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THE SUSTAINABLE CITY
STEVEN COHEN AND GUO DONG

THE
SUSTAINABLE
CITY

SECOND EDITION

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK
 Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu

Copyright ©  Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cohen, Steven,  September - author. | Dong, Guo, author.
Title: The sustainable city / Steven Cohen and Guo Dong.
Description: Second edition. | New York : Columbia University Press, [] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN  (print) | LCCN  (ebook) |
ISBN  (hardback) | ISBN  (trade paperback) |
ISBN  (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: City planning—Environmental aspects. | Urban renewal. |
Sustainable development.
Classification: LCC HT .C  (print) | LCC HT (ebook) |
DDC ./–dc
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America

Cover image: Artem Vorobiev / Getty Images

 To my loving wife, Donna Fishman.
Steven Cohen

To the memory of my grandmothers, He Suzhen and He Juzhen.

Guo Dong
 CONTENTS

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii

PART I. CONCEPT

1. DEFINING THE SUSTAINABLE CITY 3

2. SUSTAINABLE URBAN SYSTEMS 20

3. THE SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLE 50

4. THE TRANSITION TO SUSTAINABLY

MANAGED ORGANIZATIONS 74

5. THE ROLE OF POLITICS AND PUBLIC POLICY

IN BUILDING SUSTAINABLE CITIES 103

6. SUSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT 130

VIII CONTENTS

PART II. CASE STUDIES IN URBAN SUSTAINABILITY

7. WASTE MANAGEMENT IN NEW YORK CITY,

HONG KONG, AND BEIJING 153

8. MASS AND PERSONAL TRANSIT 170

9. THE BUILDING OF THE SMART GRID 192

10. PARKS AND PUBLIC SPACE 209

11. SUSTAINABLE URBAN LIVING AND

THE SHARING ECONOMY 222

PART III. CONCLUSIONS

12. TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE CITY 245

Notes 253
Bibliography 287
Index 317
 PREFACE

T
he field of sustainability is rapidly evolving. We decided to update
this book because we increasingly believe that cities hold the key
to achieving sustainability. In this second edition, we have incor-
porated our recent research on sustainable finance and sustainability
measurement. To ensure that this book has a planet-wide reach, we added
the contributions of an author who has a global perspective. Much of our
recent research on sustainable cities has focused on low-income countries
where sustainability awareness is lower than in high-income countries,
even though the need for sustainability is arguably greater in the former.
For that reason, we expanded our analysis to include a broader perspec-
tive on building sustainable cities, and not just as a way to live in har-
mony with nature but also as a sustainable engine for economic and social
development. Urbanization is going to continue, especially in middle- and
low-income countries. However, in the past few years, we have observed
alarming trends toward greater urban inequality and increasingly nation-
alistic politics. We examine these trends in this second edition and discuss
whether urban sustainability can serve as a new model of inclusive and
environmentally sound growth.
Why did we write a book on sustainable cities in the first place? A
great paradox of the transition to a sustainable economy is that it will
not be achieved in rural places in harmony with nature but rather in cit-
ies built to exploit nature without destroying it. Cities are the structure
that evolved over time to deal with the constant tension between serving
the needs of an ever-growing population and depleting the world’s finite
resources. It is in cities that innovation and technological breakthroughs
X PREFACE

have kept pace with population growth, which ensured not only that we
did not starve to death but also a growing proportion of people—living
in cities—would thrive. On the other hand, cities are also where many
of our crisis originate, such as the climate change and the COVID-
pandemic. This book focuses on cities because place matters. Economic,
technological, and cultural forces are moving people out of rural areas
and into urban areas. The urban migration now under way is a worldwide
phenomenon that reached a critical inflection point in , when for the
first time, most of the people on the planet lived in cities.
To be sustainable in a brain-based economy, cities need to follow sus-
tainable practices and secure buy-in from the public, the government, and
the private sector. Everyone needs to invest time, energy, and money to
create the sustainable city. The infrastructure to support the generation
and transmission of renewable energy; develop mass and personal transit;
and treat and transform water, sewage, and solid waste can be built and
even managed by private contractors. It still requires, however, a public
sector that is active, ethical, sophisticated, and able to form productive
public-private partnerships. Environmentally conscious consumers are
driving many of these initiatives by companies and government through
their lifestyle changes in consumption and in work.
Although the global economy leads to a homogenization of fashion,
entertainment, and aspects of culture and professional life, the human
need for a sense of place and distinctiveness is countering some of these
trends. In the process of becoming more sustainable, cities also have to
find their distinctive identity, based on distinct characteristics of people,
industry, policies, geography, and culture. Many cities are already making
progress by investing in different parts of the infrastructure of the future,
but the sustainable city still has a long way to go.
This second edition of The Sustainable City provides a broad overview
of the sustainable city from a variety of levels of analysis and perspec-
tives: individual, organization, financial, measurement, community, gov-
ernment, and global. We not only need to activate the citizens, the private
sector, and the government, but also need considerable financing and to
change the way we measure and evaluate success. This edition expands
on the thesis of a multistakeholder approach to urban sustainability and
dives deeper into the financing of the type of changes needed in all of
 PREFACE XI

the aspects of urban sustainability we define in the book, and the much-
needed efforts to measure sustainability progress in a way that eschews
the single-bottom-line paradigm.
The second edition updates many of the examples and case studies
from initiatives, projects, policies, and legislation we had discussed in
the first edition and adds many more. It also examines past and poten-
tial future trends, contains real solutions and applications, and looks at
the key aspects of a sustainable urban lifestyle. The book has three parts:
part I, Concept; part II, Case Studies; and part III, Conclusions.
The book begins in chapter  by defining the sustainable city. The
overall definition of such a city is one that facilitates human economic
(production and consumption) and social life with the least possible
impact on the natural environment. This means that material flows into
and out of the city are thought through and managed to minimize the
destruction of natural systems. What are the elements of a sustainable
city? The city’s water supply comes from sources that are replenished
through natural processes or from sources that can be withdrawn with-
out damaging ecosystems. The city’s solid waste is recycled as much as
possible with food waste converted to fertilizer and other materials sepa-
rated for reuse as well. Other systems such as sewage treatment, storm
water drainage, energy, food, health care, and transportation are designed
for efficiency and for the least possible environmental impact. We add in
the second edition a brief history of cities, explain how they evolved to
the present day, and expand on the rationale explaining why a book on
sustainability should focus on cities. Chapter  also provides an overview
of what is needed from the key stakeholders of government, the private
sector, and the public to make the transition to urban sustainability. The
ensuing chapters expand on each of these areas.
Chapter  defines and explains sustainable urban systems and what
“sustainability” means in each of these systems, including energy, water,
waste, sewage, food, transport, and public space. We add in the sec-
ond edition another critical part of the physical dimension of urban
sustainability—that is, the urban health system. We learned about the
central role of health care in the sustainable city during the COVID-
pandemic, and how a widespread failure of urban health systems
and a singular focus on economic growth can wreak havoc globally.
XII PREFACE

This chapter defines and assesses the technical, financial, organizational,

and political requirements of the sustainable city.
Chapter  is about citizen engagement and discusses the sustainable
urban lifestyle. Our effort is to distinguish the way people live in a sustain-
able city from that of people who attempt to live close to nature in rural
areas. Obviously, urbanites pursuing a sustainable lifestyle are not living
off the grid, growing all their food, and disposing their food waste in a
compost heap. They may well, however, grow some food in a neighbor-
hood garden, participate in a farm-share in which they guarantee they
will purchase the produce of a local farmer, use renewable energy, practice
energy efficiency, and send their food waste to an anaerobic digester.
The sustainable city involves a sustainable lifestyle and a transformation
from the consumer society to something else. The twenty-first-century
brain-based economy has changed the nature of production and con-
sumption. Rather than being defined by the size of one’s home and the
consumer items one possesses, the sustainable lifestyle involves a search
for different values. Consumer items remain valued, but they become
means rather than ends. Consumption becomes more oriented toward
services, entertainment, travel, and experiences and less oriented toward
possessing manufactured products. Such products become commodi-
ties in the sustainable city, providing the necessities of life, but no longer
serving as self-justifying goals. Culture and values are far more powerful
forces of social change and consumption patterns than regulation.
This chapter defines and explains the sustainable urban lifestyle that can
be achieved in the sustainable city. It includes a discussion of the changing
nature of consumption and the changing nature of work. The chapter also
discusses the driving role played by the younger generation in the urban
sustainability transition and explains the importance of lifelong learning
in adapting to fast-changing circumstances, which is becoming the norm
in the brain-based economy. The second edition complements the dis-
cussion on reurbanization in the United States by including a section on
urbanization from the perspective of middle- and low-income countries,
where the need for their cities to be sustainable could be even greater,
particularly given their large population.
Chapter  delves into organizational innovation and the change
required to make sustainability real. We leave sociology behind to focus
 PREFACE XIII

