Abstract
The Guide to Greening Cities by Sadhu Aufochs Johnston, Steven S. Nicholas, and Julia Parzen provides a comprehensive look into the practices of North America’s green city leaders and the methods these leaders employ in advancing sustainable urban agendas for cities in the United States and Canada. In just over two hundred pages, Aufochs Johnston, Nicholas, and Parzen painstakingly illustrate the vast number of ways that North American cities are becoming greener and more resilient, and give an insider perspective on the machinations of the city governments that are making this happen. The authors’ perspectives—rendered from within the administrations of some of the greenest cities in North America (Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia)—lend the book a behind-the-scenes credibility that is unique within the scholarship on green urbanism. A slim and accessibly written book, The Guide to Greening Cities will be appreciated by professionals and policy-oriented students in planning, public policy, and urban design.
The authors have written this book as a way to inspire and assist city officials, employees, advocates, and residents in attempts to green their cities. They use the term “Green City Leader” to refer to what they identify as an emerging position within city government—a city official specifically tasked with and empowered to enact green policy, programs, and projects throughout the city (11). The authors use the term “greening” in order to encapsulate what has been called “green urbanism,” “green cities,” and “green development” leaning on Timothy Beatley’s six hallmarks of Green Urbanism identified in Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities (2000) in order to provide a theoretical frame for the term (13). Importantly, the authors make a clear demarcation between the ideal of a “triple bottom line” approach—one that focuses on social, environmental, and economic results—and the reality of what typically falls within the purview of a green city manager, which is, at least currently, a much smaller and narrower focus on an environmental agenda. The authors, following on the arguments advanced by Edward Glaeser (Triumph of the City, 2011) and others, understand the city as the most important scale at which sustainable policies can be implemented (3). Taking this logic a step further, the authors also contend that cities are the government entity most capable of effecting sustainable change because they can do so as a function of many of their basic operations: writing building and zoning codes, managing development, maintaining and building transportation, water and wastewater infrastructure, and coordinating waste management (8). Understanding their intended audience, the authors, refreshingly, do not devote much space to rehashing this now well-accepted polemic, but devote the majority of the book to bridging the gaping hole that exists between sustainable urban theory and contemporary practice with thoughtful, on-the-ground, examples illustrating what has worked and why.
A Guide to Greening cities is divided into six succinct chapters, each dealing with an area of consideration for green city leaders. Each chapter is then supplemented by at least one “case in point” which illustrates the chapter’s leading ideas with an example from practice. Chapter one is devoted to Aufochs Johnston’s personal experiences as an “outsider” nonprofit activist in Cleveland and then as Mayor Daley’s assistant for green initiatives in Chicago and finally as deputy city manager for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia. Chapter 2 illustrates the ways and mechanisms by which city governments are changing their internal operations. Chapter 3 discusses the ways in which cities are using their internal assets and policy mechanism to guide green development across both the public and private sectors. Chapter 4 gives advice to the green city leader on how to effect change from within a range of positions inside city government. Readers interested in financing mechanisms for green energy and sustainability initiatives will find a wealth of information and ideas in chapter 5. This chapter is particularly useful as planners and other green city leaders will typically have little familiarity with financial mechanisms—yet, as the authors make clear, creative financing is a fundamental component of success in this arena. Chapter 6 stresses the importance of and suggests ways in which cities can establish and maintain clear sustainability progress indicators. The “case in point” sections document a wide range of green city initiatives taking place across North America. These short case studies do a good job of telling the story from the green city leader’s point of view and in documenting the challenges that these leaders faced, and continue to face, on the road to implementation.
Methodologically, the authors rely on both firsthand experience and extensive interviews with green city leaders across North America. The interviews and case studies are intended to provide readers with an internal perspective on what has worked when attempting to institute green city projects and programs within the North American context. What at first seems to be a limitation of the book, on second glance turns out to be one of its greatest strengths. By limiting themselves to North America, the authors have gathered a wealth of examples that are appropriate to North America’s particular political, economic, and financial climate. This factor alone distinguishes it from other entries into the field of green urbanism such as Beatley’s previously mentioned Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities (2000) and Douglas Farr’s Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature (2008), which rely heavily (if not exclusively) on European examples. While examples and case studies in the book are necessarily weighted toward large, progressive cities like Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Austin, and Minneapolis, the authors have also made a conscious attempt to include examples from cities that are not traditionally associated with sustainable urbanism. With examples from small cities like Lawrence, Kansas, and Asheville, North Carolina, the book does a good job of documenting the ways in which green city leaders can operate in more socially and financially conservative climates.
While a praiseworthy and useful entry into the field of green urbanism, the book is not without problems. The six chapters succeed in dividing the work into digestible parts. However, the formulaic and superficial reporting on one example after another becomes quickly monotonous. This problem is somewhat ameliorated by the “case in point” articles, but even these can feel thin on specifics. The understandable demands of publishing and printing aside, one wishes for perhaps fewer examples and more depth. More clear and meaningful division in the chapters would aid in reading, and more frequent and carefully curated images would aid in quick consumption of the book’s major points – a feature that is not insignificant to busy city managers. There is undeniable overlap between the subject matter in most of the chapters, but the book’s structure does little to keep subjects from bleeding together across chapters. Furthermore, while the interviews and reporting are successful at capturing the spirit and context in which projects are intended, the blithe, self-reported nature of these successes and the metrics and statistics that are used to support them will leave some readers skeptical. The interviews allow the reader to hear from many green city leaders but largely omit other voices. Hearing from other constituents—residents, industry leaders, city managers, and developers—would be one way to build depth and add balance within the analysis.
With the exception of a “case in point” on Denver’s conscious construction of low-income housing along transit lines, the book has omitted any detailed discussion of the complex relationship between green urbanism and gentrification. While the authors acknowledge that new green development often comes with social consequences, they also maintain that social equity is not often within the purview of the green city leader. While understandable in the attempt to produce a succinct and focused discussion centered on green urbanism, foregoing any real discussion on equity seems like a missed opportunity as it might have given the book a balance of opinion that few contributions to this area have achieved.
In The Guide to Greening Cities, Aufochs Johnston, Nicholas, and Parzen have written a book that will be a useful resource for green city leaders and those committed to achieving sustainable urbanism in North America. Intelligently, the authors have supplemented the book with a companion website, http://guidetogreeningcities.org/, which is intended to provide additional case studies and updates. Knowledgeable readers are unlikely to find earth-shattering new ideas or conclusions in The Guide to Greening Cities. However, the coalescing of green city ideas, precedents, and realistic strategies for implementation within the North American context into a single volume is both worthwhile and useful. The Guide to Greening Cities would make an accessible and useful companion text to any studio or policy course on green urbanism and should find its way onto the desk of city managers and mayors across North America.