Kent Portney's "Our Green Cities" Blog

Interdisciplinary Doctoral program on Water and Diplomacy

I'm happy to report that Tufts University recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation's IGERT program to support the creation of a new Ph.D. program in "Water and Diplomacy."  The idea behind this program is to train new graduate students on issues well beyond what they would get strictly within their own disciplines or departments.  The purpose of this is to promote the idea that addressing the world's water resource problems will require an understanding that far exceeds what engineers, natural scientists, economists, or other social scientists bring.  Starting next fall, the program will admit students who will study water challenges from this broad perspective.  I will post more information about this Ph.D. program in the next couple of weeks.

As you may know, the UN has issued its Millennium Development Goals project. Among the various targets in this initiative is to "Halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water."  If this is going to happen, a whole new generation of scholars and researchers will have to be involved in finding ways of dealing with the scientific, engineering, and international and diplomatic challenges this will entail. That is what this program is designed to try to address.

Visit to Kansas City

I had the opportunity to spend a couple of days visiting Kansas City, and checking out what is being done there in its effort to try to become more sustainable.  Kansas City has had a sustainability program for a couple of years, and it is starting to put the pieces together. One of the more impressive things about what KC is doing has to do with the metropolitan-wide reach of the effort. KC is a fairly sprawling city. It does have a defined downtown area, but the city itself is pretty large and expansive. Beyond the boundaries of the city proper, the suburbs are pretty sprawling as well.  So a lot of what is being done related to sustainability is operating across municipal boundaries.  I had the opportunity to have lunch with David Warm, the Executive Director of the Mid-America Regional Council, the metropolitan planning and policy agency.  This Council has been integrally involved in KC's climate protection program, and the city's Green Impact Zone initiative.

Financial Times issue on The Future of Cities

The September 2010 issue (part 2) of the Financial Times is dedicated to "The Future of Cities." Not surprisingly, most of the articles and supporting materials relate to sustainability in cities around the world. It includes articles entitled "Going Green: The High Stakes Battle to Create the Perfect Sustainable City" and "Save Our Cities: Cities can be sustainable, efficient and dynamic, but first we have to change the way we live."  You can find this issue at the Financial Times cities web site.