on organizational management and the movement toward an organi-

zational focus on the physical and social dimensions of sustainability.
Today’s corporations, nonprofits, and governments are operating on a
more crowded and interconnected planet that provides great opportuni-
ties but also poses great threats. Arguably organizations are responding to
greater population, consumption, resource scarcity, environmental deg-
radation, and increased risk and liability and are factoring these issues
into routine decision making. Energy, water, and other raw materials
are becoming a larger element of the cost structure of all organizations.
Organizations are routinely looking at energy consumption as a way to
cut costs and increase efficiency. Global competition means that someone
someplace is doing the same thing you are, and if you don’t keep improv-
ing, they could knock you out of business.
Similar trends can be seen as organizations assess their use of water
and other material resources. The costs and impact of waste, discharges
of effluents, and emissions are now subject to critical analysis. This is not
only for regulatory compliance: in some organizations, the risk of envi-
ronmental effects and the cost of insuring those risks have become part of
routine decision making. In addition, organizations cannot simply imple-
ment sustainability initiatives within their walls; these initiatives must
extend down the supply chain, which is increasingly global. Although the
COVID- pandemic may have interrupted the process of globalization,
the interconnectedness of the global economy will continue to grow in
the long run, especially as we face down the challenge of climate change.
Sustainability-minded managers are learning that the environmental and
social performances of their supply chains can quickly be reflected on
their financial bottom lines.
Chapter  discusses these issues and outlines the approaches organi-
zations have been adopting to implement sustainability as a basic tool
of management. This chapter also provides examples of organizations
that ignored sustainability and had to pay a huge price for the conse-
quence. Because of the difficulties quantifying social and environmental
impacts, the state of sustainability measurement remains primitive. We
expand from the discussion on metrics in the first edition by reviewing
the various frameworks that companies and governments used to mea-
sure and report sustainability activities, and we discuss the public’s role
XIV PREFACE

in advancing and supporting sustainability metrics, measurement, and

reporting. We then look specifically at the frameworks and indices that
seek to measure and report urban sustainability around the world, which
also is based on our research in this field.
In chapter , the book turns to a discussion of the role of politics and
public policy in building sustainable cities. We needed public-private
partnerships to build the industrial city of the nineteenth and twenti-
eth centuries. Government and private corporations worked together
to attract the capital and expertise required to build the energy, water,
sewage, transport, and other infrastructure needed to ensure that peo-
ple and businesses could live in thriving but dense modern settlements.
We once again require such partnerships to build the sustainable city of
the twenty-first century. While in the United States we desperately need
federal sustainability policy, in the final analysis the environmental quality
that people experience in their home communities will have the highest
degree of political salience. A successful strategy to protect our environ-
ment will need to focus on local effects.
In addition to addressing the role of sustainability in local and state
politics in the United States, chapter  in this second edition also exam-
ines how international politics and climate politics in particular are
shaping the urban sustainability agenda around the world. The focus
of this chapter is to examine sustainability politics at the local level and
detail the force of these issues today and their potential in the future.
Some issues are inherently local such that they require action at the
city level. This chapter seeks to identify the sustainability issues that
are typically subject to local discretion. Specifically, this chapter also
addresses the following issues: the role of local government in the
sustainability transition; public-private partnership in advancing sus-
tainability initiatives; public opinion and values related to sustainability;
mobilizing voters and building consensus: sustainability and partisan
politics; and the challenge and opportunity of the NIMBY (“not in my
backyard”) syndrome.
Trillions of dollars are needed to finance the transition to sustainability,
and therefore much of it depends on government leadership. Chapter 
adds a discussion on public finance and other policies to attract capital to
the sustainable elements of the economy. Specifically, government needs
 PREFACE XV

to fund basic research, provide financial support to early stage innovation,

and formulate policies that encourage private green investment.
As our economy has grown, we have noticed that in many cities, regard-
less of development level, income inequality has grown. Cities have the
advantage of density, which is crucial to powering a brain-based economy
and achieving sustainability. We also have seen in the world’s cities, how-
ever, that economic segregation and spatial inequality grew to alarming
levels, which, if left unchecked, could lead to social unrest that will impede
innovation and economic growth. In a new chapter, chapter , we review
the current trends in urban inequality and discuss the possible role of auto-
mation in exacerbating inequality. We also suggest some possible solutions
to this emerging dilemma. We discuss whether a model of sustainability
can successfully integrate economic and environmental goals and bring
environmental and business interests together to power the next stage
of economic and social development. We introduce a multidimensional
approach to development and a multistakeholder approach in decision
making and assess its compatibility with the paradigm of sustainability
and social inclusion. Finally, as indicated earlier, sustainable urban devel-
opment also needs finance. In addition to public financing for sustainable
technology and urban infrastructure, financial markets now need to chan-
nel savings away from unsustainable production processes and shift invest-
ment that not only can deliver sustained economic return but also generate
long-term environmental and social impact. Therefore, chapter  also dis-
cusses the development of sustainable finance for urban sustainability.
After defining and analyzing the concept of the sustainable city, part II
then illustrates the concepts we introduced with a series of case studies.
The goal of the case studies is to provide detailed examples of urban
sustainability programs, policies, and projects that are in place and can
be assessed. The concepts delineated and the issues raised in part I are
illuminated and brought to life by these cases. The cases provide concrete
examples of the actions needed to transition to sustainable cities.
Chapters  through  include the following case studies:

• Waste management: practices in New York City, Hong Kong, and Beijing
• Transportation: Bus rapid transit in Bogotá, light rail in Jerusalem,
high-speed rail in China
XVI PREFACE

• Energy infrastructure: Microgrids and smart grids in New York, Japan,

and Africa, and ultra-high-voltage transmission system in China
• Public space: Gas Works Park in Seattle, Washington; the High Line
Park in New York City; Victor Civita Plaza in São Paulo, Brazil; and
Canal Park in Washington, DC
• Sustainable urban living and the sharing economy: Uber and Airbnb

The second edition updates all of the case studies with up-to-date
information and recent developments. The new edition adds a case about
the use of ultra-high-voltage lines to transmit renewable power over
long distances to contrast with distributed generation, such as the use
of microgrids.
Part III concludes with a summary of the policy, management, and
political lessons learned throughout the book. The book’s conclusion also
frankly discusses uncertainties and issues that require additional research.
We are confident that the transition to a sustainable and renewable econ-
omy will take place in the world’s cities, but we are far from confident
that we understand how that change will take place. For one, it is obvious
that sustainability needs a concerted effort from a multitude of stakehold-
ers, not least from all sovereign nations. Climate change and pollution
ignore national borders, and no city can achieve sustainability alone given
our globalized supply chain and other interconnectedness forged over
decades. At a time when international collaboration is most needed to
fight a devastating pandemic caused by a previously unknown coronavi-
rus, cities and countries closed their borders. Lack of trust and coopera-
tion have been fueling calls for self-sufficiency and a renationalization of
the supply chain. We worry that the lessons from the pandemic rather
than providing a call for greater cooperation and a common purpose for
humankind will usher in a new age of nationalist politics and reverse (even
just for a time) the engine of globalization and international cooperation.
That would be detrimental to our pursuit of sustainability and to the fight
against climate change. We want to be optimistic that the advantages of
the global economy can overcome the power of xenophobia. Our hope is
that this volume provides the basis for further discussion, research, and
analysis of the transition to sustainable cities.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

STEVEN COHEN

I wish to thank my wonderful colleague and coauthor Dr. Dong Guo.

Dong has taught me more about China and the rest of the world than
I ever thought I could learn, and his brilliance and ethical sense have made
a lasting impression on me. His contributions to this work are profound,
and I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to work closely with
him on this project.
My great mentor and friend, Marc Tipermas, continues to influence
my ideas about organizations and the importance of agile management.
Marc and Tom Brisbin of the Willdan Group have taught me key lessons
of the importance of the private sector in building a sustainable nation.
I am deeply grateful for the deep and loving support of my wife Donna
Fishman and dedicate this edition of The Sustainable City to her. I am
also grateful for the support of my wonderful daughters Gabriella Rose
and Ariel Mariah, their fantastic spouses and partners Eitan Grossbard
and Rob Bowell, my perfect granddaughter Lily Bowell, and my siblings
Judith, Robby, and Myra.

GUO DONG

I wish to acknowledge Steven Cohen, my mentor, colleague, and now coau-

thor for this book. I’m forever indebted to Steve for taking me under his
wing and for bringing me onboard his research program on sustainability.
XVIII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

He imparted in me his enormous knowledge and wisdom about sustain-

ability and enabled me to see everything through the sustainability lense.
He always supported me and embraced my ideas and whims. Everything
I have become professionally and will ever become is because of him. I’m
also deeply indebted to Satyajit Bose, a dear friend and colleague, who
has served as a great mentor on just about everything. I am also grateful
to Qian Jing, for his support, encouragement, and animated discussions
that seeded many of my views expressed in this book. I have to thank
Project Agora, as well as its mentors and students, for inspiring conver-
sations. I also thank Ni Jian and Sun Zhe for their longstanding support
and wise counsel. Of course, I’m immensely indebted to my family: my
dad—for teaching me the world, my mom—for her obsessive caring, and
my extended family—aunties and uncles—for their unfailing support.

