Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue

2 Sustainability

29 2 2 sustAInAbIlItY AnDrew roSS the ABJect fAilure of international leaders to reach binding emission -reductions targets in 2009 at the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen, in 2010 in Cancun, and in 2011 in Durban has compounded the despair that thoughtful people now feel about the future. Even if the political obstacles to carbon policy making were to rapidly dissolve, many have concluded that it may already be too late to take meaningful steps to avert drastic climate change. Better to accept the foreseeable consequences by trying to anticipate and adapt to the worst scenarios. Indeed, any sober reading of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s periodic bulletins about the slow eco-apocalypse already underway would support this very conclusion. Gramsci’s motto—“pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”1—was never more relevant than to the uncertain domain of climate politics. Some prominent ecologists, such as James Lovelock, have recently argued that to properly confront the threat of climate change, “it may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”2 This belief, that civil liberties should be suspended until action can be taken, has its advocates, especially among those who favor top-down geoengineering schemes involving large-scale technological manipulation of the global energy balance. Certainly, anything is worth considering if we are to win the race to decarbonize, but not if it puts us on an authoritarian death march. For we should be clear about this—the failure to confront the climate crisis is not a failure of democracy, it is the result of the stranglehold of fossil capitalism on democracy. For those of us who are allergic to despair on the one hand and resistant to authoritarian technical fixes on the other, we look to cities for evidence that real advances are being made, and one of the reasons is that ANDREW ROSS 30 city governance is relatively progressive. Where national and regional politicians are still in the pockets of the oil, coal, and gas lobbies, city managers have been putting green policies into action for some time now. The Large Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), comprising forty of the world’s largest cities collaborating on extensive decarbonization programs, issued its own Climate Communiqué at Copenhagen, in which mayors pleaded with the national representatives of the carbon powers to “recognize that the future of our globe will be won or lost in the cities of the world.”3 The mayors’ statement reflected a growing consensus that only in dense urban environments could efficient, low-carbon living be achieved on a mass scale. Humans are fast becoming an urban species, and their survival will depend on how we live in cities that already consume 75 percent of the world’s energy and emit 80 percent of the greenhouse gases.4 Even without a decisive shift in energy supply away from fossil fuel, more compact patterns of urban growth are delivering a sizable boost to efforts at decarbonization. In the United States, looking to cities as sites of salvation is an old story, although the script for “city as redeemer” has changed several times since John Winthrop’s 1630 exhortation to the Massachusetts Bay Colony pilgrims that they should build a “city upon a hill.” For the best part of two centuries, American city building was driven by the longstanding Christian equation of godliness with city residence. But the late nineteenth-century rise of the teeming industrial city—routinely depicted by reformers as a miasma of sin, filth, and corruption—turned urban living into a moral trap. The infernal Victorian city of industry was now seen as a threat to the physical and spiritual health of its inhabitants, raising their mortality rate and diluting their humanity. Urban improvers were inspired to redeem this fallen population, first through environmental uplift—in the form of edifying contact with parks and other leafy spaces—and then through planning aimed at decongestion—by dispersing their numbers out to garden cities on the green and airy urban fringe.5 The shift to decentralization and mass suburbanization in the twentieth century had many overlapping causes (some of them clearly governed SUSTAINABILITY 31 by racial prejudice), but it turned on the belief that low-density suburbia was a more salubrious environment than the congested center city. Yet, beginning in the early 1980s, the pattern of outward flight began slowly to reverse itself. Whereas before, moral homilies...