We're in New York right now on the final stretch of our book tour, and fortuitously, yesterday the city's mayor publicly announced a new agenda for the city which accepts the 2030 Challenge for rethinking urban development with a commitment to achieving major leaps toward sustainability by the year 2030. It's called plaNYC.
Mayor Bloomberg unveiled the plan at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows, opening with a reference to that site's legacy of the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs, and the daring vision of the people who'd been there, challenging the boundaries of imagination and putting forth bold ideas for the future. The speech was followed by a panel discussion with some exceptional New York leaders, moderated by Tom Brokaw, and including one of the Worldchanging team's great heroes, Majora Carter.
It was a realistic address about the immense and immediate challenges facing the city, but inarguably hopeful that New York is in a position to preempt looming problems with innovative thinking and integrated solutions.
The team appointed to develop NYC's long-term sustainability plan looked at everything from playgrounds to power plants to public transportation.
We've looked at every playground - all 1,310 of them, and identified which neighborhoods will need more of them going forward. We've rated the age and efficiency of all 25 of the power plants serving the city - through 2030. We've estimated which of our nearly 250 miles of subway routes will be congested on an average day in 2030. We have, in short, tried to anticipate every physical barrier our communities will experience to maintaining - and building on - the quality of life we enjoy today.
They emerged with three primary challenges for the coming 25 years:
1. Population: By 2010, the five borroughs of New York City will be home to 200,000 more people than they are today, and by 2030, that number will be nearly 1,000,000 additional residents (which doesn't take into account the constant additional presence of thousands of tourists). Bloomberg made the projection real by pointing out that this will be the equivalent of adding the entire combined populations of Boston and Miami.
2. Aging insfrastructure: With century-old buildings and systems still providing daily support to the city's population, and with that population hitting astonishing growth rates, the age and additional pressure on those areas of the city will present potential hazards and high cost if not restored carefully and soon.
3. Environmental quality: As a result of the first two, and the more global problems compromising the climate and our natural resources, New York's air, water and land face increased pressure and more significant consequences of impact.
The mayor's talk was interspersed with several video presentations focusing on particular challenges, and speaking with citizens, experts, and local leaders about their personal experience living in New York and what they expect (and hope) to see in coming years. Carlton Brown of Full Spectrum, LLC, was one of the last speakers on the video series, and his words not only beautifully summed up the feeling of the collected voices, but also perfectly echoed Worldchanging's own fundamental beliefs:
[New York is] a place where we have the smartest people in the world, we have all the resources to clean up brownfields, we have all the resouces to use less energy, design better buildings. We can do this. The only hurdles are not technological, they are about human will.
Of course, we are behind this idea wholeheartedly. Bloomberg echoed the idea that we already have the tools and technological know-how that's required to make some major changes. By embracing those available means, he declared, New York will -- by 2030 -- reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than thirty percent, achieve the best air quality of any big city in America, clean up all contaminated land, and open up rivers, harbors and bays for recreation by restoring wetlands and attending to the condition of local water bodies.
plaNYC is an action plan for New Yorkers and the agenda is laid out as a series of imperative actions that will require the cooperation of individuals, policy-makers, planners and community advocates. That collaborative and multi-layered approach was well-illustrated by the distinguished group of panelist who came together to talk over New York's problems and potential once Mayor Bloomberg closed his remarks. It was a very interesting discussion which brought out the need for individuals to look outside of the narrow lens of their own pursuits and see how their work intertwines with the larger needs of the city.
Brokaw began by asking each of the five guests to concisely review their most central concerns as we move forward. Majora Carter, Executive Director and Founder of Sustainable South Bronx, cited environmental justice issues and the domino effect of negative consequences that impact people growing up where environmental health is degraded. In the South Bronx, pollution causes brain damage in children, compromising their learning capabilities and making them more likely to struggle in school and end up in jail instead of in college. As a result, the challenges facing that entire community are bound to persist, with the residents there finding far less opporunity to get the education and empowerment that could push them into leadership positions in the city.
Diana Fortuna, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, brought up growth and the issue of regarding economic prosperity as a long-term goal, and pursuing it as such, rather than seeing only the present and immanent economic conditions. Smart decisions for the city can only be made within that framework.
Edward Ott, Executive Director of New York City's Central Labor Council AFL-CIO, addressed the opportunity to create jobs out of a reconsideration of urban expansion through the lens of sustainability. He emphasized the importance of including working people and families in planning the city's future, such that they see themselves as a part of the picture of a thriving city, not as a population being pushed to the periphery and excluded from crucial decisions. The cooperation of the working class can make great things happen fast, he said; and likewise, their collective resistance can make city-wide efforts much more difficult.
Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, a research scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, focused foremost on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate extremes. Dealing with automobile dependency and power generation present a dual priority, and she cited not only reduction efforts, but also green building projects and smart design that will allow normal life in New York to generate far less CO2. We're in a competition with London, she said, to be leaders on climate change action (and we all know how much harder everyone works when they think they're trying to beat someone).
In discussing the impact of auto dependency, the idea of a congestion tax for incoming commuter cars arose, which sparked both audience applause and words of caution from Ott. He warned that such taxation needs not to become the burden of the working class, who commute by necessity and can't afford to be penalized for a circumstance that's allowing them to support their families. Carter suggested the use of dollars generated through taxation for supporting public services and community improvement.
Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, returned to population. With increasing numbers, we need to work fast to get ahead of the trend, and anticipate the challenges that population growth will present. He named resource-conservation solutions like district heating and cooling, distributed power generation, rethinking waste management, and other means of transforming the city's internal systems and operations.
Yaro characterized plaNYC as an exercise in direct democracy - a way to present choices about the city's future directly to the people who will be impacted, and to trust that they will make smart decisions. This follows on a point that several of them made in various ways, which is that New Yorkers live in New York because it's a place the promises opportunity. It's not because it's cheap; it's not, as Edward Ott said, because people want to "read in the dark and eat alfalfa sprouts." People come to work hard and benefit from that work, and nobody ought to have the benefits of a hard working life at the expense of another community. Majora Carter added that the playing field is not level, and that these opportunities don't reach each New Yorker equally. We need to look for ways to create jobs in one neighborhood by collecting and reusing wasted resources from another, as is being done in the South Bronx.
The individual statements blossomed into a lively conversation which left a sense that Carlton Brown's earlier statement might be more of a description of reality than a description of a problem. Human will was readily apparent yesterday, from all the borroughs and many influential organizations. Hopefully plaNYC will add necessary activation energy to the simmering collective potential and New York will gracefully step into its role as a world leader in urban sustainability.
Thanks to high-speed communication, the transcript of Bloomberg's talk and a video of the entire presentation are already available online.