BOTH AUTHORS

We are always grateful to our friend, colleague, and longtime professional

partner Bill Eimicke. Bill introduced us, and we both feel fortunate to
know him. As always, everything we work on is a team effort. We are
especially grateful to the Research Program on Sustainability Policy and
Management at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and its staff: Alison
Miller, Hayley Martinez, Kelsie DeFrancia, Alix Schroder, and Ma Lei. A
number of research assistants, all students at Columbia University, worked
on the cases and source materials for this book. We thank Hilary Osborn
and Catalina Villegas for their time spent researching and editing drafts.
We especially thank Liao Xiaoyu and Maya Lugo for their research and
editing assistance for the second edition.
A number of colleagues and friends were critical in framing many of
the ideas we write about in this book. They include Howard Apsan, Allison
Bridges, Mark Cane, Peter Coleman, Ruth DeFries, Peter DeMenocal,
Nancy Degnan, David Dinkins, Joshua Fisher, Ester Fuchs, Gao Ruiqi,
Geng Mingzhai, Michael Gerrard, Alex Halliday, Tanya Heikkila, Sheldon
Kamieniecki, Jacquelin Klopp, Upmanu Lall, Arthur Lerner-Lam, Marc
Levy, Maya Lugo, Li Yushuang, Peter Marcotullio, Christoph Meinrenken,
Vijay Modi, Kate Orff, Richard Plunz, Curtis Probst, Louise Rosen, Jeffrey
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XIX

Sachs, David Sandalow, George Sarrinikolaou, Elliott Sclar, Sean Solomon,

Tian Tuo, Tian Xiaolei, Wang Anyi, Wang Jun, Lynnette Widder, Alice
(Tianbo) Zhang, Zhang Chao, Zhang Dawei, Zhang Yong, and too many
others to name here.
We also wish to thank our excellent editors, Miranda Martin and Brian
Smith, and their team at Columbia University Press for their patience and
for tirelessly working with us during this process. We wish to thank our
production editor, Kathryn Jorge, as well as Ben Kolstad and his team at
KnowledgeWorks Global for their thorough review and editing of the
final manuscript. We wish to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for
their constructive comments.
We are grateful for the example of Lee Bollinger, Columbia University’s
visionary president, who shows all of us how to combine thought leader-
ship with organizational leadership. We are also grateful to other leaders
of Columbia University, including John Coatsworth, former provost; Ira
Katznelson, interim provost; Amy Hungerford, arts and sciences dean
and executive vice president; Merit Janow, SIPA dean; and Alex Halliday,
Earth Institute director for giving us the space and support to finish this
work. This is a time in the world when we must work even harder to build
a peaceful and sustainable planet. We hope this book is a small contribu-
tion to the creation of that world.
 1
DEFINING THE SUSTAINABLE CIT Y

W
e begin by defining the sustainable city. What are the elements of
a sustainable city? Our economic life allows us to pay less atten-
tion to our basic biological needs, but those needs cannot be met
if our planet is toxic or dangerous. We can have urban dynamism and
clean air, water, and food; however, maintaining this dynamism requires
competent sustainability management, good governance, and adequate
financial resources. The desire for a clean and healthy environment is an
inevitable stage of economic development. In this first chapter, we explain
our rationale for focusing on cities as places to achieve sustainability and
illustrate how pollution, diseases, and congestion have been longstanding
problems of sustainability since the dawn of cities.
The sustainable city sounds like a wonderful place to live, but how
do we make the transition from today’s unsustainable city to tomorrow’s
sustainable one? Multiple stakeholders have to be engaged: the govern-
ment, the private sector, and the broad civil society. This entire book is an
effort to explain how to achieve this engagement; this chapter provides
an overview of the type of change that is needed in each of these areas
and the finance and performance targets that are required to make the
transition to urban sustainability.

THE SUSTAINABLE CITY—A DEFINITION

Because a city is a human settlement that is designed for human rather

than ecological well-being, it may seem inconsistent to even try to define
4 CONCEPT

a sustainable city. With more than seven billion people on the planet and
a likely maximal population of nine to ten billion, it may not be pos-
sible to design and build human settlements that are in perfect harmony
with nature. According to ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability,
“sustainable cities work towards an environmentally, socially, and eco-
nomically healthy and resilient habitat for existing populations, without
compromising the ability of future generations to experience the same.”
Because cities are essentially a transformation of the physical environ-
ment to a built environment, the goal of a sustainable city is to build
human settlements that have the least possible impact on the environment.
Although some may question the ethics of this goal, our definition of
impact is to ensure that the natural systems central to human well-being
are maintained with the least possible amount of damage. The sustainable
city minimizes its emissions of conventional air pollutants and greenhouse
gases, uses as few nonrenewable resources as possible, discharges effluents
into waterways after treatment that removes the most harmful pollutants,
uses energy and water as efficiently as possible, and attempts to reduce
and recycle waste and minimize the impact of whatever waste disposal
is needed.
A clear, agreed-upon definition of a sustainable city is lacking, but the
definitions we have reviewed in the literature often include a range of envi-
ronmental, economic, social, political, demographic, institutional, and
cultural goals. In , the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements
Sustainable Cities Programme defined a sustainable city as one “where
achievements in social, economic and physical development are made to
last.” A  report by the United Nations stated that sustainable cities
could be achieved by integrating the following four pillars: social devel-
opment, economic development, environmental management, and urban
governance. The World Bank defines sustainable cities as those that are
“resilient cities that are able to adapt to, mitigate, and promote economic,
social and environmental change.”
The United Nations Environment Programme more specifically defines
resource-efficient cities as those that “combine greater productivity and
innovation with lower costs and reduced environmental impacts while
providing increased opportunities for consumer choices and sustain-
able lifestyles.” According to Kent Portney, cities that take sustainability
 DEFINING THE SUSTAINABLE CITY 5

seriously engage in a wide variety of activities that improve and protect

the environment, either directly or indirectly, through actions such as
reduction of energy consumption. He cites efforts such as reducing solid
waste, redeveloping brownfield sites, protecting biodiversity, improving
public transit policy, and enacting climate action goals as the types of
actions that reflect a sustainable-oriented city.
It is possible to define sustainability so broadly that it loses meaning.
In this work, we provide a clear and bounded definition. In addition to
preventing damage to vital ecosystems, the sustainable city is also a place
that attracts people, culture, and commerce. It provides opportunities for
human interaction, employment, and activities such as education that
develop human potential. The forms of culture, commerce, entertain-
ment, and social interaction can vary according to culture, taste, and tra-
dition. The city’s function is to provide an opportunity and a facility for
these actions to take place. When thinking about a sustainable city, we
should first understand what an unsustainable city is. The unsustainable
city is one that damages its natural surroundings and repulses rather than
attracts people, culture, and commerce. Cities, like all human societies,
evolve and change. The needs and expectations of the population change,
and a place’s ability to accommodate those needs and expectations also
change. Thus, a city is a set of economic, political, and social systems that
interact with each other and exist in a specific physical setting.
To provide a more operational understanding of a city’s evolution and
of the transition to a sustainable city, we can relate it to the operational
experience of a specific place. Consider the example of New York City,
where most of this book was written. A little over fifty years ago, New
York apartment buildings had incinerators in which tenants’ garbage was
burned in the middle of the night. The rest of the city’s garbage was brought
to landfills in Brooklyn and Staten Island. Sewage from Manhattan was
dumped untreated into the Hudson River. New York was a manufactur-
ing and commercial center. Clothing, toys, bicycles, and even automobiles
were made within the five boroughs. The now-famous High Line Park was
originally an elevated roadbed for freight trains that ran from the Hudson
River docks to the factories located on the West Side of Manhattan (in
Tribeca and Chelsea). After World War II, New York City was the busiest
port in the world, and nearly half of its economy was devoted to clothing
6 CONCEPT

manufacturing, distribution, and sales. The city had a world-renowned,

fully functioning system of mass transit; an extensive park system; and a
water storage and delivery system that remains an engineering marvel.
The water system was needed because most of the extensive network of
groundwater that lies beneath the street grid in Manhattan and Brooklyn
was poisoned. Throughout the twentieth century, toxic waste was stored
underground and in waterways, such as the still-poisoned Gowanus Canal.
The former factories of SoHo and the West Side either are multimillion-
dollar homes and commercial establishments or have been demolished
to make way for the shiny new glass and steel creations of the world’s
“starchitects.” New York City has made the transition from a center of
manufacturing, commerce, and finance to a center of education, health
care, media, finance, public relations, and tourism. The city now exports
all of its garbage to out-of-state incinerators and landfills. Its subway,
sewage treatment, water, and park systems have given it a tremendous
head start in the transition to a sustainable city. New York City is the
most populous and most crowded city in the United States. Over the past
decade, it has been gaining population, and the metropolitan area is home
to twenty million people. The COVID- pandemic may temporarily
halt that growth, but the city is still widely viewed as the financial capital
of the world, and a major cultural and media center, and it will continue
to attract more talent and visitors after the pandemic. This growth will
make it a more congested and less pleasant place unless it can improve its
mass transit and build new and more creative public spaces. Additionally,
as COVID- has taught us, the city also must have an extensive health-
care network capable of scaling up, when needed, to deal with infectious
diseases and other health emergencies. In the competition for global busi-
ness and population, a city needs not only to be safe and orderly but also
dynamic and exciting.
In the transition from an industrial and commercial city to a postin-
dustrial global capital, New York City almost went bankrupt and nearly
collapsed in crime and social disorder. But enlightened leadership,
resiliency, and luck saved it. Over the past decade and a half, New York
City began its transition to urban sustainability through its PlaNYC 
and OneNYC sustainability plans. These plans set goals and priorities
for the public-private partnership that will bring about the transition.
 DEFINING THE SUSTAINABLE CITY 7

The marriage of economic development and environmental protection

initiated by former mayor Michael Bloomberg was both important and
innovative. The idea that community-based environmental justice groups
and powerful real estate interests could sit together and find common
ground was a remarkable accomplishment for the Bloomberg administra-
tion and for New York City.

