in particular through 'brownfield' redevelopment and redevelopment of declining downtowns; and Integrated planning of land-use and transportation, encouraging 'transit-oriented development' around public transit stops with more compact mixed development.
Overall, smart growth is an important element of green planning approaches at a local level. In particular, they assist in achieving a number of specific environmental goals. For example, improved walkability of neighborhoods along with increased transit use mean less use of the private automobile and therefore decreased greenhouse emissions and improved urban air quality.
Most remarkably, business is on-board with the concept of smart growth, as demonstrated by the Bank of America co-sponsored report Beyond Sprawl: New Patterns of Growth to Fit the New California, which outlines how smart growth approaches are not only good for the environment, but are also more fiscally responsible for cities and communities.
Improving governance is another great challenge for green planning at the local level. As a result of disenchantment with national and state-level politics, there has been a refocusing toward local politics as an arena for involved leadership and true public participation to reemerge. Nationally, the concept of 'civic entrepreneurialism' has emerged, which encourages regional collaboration to achieve economic success.
Civic leaders such as State Senator Myron Orfield in Minnesota, author of MetroPolitics, advocate for the recognition of the importance of regional collaboration in urban areas to meet a range of goals. Orfield's analysis of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area found that much of the infrastructure investment in the region was going to the wealthier and faster-growing 'edge-cities' on the fringe of the region, while inner-cities and inner-ring suburbs decline and receive less than their fair share of investment. As a result, Orfield brought together a regional coalition which has put in place regional tax-sharing to encourage re-investment in inner cities and discourage further sprawl on the urban fringe.
The Minneapolis-St. Paul example is only one example of an emerging 'regionalism' movement, with regions such as Silicon Valley and Chicago demonstrating similar leadership (see www.citistates.com for further information). At the community level, responsibility for creating a sustainable future lies ultimately with individuals, households, and families. Individual consumer choices and behaviors have a dramatic multiplier effect upon resource use and efficiency. For example, an individual's daily choice of whether to drive or use public transit or whether to recycle or not.
There is a growing movement to shift away from over-consumption in the U.S., as demonstrated in groups such as the Alliance for the New American Dream (www.newdream.org). A recent public television documentary, Affluenza, discussed the many problems of overconsumption, both social and environmental.
A fascinating, and increasingly successful program which demonstrates vision for the future is the 'eco-teams' approach developed by David Gershon of the Global Action Plan (GAP). GAP has developed a four-month behavior modification program that, to date, has enabled 3,000 households in the U.S. (and 8,000 worldwide) to reduce the stress their consumption patterns impose on the environment. Neighborhood based eco-teams work together over the four-month period, and regularly meet to discuss how each household is doing in reaching recycling and resource-use targets, and share ideas on doing more to become sustainable. Gershon does not see his program as being the solution to finding a sustainable future, but as an important step everyone can take to put us on the path to sustainability. As a result, a sense of neighborhood and community is developed at the same time as good work is done for the environment.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
The Dark Side of the American Dream: The Costs and Consequences of Suburban Sprawl, Sierra Club, 1998.
"The Ahwahnee Principles: Toward More Livable Communities", Judith Corbett and Joe Velasquez of the Local Government Commission, reprinted from Western City, September 1994. (8 pages)
Eco-Pioneers: Practical Visionaries Solving Today's Environmental Problems, see Chapter 23 (on David Gershon and the Global Action Plan (GAP) Program), by Steve Lerner, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997. (24 pages)