Kent Portney's "Our Green Cities" Blog

Two New Research Articles

If you are interested in recent research that examines local participation to the pursuit of sustainability policies, or the role of local nonprofit organizations in influencing those decisions, I have two recently published papers that you might be interested in.  I will try to post these on the Our Green Cities web site, but if you can't get access to them, just email me and I'll see if I can help.

    The article that addresses the participation-sustainability link is:

“Participation and the Pursuit of Sustainability in U.S. Cities,” in Urban Affairs Review, forthcoming 2010. Co-authored with Jeffrey Berry.

And the article that looks at the role of nonprofits is:

“The Local Nonprofit Sector and the Pursuit of Sustainability in American Cities: A Preliminary Exploration,” in Local Environment, Volume 15, No. 4, April 2010, pp. 323-339. Co-authored with Zachary Cuttler.

New Book on Urban Sustainability and Economic Development

Back in October I wrote about a new book by Joan Fitzgerald, Professor at Northeastern University, and this book is now in print. It provides a wide array of documented information about how cities are taking advantage of the pursuit of sustainability to help grow their local economies.  The book, Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development, is published by Oxford University Press, and I highly recommend it. If you are looking for ways of understanding what cities are actually doing around the US to do green economic development, this is a must-read.

New Book on Sustainable Development in Cities coming out

My friend and colleague Joan Fitzgerald, from Northeastern University, has a new book coming out with Oxford University Press.  The book is called "Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development," ( isn't Emerald Cities a great title?) and represents an excellent effort to develop case studies of what cities are doing to link economic development to sustainability.  She has lots of examples, and really provides the foundation for building a national green jobs strategy.  I recommend that you take a look at this book when it becomes available. Go to the Oxford University web site to see the pre-release description.

Survey of Local Officials Under Way

My colleague Jeff Berry and I have been working with some students (Katie Bond and Kelli Farrington) over the last few months on a very ambitious project to conduct a survey of local public officials to get their views of sustainability, green jobs, and many related issues.  The focus of this project is on 50 of the largest 54 cities in the US.

We have already surveyed all of the city councilors in these cities -- there are currently about 541 such councilors -- sometimes also called aldermen or commissioners -- and we have heard from 170 of them so far.  Four cities have proven to be much less responsive to our survey than the others -- none of the councilors in Sacramento and Santa Ana, California, Miami, FL, and Columbus, OH.  If you know any councilors in those cities, perhaps you could convince them to fill out the questionnaire either on paper or online.

The project also includes surveys of all major city administrators and managers -- mostly department heads -- as well as the leaders of local nonprofit groups working on issues of economic development and sustainability.  In total, we have distributed around 3000 questionnaires.

We have just completed some analysis of the city councilors' responses that we have received so far, and have written a paper that will be presented at the American Political Science Association conference in Toronto over Labor Day weekend. Check back in a few weeks and I'll post this paper here on th"Our Green Cities" blog and web site.