WHY WE FOCUS ON CITIES

Despite the global nature of many environmental problems, they often

have a local origin and require local solutions. Air and water pollution,
while transcending political boundaries, affects our homes and commu-
nities, which increasingly are located in cities. Given that the majority
of the world population resides in dense urban centers, local environ-
mental degradation is magnified and experienced by large numbers of
people. In addition to ensuring a clean environment, cities must meet
the accompanying social challenges, such as the provision of efficient
and equitable health care and education services for the ever-increasing
urban population. The strategic choices cities make on infrastructure and
the built environment influence their carbon footprint and can have a
significant impact on global sustainability. While serving as innovation
and cultural hubs, the ecological footprint of cities diffuses far beyond city
boundaries. Consensus is increasing that cities hold the key to sustain-
able development—that is, reducing per capita environmental impacts
while improving economic prosperity and social inclusion for current and
future generations. Cities occupy only  percent of the overall landmass
on earth, yet they consume more than  percent of the earth’s natural
resources and emit  percent of world’s carbon dioxide. Sustainability
will be either achieved or impaired by the actions of the world’s cities.
As manufacturing becomes more mechanized, the economies of cities
focus on those types of organizations that are most dependent on brain-
power and creativity. People are needed more for their brains than for their
brawn. These less mechanized and more labor-intensive operations tend
to include service providers such as hospitals, educational institutions,
hotels, or recreational facilities. Alternatively, they can be entities that
8 CONCEPT

focus on planning, strategy, creativity, and design—for example, public

relations firms, financial advisors, media companies, consulting firms,
and cultural institutions.
Globally, more than one in two people live in urban areas, compared
with just one in ten before the Industrial Revolution. Two hundred years
ago, the largest cities in the world, Beijing and London, barely had one
million people. Today the largest city, Tokyo, has a population of more
than thirty-seven million, with at least another  cities reporting
more than one million residents. The world’s population is becoming
increasingly urbanized because of an economic change related to the
decline of manual labor and the growth of the brain-based economy.
Although electronic media and communication technology make it pos-
sible to contribute creative input from anywhere, the informal network
that fuels this creative economy requires that we be physically present to
fully participate—something we do not yet fully understand about human
communication. The person who uses a communication platform like
Skype or Zoom to participate in a live meeting is never quite a full mem-
ber of the discussion. We are social creatures craving interaction and live
contact. The fact that face-to-face contact is a precipitator for innovation
is best demonstrated with the success of Silicon Valley, where experts in
technology and entrepreneurship live in proximity and constantly interact
with each other. We need live contact not only in our professional lives
but also during downtime. Cities, with their range of shops, restaurants,
parks, museums, squares, and pubs, provide the urban space people need
to socialize and interact. The COVID- pandemic made the value of this
interaction painfully obvious.
The concentration of population has created problems for material and
energy flows into and out of human settlements, but it also has created
opportunities for economies of scale and creative problem solving. These
ideas of closed systems of production and consumption are central to
the concept of the sustainable city. As the mechanization of agriculture
reduces rural employment opportunities and as the internet communi-
cates the appeal and seductiveness of urban lifestyles, more and more of
the world’s population is moving to cities. This is especially true of young
educated adults: two-thirds of young adults in the United States (ages
twenty-five to thirty-four) with a bachelor’s degree live in the nation’s
 DEFINING THE SUSTAINABLE CITY 9

fifty-one largest metropolitan areas. In middle- and low-income coun-

tries, college degrees are seen as one of the main ways for young adults
from rural areas to escape poverty and seek high-paying jobs in cities.
This creates opportunities for more efficient production, distribution, and
consumption of goods and services. It also creates efficiencies that come
from a “sharing” economy. Cars, bicycles, and indoor and outdoor spaces
can be shared more easily in a dense settlement. Instead of two hundred
families each having their own half-acre backyard, a ten-acre park can be
shared by many more people and holds the possibility of many uses that
require more space than a half-acre.
People move to cities for a range of reasons, from favorable labor
market conditions, to attractive public infrastructure, to the benefits of
being near centers of finance, corporate headquarters, and information
and technology. Cities that have experienced a resurgence are usually
competitive, attract new and growing activities, and develop a distinct and
comparative advantage.  Diverse amenities, cultural institutions, educa-
tional institutions, and other facilities as well as differentiated neighbor-
hoods are also possible in cities. A neighborhood that attracts families
might be distinguished from one that is attractive to single professionals,
young couples, and students. The economic and social attractiveness of
cities coupled with the diverse character of neighborhoods explains the
growing importance of urban areas.
On the other side of the equation, large concentrations of people in
tight spaces create many challenges, such as the contamination of air and
water; problems with health and sanitation because of overcrowding;
urban slums and shantytowns populating the outskirts of urban centers,
and, of course, epidemics, which can spread quickly among close-knit
communities and families living in crowded city apartments. The spread
of the novel coronavirus and the need for social distance has been seen
by some as a fundamental challenge to globalism, population density, and
urban life, but it did not change the basic appeal and benefit of our way
of life. Of course, these urban problems are not new, as we shall see, and
have been common throughout the history of cities.
Cities are also increasingly dependent on the services delivered by eco-
systems that are both close and farther away. The resources required to
clothe, feed, house, and stimulate urbanites can strain the resources of
10 CONCEPT

the planet if they do not largely depend on renewable rather than finite
resources. Population growth plus the rate and style of consumption drive
resource utilization and so too does the use of particular materials and
sources of energy in production processes. The residents of cities will have
some ability as consumers to insist on sustainable production processes,
but these are not processes that they can control. On a macrolevel, urban
centers are the primary source of carbon emissions, which affect local
and global climate change. In addition, cities are often causes of altered
waterways and reductions in biodiversity.
Urban dwellers may not directly observe the environmental impact
of their consumption and lifestyle, but governments, nongovernmental
organizations, and researchers must observe, analyze, project, and com-
municate those effects. Public awareness of these effects will hopefully lead
to changes in public policy, regulation, and ultimately private corporate
and individual behaviors. The development and implementation of tech-
nologies that permit consumption while mitigating environmental impact
are essential. In the United States, Japan, and Europe, we have already
seen that this is possible. Gross domestic product (GDP) has grown in
high-income countries over the past half-century, but air pollution and
water pollution have been reduced. Control technologies have been put
in place to reduce pollution, and these technologies continue to improve
over time.
Pollution control technologies and green infrastructure cost money;
however, if designed correctly, they can increase quality of life and eco-
nomic efficiency for people living in cities. When cities are clogged in
gridlock, or closed down because of flooding, or waste energy and water,
then the cost structure of businesses operating in those cities is impaired
because of lower productivity. When air pollution sends children or their
parents to the hospital, the costs of health care and childcare must be
counted as costs of air pollution that can be reduced with investment
in pollution control technologies. When lower taxes hollow out govern-
ment emergency response systems and health capacity, then cities are
ill-prepared to deal with pandemics, like with COVID-.
In sum, a focus on cities is required because if we are to achieve a
sustainable economy and planet, it needs to happen first in our cities. The
behavior of people and institutions needs to be changed, and as people are
 DEFINING THE SUSTAINABLE CITY 11

located in cities, we need to focus our attention on these forms of human

settlement. The pressure on the countryside and on our ecosystems is
coming from the actions of people in cities. As our colleague Ester Fuchs
has observed, leadership from government will be required to ensure that
the focus on cities results in sustainability. According to Fuchs, “Leadership
from city government, and especially mayors, is critical to the long-term
planning that is required for sustained investment in infrastructure, eco-
nomic growth and environmental sustainability that will ensure any city’s
viability in the future.”

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CITIES

As we shall see from history, many of the problems we have described are
not new and have existed since the dawn of civilization. Rulers and urban
planners have tried for millennia to apply cutting-edge methods to combat
problems ranging from sanitation to traffic congestion. The bridges and
tunnels connecting Manhattan to New York City’s other boroughs and
New Jersey may seem depleted and inadequate now, but they were not only
engineering marvels when they were built but also were hugely innovative
and daring solutions to the congestion and housing problems—typical
of an island city—that propelled New York City into its current status as
a global center. The challenges many cities face today are also unique in
their scale. With billions of people living in connected cities who may be
simultaneously affected by a potential crisis such as COVID- and global
environmental problems that are unprecedented in human history, the
solutions require local ingenuity as well as a concerted effort by all actors
in civil society from around the globe.
Cities have existed for thousands of years, likely following the devel-
opment of agriculture. Surplus food produced from agriculture meant
that humans could finally settle into one place instead of being hunters
and gatherers. Agriculture probably started in the Middle East around
 b.c.e., when people first learned how to “cultivate the earth” and
to store and trade surplus food. To trace the exact beginning of cities
is difficult because what defines a city is often debatable. A city needs a
border, and in ancient times, that meant some type of fortification or wall
12 CONCEPT

as opposed to the open structure of villages. To differ from a village or

town, a city probably had a large population and high population density.
Of course, a city should be a more permanent settlement with houses
and streets, rather than camps and encampments that easily come and
go. Most important, cities signaled a new lifestyle—that is, an “urban-
ism” ushered in by the specialization of labor in full-time craft-making,
trade, and provision of services. With agricultural surplus, people need
not all farm—the growth of workers in trades and crafts is a significant
attribute of early cities, which offered an enriched urban lifestyle, where
surplus products could be traded for craftwork and other services that a
city provided.
Despite the debate surrounding what constituted an early city, the
consensus is that the first cities appeared in Mesopotamia in the Tigris-
Euphrates Valley (present-day Syria and Iraq) around  b.c.e., with
complex economic and political structures. They were vibrant places, but
even from that early time, the impact of cities extended far beyond their
physical borders. The urban centers were necessarily surrounded by rural
landscapes and had to be provisioned by a much larger hinterland, or a
surrounding ecosystem in today’s terminology. Later, other cities emerged
along the Nile River, the Yellow River, in the Indus Valley, and across the
Mediterranean. It was not a coincidence that the earlier cities developed
near rivers, given that water is crucial for irrigation and human survival.
Political arrangements were needed for water management as the engi-
neering projects required central planning. The Chinese civilization is
often traced to the legend of Yu the Great around  b.c.e. for his inno-
vation in flood control that founded China’s first dynasty, Xia. Even to this
day, China still has a cabinet-level ministry devoted to the management
of water resources. These early cities were organically developed along
major waterways, with natural transportation links and vast hinterlands
that provided many ecosystem services. They were supported by arable
lands and abundant animal life, which were necessary to sustain a large
population. Many modern cities share these same traits, such as the major
port cities that dot the globe. Few of these cities were developed purely
for political reasons.
Early cities were also sustained by large-scale migration, including war
captives, farmers, and craftspeople looking for opportunities that only
 DEFINING THE SUSTAINABLE CITY 13

