Kent Portney's "Our Green Cities" Blog

Non-state actors workshop

I was fortunate to have been invited to participate in a workshop last week on "Social science perspectives on non-state actors in environmental governance" at the National Socio-environmental synthesis center at the University of Maryland in Annapolis.  Many thanks to Carmen Sirianni, Dana Fisher, and Andy Andrews for the invitation and for putting the workshop together. Not all of the presentations had to do with cities, but research by Dana Fisher from the Universty of Maryland and by Suzanne Staggenborg from Pitt focused on local groups of various sorts.  Dana's work is about what she calls local "hybrid" organizations which perform lots of different environmental functions. Her analysis is largely focused on New York City, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. I presented work with my colleague Jeff Berry that looks at how local groups engage in advocacy with local policy makers.  Several papers on this subject are accessible at the ourgreencities web site.

Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom!

I just wanted to post my heartiest congratulations to Elinor Ostrom from Indiana University upon winning the Nobel Prize in Economics.  As you may know, Lin is not an economist, she is a political scientist.  So that makes the award all the more pleasing to those of us in political science but who work at the intersection with economics.

Our Tisch College at Tufts had Lin to campus last spring to receive the 2009 Tisch Civic Engagement Research Prize.  Not quite the Nobel Prize, this award nonetheless is designed to recognize the outstanding research contributions to understanding civic engagement.  Of course, Ostrom's work on common pool resource issues, especially water-related issues, is just outstanding. Over the last few years, in working with colleagues around the University, including engineers and public health scholars, on issues of water policies, I have come to see how extremely important Lin's work has become outside of the confines of political science.

My personal interest in Lin's work comes from trying to understand the relationship between civic engagement and participation and cities' pursuit of sustainability policies.  Some of my recent research (available soon on the Our Green Cities web site) shows that there is a tendency for cities with residents who are more civically and politically engaged are more likely to adopt and implement sustainability policies. Ostrom's work provides the theoretical and empirical foundation for this exploration.

Sustainability in Small Cities article in the Boston Review

There was a recent article in the Boston Review by Catherine Tumber entitled "Small, Green, and Good: The role of neglected cities in a sustainable future."  Thus article advocates the pursuit of sustainability in smaller US cities, and specifically mentions Syracuse, Rochester, Decatur, New Bedford, Kalamazoo, Buffalo, Trenton, Erie, Youngstown, and others as places where interesting and important things seem to be happening.  I chatted with Catherine about the article as she was contemplating it, and I must confess that it came out a bit different from what I expected.  In any case, the article is followed by a series of responses from readers, and they are also important to read, including the critical, albeit misguided, ones.

Tufts Global Cities Symposium

Congratulations to the Tufts EPIIC program on "Cities: Forging an Urban Future" -- including its Director, Sherm Teichman and all of the terrific students who worked on last weekend's events. This represented an amazing collection of people and talent from around the world, and a large number of these people have been involved with sustainable cities projects and research for a long time. At the risk of leaving people out, it was a real experience to hear from Peter Droege, Director of Solar City, International Energy Agency; Chair, World Council for Renewable Energy, Asia Pacific; and author of The Renewable City: A Comprehensive Guide to an Urban Future and Urban Energy Transition: From Fossil Fuels to Renewable Power. Peter led a breakout session focusing on Masdar, the planned city in the United Arab Emirates, initiated by Abu Dhabi. I also enjoyed hearing Joan Fitzgerald, from Northeastern University, who spoke about the various forms of economic development pursued in the context of sustainable cities. 

I was fortunate to have been able to lead one of the breakout sessions, with my subject being "Sustainable Cities, Governance, and Political Will," where about a dozen participants and I talked extensively about what it takes to create the political will to pursue sustainability.

New "Our Green Cities" web site

If you haven't already visited our new "Our Green Cities" web site, please check it out.  My sister has done a terrific job of moving to this new site. We still have quite a lot of work to do to tailor the format of the materials to the new format of the site, but we're working on it almost daily.  As always, if there is anything you'd like to see posted there, just send me a note.

Top Mayors for Sustainability

In case you haven't checked out the "Our Green Cities" web site lately, we added six mayors to the list of "America's Top Mayors for Sustainability."  Congratulations to these mayors -- David Palmer of Trenton, NJ, Chris Coleman of St. Paul, MN, Dave Cieslewicz of Madison WI, Ralph Becker of Salt Lake City, Joe Curtatone of Somerville, MA, and John Marks of Tallahassee, FL.  Each of these mayors has made the pursuit of sustainability a high priority, and has served as a strong voice in support of programs and policies to achieve greater sustainability. 

Wall Street Journal Article on Cities and Energy

In case you missed it, there was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal recently that briefly profiled the efforts of nine cities around the world in their efforts to reduce energy consumption. It profiles New York City, Chicago, Aspen CO, Ann Arbor MI, Palm Desert CA, Amsterdam, Beijing, London, and Thane, India.  View the article here. 

This is a pretty solid article as far as it goes, but what struck me the most is that it did not attempt to provide a larger view of how widespread such activities are around the world, and even in US cities.  In fact, if I were to look for the US cities that are doing the most, I don't think I would have selected many of the places discussed in this article.  I definitely would include NYC and Chicago; but I would have included Austin TX, Cambridge MA, Santa Monica and San Francisco CA, Grand Rapids MI, and some other cities because I think they probably better exemplify best practices. 

I was also struck by the fact that there was no effort to provide a sense of the larger context in which the selected cities have decided to pursue energy efficiency and conservation.  For many cities, that larger context consists of broad-based efforts to try to become more sustainable, especially in terms of the bio-physical environment and quality of life. 

Let me know if you are aware of any other major city efforts, either on energy efficiency or climate change.  I'm particularly interested in actions and programs undertaken by the city government.

Popular Science Magazine Rankings of Green Cities

In February of 2008, Popular Science magazine published its rankings of cities according to how green they are. See the rankings online at America's 50 Greenest Cities.  I would be interested to know how you think this approach to ranking the cities compares to the SustainLane rankings and to my own rankings.

There are some major differences.  My rankings do not try to assess cities in terms of how green they actually are (how clean the air is, how pure the water is, etc.), but rather focuses just on what city governments are doing to try to become more sustainable.  That's why Popular Science says that Boston is near the top of the list and my rankings have Boston pretty far down.  Boston's policies on sustainability are almost non-existent, but the water and air are relatively clean anyway. My sense is that the Popular Science ranking resembles the SustainLane rankings, but the latter are somewhat more elaborate, multidimensional, and probably a more accurate assessment. But I'd love to hear your ideas on this.

Clinton Foundation and Make It Right Project Join Forces in New Orleans

In March 2008, the Clinton Foundation's Global Initiative joined forces with Brad Pitt's Make It Right project to spearhead a major initiative to build 150 new sustainable and affordable homes in New Orlean's Lower Ninth Ward, the area so devastated by Hurricane Katrina.  About 600 students from around the country attended the events, which included a series of brainstorming sessions and workshops at Tulane University.  One of the students in my Sustainable Cities course at Tufts attended, and reported that there is tremendous hope that the result will be a more sustainable New Orleans.  Check out the Clinton Foundation's description at the Foundation's web site and the Make It Right Foundation's efforts at the Make It Right Project web site.

Green Blogs

In case you haven't notice, in the last couple of years there has been an absolute explosion in the number of blogs dedicated to green issues -- the environment, sustainability, climate protection, green building, and so on.  Now there is a web site that provide direct and immediate access to a large number of these.  This web site, called "best green blogs," has searchable indexes and is relatively easy to use.  This web site is listed there.  Check it out at http://BestGreenBlogs.com .