cities could provide. Cities rise and fall, following military conflicts, epi-
demic disease, and other instabilities. In the first century, with population
growth, reduction in epidemics, and relative political stability, Rome man-
aged to host one million inhabitants during the Roman Empire. In the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Mongol Empire, which stretched
from East Asia to the Middle East, also greatly increased trade and
migration. Maritime trade starting in the sixteenth century powered a fur-
ther wave of urban development around the globe, especially in port cities,
which included Philadelphia, Havana, Amsterdam, London, Guangzhou,
Manila, Nagasaki, and Bombay. As much as early cities were built to
reflect the power and vision of their rulers, they also were built to respond
to the environmental problems of urban living, such as traffic congestion,
waste management, sanitation, water supply, and pollution, challenges that
city dwellers are all too aware of today. As cities grew in size, they started
to suffer from these environmental problems as well as from social chal-
lenges, such as poor nutrition, inequality, and housing shortages.
With industrialization during the nineteenth century, we saw a great
divergence in the rates of economic development; European and later
North American cities greatly expanded, whereas cities in Asia, Africa,
Middle East, and India stagnated. New technology and productivity
increases first propelled the development of major industrial cities of
London, Paris, and Brussels, and later filtered through to northern and
eastern European cities, which quickly caught up. The “new” cities devel-
oped in North America, first along the East Coast, and then in the Midwest
and continuing all the way to the West Coast. Coal-fired industrial fac-
tories and increasingly centralized ownership of rural lands combined to
propel farmers and rural dwellers to live in crowded urban environments.
With perhaps the exception of Japan, which industrialized after the Meiji
Restoration in the late-nineteenth century, and the emergence of colonial
towns after World War I, urbanization in Asia, Latin America, and the
Middle East did not catch up to the rest of the world until after the end of
World War II. It was only after the s when cities like Shanghai, Cairo,
and Mexico City grew significantly in size.
Growth in the emerging economies and the brain-based economy is
powering the most recent wave of urbanization. Fast growth and lack
of long-term planning, however, have subjected many cities to the same
14 CONCEPT

environmental and social problems that have plagued large cities for cen-
turies. At the same time, developments in many European and North
American industrial cities have stagnated, as they experienced aging
infrastructure, suburbanization (as in the case of many U.S. cities), and
deindustrialization with manufacturing moving to suburbs, exurbs, or
even other countries. Unplanned urban development in the twenty-first
century is straining public finances and the provision of public service
and is creating social and spatial inequalities.

THE ELEMENTS OF THE SUSTAINABLE CITY

In later chapters, we discuss the social, political, managerial, and economic

elements of the sustainable city. The social elements include a set of values
and perceptions that lead to consumption and behavioral choices that
minimize human impact on the environment. These choices are facilitated
by a legal and regulatory structure that reinforces them. The laws and rules
are the outcomes of stakeholder interaction in a political process that is
supportive of sustainability. A city’s government and private sector must
possess the organizational capacity to collect and recycle waste, facilitate
the distributed generation of renewable energy, build energy efficiency, and
ensure the cleanliness of all material flows into and out of the city. The sus-
tainable city also must be capable of obtaining or generating the financial
resources needed to develop and maintain a sustainable infrastructure.
These elements of infrastructure and rules are essential to the sustain-
able city and provide an operational definition of sustainability. The regu-
latory framework includes the right to be paid for energy contributed to
the electrical grid, rules governing waste management from the smallest
household to the largest business, building codes, energy efficiency codes,
congestion pricing, and other elements of the tax code that reinforce
resource efficiency and reuse. The infrastructure includes green solutions
to combined sewer overflow, sewage treatment, recycling and effective
use of waste materials, water filtration, air pollution control, toxic waste
regulation and treatment, mass transit, and electric personal transit.
The most difficult element to build in the sustainable city will be the
required infrastructure. This may include microgrids and smart grids that
 DEFINING THE SUSTAINABLE CITY 15

will require a huge investment of capital in rebuilding the electrical system.

This can take decades, leadership, and persistence to complete. The same
is true of new waste management and recycling facilities and mass transit
systems. In the United States, underinvestment in virtually all forms of
infrastructure has become a normal and accepted practice. Bridges often
need to be near collapse before we consider replacing them. In addition
to underfunding capital expenditures, many operating facilities are poorly
maintained because of inadequate operations and management budgets.
No effort to increase energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gases can
succeed without enhanced mass transit. Because a national solution is not
on the political agenda in the United States, places like Washington, DC,
New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco are on their own.
New York City’s third water tunnel is an example of the nature of these
projects. When this water tunnel is completed in , it will have taken
nearly half a century and more than $ billion to complete. The goal of this
project is to ensure that the city’s upstate water supply can be effectively
and efficiently delivered to the city. The infrastructure being replaced is
close to a century old and badly in need of repair. New York City has a
magnificent system of water supply. It is an example of farsighted long-
term leadership and investment without which the modern city of New
York could never have been built. It takes advantage of ecosystems, grav-
ity, and best management practices to deliver high-quality and relatively
low-cost water to New York. Like the city’s subway system and electrical
grid, however, it is old infrastructure that is decaying, and its maintenance
is essential to the transition to a renewable resource–based economy. As
a political matter, mayors and other elected leaders prefer capital proj-
ects that can be completed within their term in office and are visible and
symbolic of progress. A waste management facility, a smart grid, a water
tunnel, or a renovated subway line are expensive, sometimes invisible,
projects and are difficult for the media to report.

TRANSITIONING TO A SUSTAINABLE CITY

The job of building a sustainable city atop the current unsustainable city
will involve a decade-long transition period and paradigm shift in the way
16 CONCEPT

we manage and pay for cities. The field of management will need to change
as we integrate the physical dimensions of sustainability into management
education and then into organizational management. Just as current chief
executives must understand accounting, finance, regulation, international
business, strategy, marketing, and human resource and information man-
agement, the leaders of the sustainable city must integrate energy, water,
and material efficiency into routine organizational management along
with a concern for environmental effects, which must incorporate the
entire supply chain and the process of production and consumption. In
addition, city planners and decision makers must be aware of the social
consequences stemming from negative climate and environmental events,
given that they often are filtered through the economic and political fabric
of the communities. Poor countries with inadequate housing, infrastruc-
ture, warning mechanisms, and emergency services often suffer more from
extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and other storms. The same is
also true for poor residents living in a wealthy city, where the same event
can have vastly different consequences for the rich and poor.
This process has begun in some organizations with the start of sustain-
ability offices. In some cases, establishing these offices are symbolic green-
washing exercises, but in other organizations, they play the role of change
agents to remind senior management about sustainability and to provide
technical assistance when sustainability initiatives are implemented.
Building the sustainable city requires that more of our organizations have
the management and technical capacity to incorporate renewable resources
and waste reduction practices into daily organizational life. Environmental
risks often become financial risks. The world is too complex and too vis-
ible on social and mass media for companies to get away with corporate
environmental mismanagement. A company cannot simply dump toxic
waste by the side of the road and assume it will not be detected.
Our view is that all competent management should be sustainability
management. All of a city’s agencies should plan for the effects of climate
change on their operations. They should ensure that their buildings and
equipment are retrofitted for resiliency in the face of more frequent and
intensive storms and heat waves. Agencies should make their operations
more energy- and water-efficient, and they should minimize the environ-
mental effects of the services they deliver.
 DEFINING THE SUSTAINABLE CITY 17

In addition to the development of organizational capacity, private and

public organizations need to identify means of generating the capital
required to construct a sustainable built environment, including build-
ings, energy, waste, and water infrastructure. Finance mechanisms will
differ according to the sector and function being performed. Private-
sector green finance has become more feasible as investors look to invest
in sustainable businesses. Some funds have been established that require
sustainability features in the companies being funded. This includes
both the service or product being produced and the production process.
Environmental liabilities and costs such as Volkswagen’s air pollution
issues and British Petroleum’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill in  have been
noted by investors, and the risks posed by a company’s lack of attention to
sustainability issues have begun to be measured.
The deepest problems will be with the funding of sustainability infra-
structure. Because traditional and highly valued infrastructure, such
as roads and bridges, are woefully underfunded in the United States,
less visible and traditional infrastructure is also suffering from the pub-
lic’s unwillingness to pay the taxes needed to finance these projects. User
fees, tolls, and privatization are some of the methods used to address
these issues, but they too face political opposition. Funding new green
infrastructure, such as smart grids, advanced waste management, mass
transit, and renewable energy, is even more difficult.
One way to assist in financing the sustainable city is to enact laws
and public policies that require institutions and individuals to operate
according to sustainability principles. Individuals who waste resources
or dispose of waste incorrectly can be sanctioned, and those who behave
“sustainably” could be rewarded. Institutions that want to obtain build-
ing permits could be required through the building code to build
green buildings. Licensed plumbers, architects, electricians, and other
craftspeople could be required to be trained in sustainability issues and
adhere to sustainability principles. The government could use its own pur-
chasing power to drive the market toward green production.
For example, New York governor Andrew Cuomo took the most sig-
nificant green step of his governorship when he directed his Department
of Public Service to enact a new clean energy standard. By , at least
 percent of the state’s electricity must be generated from renewable
18 CONCEPT

resources, and by , Governor Cuomo pledged to bring the state

 percent carbon-free electricity. This is a demanding but feasible effort
and is a clear indicator of the governor’s priorities. The renewable energy
standard announced by Governor Cuomo is a real, operational, and
meaningful step. The New York State Public Service Commission regu-
lates the generation and transmission of electricity in New York and has
a similar responsibility for natural gas, steam, telecommunications, and
water. The utilities that the commission regulates are “natural monop-
olies” because of limited access to space for power lines and similar
infrastructure. When Governor Cuomo directs the Public Service Com-
mission to switch to renewable energy, the force of that order should not
be underestimated. It is a meaningful, real-world step that will have a
dramatic impact on power generation in New York over the next decade
and a half.
The new paradigm would also require the engagement of diverse stake-
holders, not just top-level decision makers. This has been demonstrated
in the design of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs), which reversed the often expert-led and top-down approach in
setting climate and sustainability agenda at the supranational level. The
development of SDGs involved all member states of the United Nations
and the broad civil society, which also emphasized the role of all nations
and abandoned the “donor-recipient” mentality, which underlined the
Millennium Development Goals the SDGs served to replace. At the local
level, driving sustainability policy will also require active and effective
political support at the community level. This political support will need
to be built on a strong foundation of popular support for these policies
and practices.
A necessary but not sufficient condition for the transition to a sustain-
able city is a demand from the public for the development of such a city.
The public not only can demand policy changes—as illustrated by the
public outcry against air pollution in China, which led the government
to change a decades-old development strategy driven by GDP growth and
adopt ambitious environmental targets—but also can hold the private sec-
tor accountable—as demonstrated by consumer-led initiatives pushing
for fair trade, green products, and higher labor standards in the corporate
sectors of Europe and the United States. This cannot be a “top-down”
 DEFINING THE SUSTAINABLE CITY 19

approach, or else the set of mass behaviors needed in the sustainable city
will not take place. Simply condemning those who cheat, cut corners, and
disregard sustainability principles may not be the most effective approach
to achieve sustainability. To build support, sustainability must be defined
as a set of positive aspirations, rather than a set of grim behaviors rein-
forced by negative sanctions. Chapter  on sustainable lifestyles focuses
on sustainability’s positive attributes.
Our hope is that all of this work will result in a greater concern for the
well-being of our neighbors and our community. That concern could lead
to a more determined effort to develop new revenue streams to pay for
infrastructure and to care for each other. It could lead to an examination
of our tax structure and an effort to increase taxes where taxation will do
the least harm and to reduce taxation where it will do the most for soci-
ety. A young U.S. president once asked people to think about what they
could do for their country. Now, the question becomes what we can do
for our globe and not what we could do for our stock portfolio. If we are
to effectively make the transition to a sustainable, renewable resource–
based and socially inclusive economy, we need to rebuild that sense of
community and shared sacrifice. In the face of increased globalization
and economic integration where the competition to attract talent is fierce,
it is essential that cities find their unique identity, not by retreating into
national isolation, but rather by exploring innovative urban solutions that
will usher in a new age of sustainability.
 2
SUSTAINABLE URBAN SYSTEMS

T
he sustainable city must be built on the foundations of a set of sus-
tainable urban systems. These include production and consumption
processes along with infrastructure that enable human settlements to
survive and thrive with the least possible impact on natural systems. The
operation of these systems requires technology, money, organizational
capacity, and political support to be developed and maintained. This
chapter discusses those systems in the contemporary city and describes
the changes that will be required in the transition to sustainability.
Specifically, this chapter defines and explains the following urban sys-
tems and defines sustainability in each distinct system: energy, water, solid
waste, sewage treatment, food, open spaces and parks, health care, and
transportation. We first explain what a sustainable energy system looks
like, one that is based on renewable energy and smart grids and that
reduces our dependence on fossil fuels. We then discuss water, a vital
resource that must be purified and distributed to everyone in the city and
has become a politically sensitive topic. We also discuss how the sustain-
able city should pursue a number of policies in solid waste to encourage
waste reduction, proper waste treatment, and removal. We briefly con-
sider sewage treatment and the need for sewage to be mined for nutrients
and chemicals that could be used for other purposes. We look at some of
the issues related to food supply in the sustainable city—how does a city
feed its citizens sustainably? A key system we examine that was certainly
brought home during the COVID- pandemic is the system of public
health. We turn to a discussion of the importance of parks and public
open spaces in cities, where people live with less personal space than
 SUSTAINABLE URBAN SYSTEMS 21

they might have access to in rural or suburban places. Finally, we look at

the transportation system and discuss the needs of mass transit and an
infrastructure system that are based on renewable energy. This chapter
provides a broad overview of the different urban systems that we consider
vital for the sustainable city.

ENERGY

All energy sources in the United States are subject to federal and state
regulations, such as emerging federal carbon dioxide emissions rules and
regulated public energy utilities that deliver electricity to homes and busi-
nesses. Yet it is important to think about energy within the framework
of the sustainable city. According to the United Nations Environment
Programme, “Cities consume  percent of the world’s natural resources,
 percent of the global energy supply and produce approximately
 percent of the global carbon emissions.” Kent Portney explains, “with-
out a doubt, the single most important element in any city’s sustainability
effort revolves around the environment, and by extension, energy usage
and conservation.” The energy system includes the electrical grid, as
well as delivery of natural gas by pipeline and truck delivery of petro-
leum to homes for heating and to gas stations for motor vehicles. A sus-
tainable energy system would be based on renewable resources. Most
of this renewable energy is delivered through the electrical grid, but
some renewable energy can be generated through geothermal installa-
tions, household solar water heaters, rooftop solar arrays, and a variety
of other technologies.
A sustainable energy system would involve ensuring access to mod-
ern energy services, improving energy efficiency, and increasing the
share of renewable energy in the global energy mix. The National
Science Foundation states that “a sustainable energy economy values
environmental and ecosystem stewardship, as well as clean, equitable,
reliable, renewable, safe, secure, and economically viable energy strate-
gies and solutions.” Renewable energy in the United States accounted
for about  percent of total U.S. energy consumption ( percent came
from fossil fuels and the rest came from nuclear) and about  percent
22 CONCEPT

of electricity generation in . In  globally, installed renewable

electricity capacity represented about a third of total capacity.
A sustainable energy system would be far more efficient than our current
system. Today, a great deal of the energy on our grid is lost in transmis-
sion or not put to use during the late evenings and early mornings. It is
also inefficiently controlled and used. Electricity transmission and distri-
bution losses average  percent annually in the United States. This issue
is particularly severe in middle- and low-income countries where losses
during transmission and distribution are even higher. Insulation, timers,
and more efficient appliances and building systems can save energy,
whereas sloppy human behavior wastes enormous amounts of energy.
The current electrical grid lacks computer controls and, in many cases, the
ability to accept and utilize distributed, decentralized sources of energy.
A sustainable energy system would address all of these issues.
At the heart of a sustainable energy system would be a smart grid
capable of storing, transmitting, and receiving energy with maximum
efficiency. Such a system also would include backup energy systems to
prevent blackouts when the grid is malfunctioning. Building the smart
grid will be an incremental process similar to the development of the
current electrical grid. The building block of the smart grid of the future
could be a set of microgrids built by institutions and communities to
provide energy resiliency and backup, to enhance energy efficiency, and
to enable buildings and facilities to generate and transmit excess energy.
Microgrids are defined as a group of interconnected loads and distributed
energy resources with clearly defined electrical boundaries that act as a
single entity and that can connect or disconnect from the grid. Microgrid
networks usually include one or more distributed generation sites. These
microgrids have computer controls that ultimately are knitted together
into larger and larger smart grids, which are made possible by commu-
nication technology and computer processing. Part II highlights several
microgrid cases around the world.
Depending on location, distributed renewable energy will include
resources, such as arrays of solar cells, onshore and offshore wind tur-
bines, and geothermal sources of heat and cooling. Over time, innova-
tion will make these technologies more efficient and less costly. Solar
cells are relatively inefficient in their use of solar energy. Some believe
 SUSTAINABLE URBAN SYSTEMS 23

that the application of nanotechnology to solar cells will result in smaller,

more efficient, and less expensive solar arrays. Energy storage, typically in
the form of batteries, is a key technology for sustainable energy. Batteries
are coming down in price and size and are becoming more effective and
practical. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, “In
multiple application areas around the world, batteries have been deployed
to aid the integration of renewable energy, especially solar and wind
power . . . Costs are coming down, and technological progress is improv-
ing performance. Recent progress is also making batteries safer and more
efficient.” The battery market now uses more lithium–ion batteries, which
have better cost and performance than other batteries. Battery storage
can increase the flexibility of the electricity system, especially in the face
of growing renewable energy. An auto battery that delivers  miles of
driving in one charge could transform the motor vehicle business. A low-
price home battery that allows solar or wind energy to be stored could
transform the energy business.
Alternatively, China has built ultra-high-voltage transmission lines that
are capable of transferring electricity over long distances with minimum
energy loss, such as the .-million-volt ultra-high-voltage direct current
(DC) line it built over , kilometers (, miles) to transmit wind
and solar power, which are abundant in Xinjiang, to China’s eastern coast.
China has exported this technology to Brazil for building an ultra-high-
voltage line that would transport hydroelectric power from the north to
the populous south. An ultra-high-voltage transmission offers the benefit
of allowing power plants to be built closer to the energy source, alleviating
urban air pollution of populous cities. It also would be able to integrate
dispersed renewable energy sources into the distribution network.
Although some of the technologies for renewable energy already exist,
the truly transformative technology that would drive fossil fuels from
the marketplace has not yet been invented. The transition to a renewable
energy economy will take several decades to complete. Existing technology
already is being used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while continuing
economic growth. Energy efficiency is playing a key role in the early stages
of the transition to a sustainable urban economy. But nearly all aspects
of modern life require energy. Urban lifestyles require mobility, climate
control, food and waste processing, transport, and / information and
24 CONCEPT

communications. Every element of this lifestyle involves the use of tech-

nology that requires energy. Our addiction to and dependence on energy
makes it extremely difficult to transition to new forms of energy unless
they are as reliable, convenient, and inexpensive as current sources.

WATER

Water quality is defined at the federal level in the United States through the
Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, but potable water for
drinking, cleaning, cooking, and bathing must be supplied by the sustain-
able city. It is a function of local government. The ability to supply potable
water requires water storage, filtration, and distribution systems that often
cost billions of dollars to construct and many million dollars each year to
operate and maintain. Loucks, van Beek, and Stedinger explain: “Urban
water infrastructure typically includes water collection and storage facili-
ties at source sites, water transport via aqueducts (canals, tunnels, and/
or pipelines) from source sites to water treatment facilities; water treat-
ment, storage, and distribution systems; wastewater collection (sewage)
systems and treatment; and urban drainage works.” In addition to the
public supply system, private water tanks, pumps, and pipes must be main-
tained by property owners to ensure that clean water remains clean when
it comes out of the faucet. The World Health Organization estimates that
 million people around the world lack access to improved sources of
drinking water, and by , half the world’s population will be living in
water-stressed areas. In  and , we saw a crisis develop in the water
supply of Flint, Michigan, where unsafe levels of lead were discovered in
homes after the city switched water sources. The decision to disconnect
a water system from a proven and relatively clean source of water to an
unproven source turned out to be a poorly evaluated and foolish attempt
to save money. This incident raised awareness of the relationship of water
infrastructure to effective governance, and media stories in the months fol-
lowing revealed lead concerns in cities across the United States. One USA
Today article reported that “an analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency data showed about  schools and day-care centers failed lead
tests a total of about  times from  through .” In New York
 SUSTAINABLE URBAN SYSTEMS 25

City, the issue of water supply was so politically sensitive that when the
New York Times reported a cutback in capital funds to complete the city’s
vital third water tunnel, the mayor reversed the decision the next day. His
staff tried to claim it was a “clerical error.” The mayor blamed his staff for
poorly communicating his decision. Regardless of the actual events, the
fact remains that water supply has become a major political issue, even in
high-income countries, such as the United States.
Many people have a sense that, like air, water should be free and avail-
able to all. Water is necessary for human life and everyone has the right
to safe water. Although we agree that the provision of safe drinking water
is a public responsibility, on a crowded planet, this resource can no longer
be obtained free of charge. More and more of our groundwater has been
contaminated by normal land uses that involve toxic substances in every-
day life. The contamination includes everything from the use of toxics in
cleaning fluids, to chemical lawn treatments, to the residue on a suburban
driveway after an oil change.
Our lives are built around an almost casual use of plastics and toxic
chemicals that have useful properties, but eventually these plastics and
chemicals degrade or will be damaged by water or fire and then released
into the environment. This process pollutes the air, land, and water, and
although much of the pollutants are diluted before humans ingest them,
they can enter drinking water sources that once were clean and contami-
nate them enough to require filtration and other forms of treatment. This
treatment could take place at the household level if the contaminants are
known and stable. Because this is not typically the case, however, large-
scale water filtration and treatment with professional operation and water
testing is a more cost-effective approach. This approach, in turn, requires
that water systems be managed as a public utility, and because of econo-
mies of scale, these systems are more cost-effective in urban areas than
they are in rural ones.
A sustainable water system is simply one that provides safe and conve-
nient water to everyone. Sustainable water use ensures “adequate supplies
of fresh clean water for present and future generations and for the envi-
ronment.” This requires that contaminants in the water supply be under-
stood, measured, and treated to ensure that the water is fit for human
consumption. An unsustainable water system is one that is missing one
26 CONCEPT

key component or that depends on finite, uncertain, or nonrenewable

water resources. Some groundwater sources may be geologic, and some
may be recharging slower than the rate of extraction.
In a modern water system, filtration is critical, and these processes
require a great deal of energy and may be expensive. Desalinization is
becoming more common in some island or arid nations. Recycling waste-
water is also becoming more common. As these technologies continue
to advance, the technology of sustainable water is more advanced than
that of sustainable energy. In the case of water, current technology can be
relied on to ensure sustainability; this is not yet the case for energy.
The politics of infrastructure investment will affect water sustainability
because elected officials know that they will never get to cut the ribbon
on any of these investments, as design and construction can take decades.
As we noted, in , we saw an example of the politics of New York
City’s water supply. On April , , New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer
wrote an excellent, well-sourced, and somewhat-depressing article about
the defunding of the last stages of New York City’s third water tunnel by
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. The third tunnel is needed to gradu-
ally close the other two older tunnels for repair, ensuring the city’s water
supply. According to Dwyer’s initial story:

The entire Brooklyn-Queens leg of the new tunnel was scheduled to be

finished by , with $ million included in the capital budget in 
by Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, for whom
completion of the third tunnel was the most urgent and expensive under-
taking of his tenure. But last year, Mr. de Blasio’s administration, eager
to keep a lid on water and sewer rates that had grown by an average of
 percent annually under Mr. Bloomberg, moved financing for the third
tunnel to other projects, Amy Spitalnick, a de Blasio spokeswoman, said.
The city intends to finish the remaining portions of the tunnel sometime
in the s, but it has not set a date for completion nor allocated money
in the budget to carry out the work.

The negative reaction to the New York Times story by the city’s movers
and shakers, and by many environmentalists, was swift and overwhelming.
The  drinking water disaster in Flint, Michigan, had increased the
 SUSTAINABLE URBAN SYSTEMS 27

attention paid to water supply. Moreover, the city had already invested
billions of dollars over many decades to build this tunnel. The project
was nearly completed; why stop it now? To many people outside of city
hall, Mayor de Blasio’s decision made no sense. According to the mayor,
the newspaper story and the views of his staff quoted in the story were in
error. The day after the first story, Dwyer filed a second article about the
restoration of capital funds to the city’s budget:

Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday that he was going to add $
million to New York City’s capital budget to speed up work on Water
Tunnel No.  so that it would be able to serve Brooklyn and Queens. . . .
The mayor’s announcement came just hours after The New York Times
reported that his administration last year had removed all money to pay
for the tunnel and had also replaced the announced  deadline for
completion with a commissioner’s “guess” that it would be ready for ser-
vice sometime in the mid-s. . . . The simplest part of the mayor’s day
may have been finding money to pay for the tunnel, not an especially diffi-
cult task in a budget swollen with revenues from a booming city economy.
Far more awkward was the struggle by him and his aides to argue that
they had never flagged in their support for the tunnel project, and to
avoid an unflattering comparison to Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael
R. Bloomberg, who drove progress on the construction after work on the
tunnel had moved sluggishly for decades.

Despite de Blasio’s confused leadership and effort to evade accountability,

the real lesson of this water controversy was to reinforce the growing vis-
ibility and importance of the water supply issue.
High-quality infrastructure can be expensive but must be seen as an
investment in the future. The problem for political decision makers is that
reelection is often more important to them than some abstract notion
of “the future.” But the future can happen quickly and without warning.
And water resources are not optional for a functioning city—they are
necessary. Across America, we see older cities with crumbling infrastruc-
ture in need of reinvestment, and in the newer cities of the Southwest,
population growth and anti-tax zealotry have put increased pressure on
the newer infrastructure that was not built to handle the loads it now
28 CONCEPT

confronts. Many dams in the Western United States are inefficient, and
they lose hundreds of billions of gallons of water each year to evaporation
and leakage underground. Some states are developing plans for new dams
and river diversions, yet as reported in the New York Times, “the projects,
coupled with perhaps the most severe water shortages the region has ever
seen, have reignited a debate about whether th-century solutions can
address the challenges of a st-century drought, with a growing chorus
of prominent former officials saying the plans fly in the face of a new
climate reality.”
Water is critical infrastructure. Unsafe drinking water can make one ill,
and if children ingest lead, it can cause brain damage. Water is a biological
necessity, and because the primary function of government is to ensure
the security and well-being of the population, protecting a jurisdiction’s
water supply can be as important as police and fire services. In New York
City’s case, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office and asked for an
assessment of the risks and threats that the city might face, he learned
that a collapse in the water supply system was at or near the top of the list.
In the United States, people take their water supply for granted. We
turn on the faucet, and clean water flows out. In parts of the middle- and
low-income countries, people walk with buckets for miles to find water
and bring it back to their homes. The technology of water supply has
advanced dramatically in recent decades. Comprehensive water models
now use engineering, economic, ecological, hydrological, institutional,
and political information to better manage water resources. We now can
filter almost any water and make it safe to use. A poor water supply is a
function of underinvestment in infrastructure that must be built when the
land-use development process degrades traditional sources of water. At
one time, your home’s backyard might have been a place where you could
dig a well and obtain clean water. As land development occurs, that clean
source can become polluted.
In New York City, a reservoir once was located at Forty-Second Street
and Fifth Avenue at the site of the present main branch of the New York
Public Library. As groundwater got polluted and as real estate values
soared, the city’s leaders realized that they needed to spend the money to
go many miles north of the city to store water and to pipe it in. It is always
tempting to do what Flint, Michigan, did and look for a cheaper source of
 SUSTAINABLE URBAN SYSTEMS 29

water, but you get what you pay for. As the planet becomes more crowded
and as the global trend toward urbanization continues, investment in
water treatment and supply needs to grow. For the moment, an awareness
of this need seems to have political currency in the United States.

SOLID WASTE

Solid waste (i.e., garbage) removal is a fundamental requirement of

the sustainable city. Garbage occupies a great deal of space and can be
unsightly, and its open storage can attract vermin and generate disease
and illness. As population and consumption have grown, solid waste vol-
ume has increased, as have the technologies of waste transport, storage,
disposal, treatment, and reuse. Municipal governments must deal with
the rising costs of waste disposal and environmental effects. The United
States consumed  percent more materials on a per capita basis in 
compared with . The global cost of dealing with all that trash is ris-
ing, from $ billion a year in  to an expected $ billion by ,
with the sharpest cost increases in low-income countries. In the twentieth
century, many cities developed “sanitary landfills,” which were essentially
either holes in the ground in which garbage was dumped or areas such as
wetlands to which solid waste was added to create new land. Many parts of
New York City are landfilled areas. All of Manhattan south of Wall Street
is landfill, some of which consists of garbage. For many years, New York
City and many other coastal cities barged their garbage into the ocean
and dumped it. Fortunately, disposal of waste to landfills has decreased:
in , Americans sent  percent of the waste they generated to landfills,
compared with  percent in .
Before the twentieth century, most garbage was organic in content and
decomposed over time. Modern waste includes many plastics and other
substances that are either toxic, nonbiodegradable, or both. As a result of
such materials and the growing volume of consumption, solid waste has
become an area of urban service delivery requiring technological innova-
tion and increased organizational capacity. Garbage trucks with built-in
compactors, landfills, waste-to-energy plants, waste sorting and recycling
facilities, and anaerobic digesters (technologies that transform food waste
30 CONCEPT

to fertilizer) have been developed to manage and make use of this grow-
ing volume of solid waste. Some of the policies that are needed for a truly
circular economy would require national policy, and in the United States,
many local initiatives require state approval. Therefore, the discretion that
local governments have when setting waste management policies is lim-
ited. Nevertheless, the sustainable city should pursue a number of policies
and programs regarding solid waste management.
The first such policy is waste reduction. One such effort is to reduce
packaging, including plastic bag fees. Deposits on bottles, tires, batteries,
and other recyclable items also can be applied. Another effort is building
the organizational and technological capacity needed to separate waste
into dry and wet garbage (food and nonfood) as well as into more eas-
ily recycled waste, such as paper and glass. In , the United States
generated about . million tons of trash and recycled and compos-
ted roughly . percent of that amount. Globally, about  percent of
waste are either recycled or composted. Additionally, we need the orga-
nizational and technological capacity to treat waste. This may include
waste-to-energy plants and other facilities to either dispose of waste safely
or transform it into a usable product. Some of the waste that is burned
for energy leaves behind a material that can be used in construction.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines an integrated waste
management system as one that has the following four components, in
order of emphasis: source reduction and reuse, recycling and composting,
energy recovery, and treatment and disposal. These efforts all suggest an
approach more sophisticated than merely collecting garbage and dump-
ing it into a hole in the ground.
Waste management also has a social element that is related to a com-
munity’s culture and values. One of the goals of a sustainable city is to
effectively manage material flows into and out of the city. Garbage, or
what environmental engineers call solid waste, presents some of the most
difficult challenges to urban sustainability. In , San Francisco set an
ambitious goal of “zero waste,” which included diverting all of its garbage
away from landfills by . The zero-waste policy can become an integral
part of a sustainable city, which for San Francisco included three goals:
prevent waste, recycle and compost, and safely handle toxins. Although
it is no longer possible for the city to achieve that time-specific goal,
 SUSTAINABLE URBAN SYSTEMS 31

it already has reduced waste by more than any other city in the United
States. In , San Francisco had already diverted  percent of its waste
away from landfills, through reuse, recycle, or composting, at time when
the U.S. national average was only  percent.
New York Times reporter Matt Richtel once observed that “San
Francisco also has a world-class reputation for its composting processes,
which turns food waste into fine, coffee-like grounds that is sent to farms
as fertilizer.” According to the San Francisco Environment Department,
about half of the waste placed in nonrecyclable waste bins in  could
be recycled, which would drive the waste diversion rate to  percent.
Some assessments of the  percent diversion rate state that this number
is so high because it includes heavy construction materials and biosolids.
Nevertheless, San Francisco’s unique political and social culture must be
seen as a major factor contributing to this program’s success. People in
San Francisco act in a manner that shows reducing waste and recycling
are important social behaviors.
Although achieving zero waste may prove to be difficult—simply
because you cannot recycle what is not recyclable, such as some plastics
and electronics—San Francisco has set new targets to reduce personal
waste by  percent and reduce waste that is burned or thrown in landfills
by  percent by . Now, San Francisco may face a new problem—
that is, where to ship its waste. China, which used to import  percent
of the world’s recyclable waste and  percent of plastic waste from the
United States banned almost all waste imports in  to focus on recy-
cling its own domestic waste. The reliance on China has stifled recycling
infrastructure and markets domestically in the United States and Europe.
Before long-term alternatives are established, such as finding new markets
with sufficient recycling capacity, boosting local processing capacity, or
reducing single-use plastics, the most cost-effective disposal method in
the short term could be sending more waste to landfills or incinerators.
In contrast to San Francisco, New York City set a goal to achieve zero
waste by . The waste diversion rate in New York City was  percent
in , and five years later, the rate still hovers around  percent. Any
casual look at New York City’s public recycling bins reveals a sense of
the difficult road New York must travel to reach anything approaching
zero waste. Bins designed to collect paper are filled with bottles, and the
32 CONCEPT

bottle bins are filled with a wide variety of unsorted waste. Northern
Californians may be thoughtful about waste disposal, but New Yorkers
apparently cannot be bothered. It is not clear that New York is capable of
a cultural shift deep enough to achieve the diversion rates already reached
in San Francisco.
Each city is different, and New York’s pace, diversity, and size make
comparisons to San Francisco difficult. Still, large-scale behavior changes
can be achieved with leadership, strategy, and creativity. New York City
has eliminated indoor smoking in public places—a goal once seen as
unattainable. In any case, behavior change alone is not sufficient. The
recycled waste must actually be reused—a problem with the weak market
for some recycled substances. The technology of waste sorting and the
energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness of recycling also need improve-
ment. A city’s system of recycling and waste management is as important
as an individual’s waste disposal behavior. The technology and market
for zero waste will eventually come to New York City, but probably not
by .
Most experts recognize that a system of recycling facilities, waste-to-
energy plants, and changed public behavior would be a more cost-effective
and environmentally beneficial waste management system for New York
City. Unfortunately, because of “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) politics,
New York can barely site marine waste transfer facilities to ship garbage
away by barge and has not been able to build waste-to-energy plants
or other elements of a more advanced waste management system. New
Yorkers simply won’t accept construction of those facilities in their
neighborhoods. In any case, NIMBY politics, which we discuss further
in chapter , may well be supplanted by economics. As New York’s land
prices rise, it becomes increasingly uneconomical to locate large-scale
waste facilities within the city.
Elsewhere in the world, cities in Japan, Italy, Canada, Brazil, and China
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"You mistake me, Mr. Packard. I am surprised, for the idea never
entered my head before."
"I suppose you wouldn't like the idea," said Giles Packard nervously.
"On the contrary, I approve it. Of course I don't know how mother
may look upon it."
"But you don't object to it?"
"No, Mr. Packard, I wish you success."
Mrs. Rollins was surprised to receive an offer of marriage from Mr.
Packard, but she had learned to know his many good qualities and
was grateful to him for his kindness to Rupert, and after a brief time
for consideration she gave her consent.
There was little change in their way of living, but of course there
was an end of pecuniary cares and anxiety for the future.
Mr. Packard decided to go into business in New York on his own
account. Rupert is his confidential clerk, and has a handsome salary.
Mr. Packard's natural shrewdness has made his venture a success
from the start He sold out his Colorado cattle ranch on very
favorable terms to two parties from the East, and now his time is
exclusively employed in his New York business.
Some time since the Evening World contained the following
announcement:

"Mr. Stephen Lorimer, the well-known dry-goods merchant of

Third Avenue, is reported in difficulties. A meeting of his
creditors has been called, but so serious are his
embarrassments that it is doubted whether he will be permitted
to go on."

This prediction was verified. Mr. Lorimer now occupies a position as

salesman in a dry-goods house in Chicago, not being willing to fill
such a place in any city where he had been in business for himself,
and is obliged to live in a very plain way.
There was little sympathy felt for him by those who had been in his
employ. He had done nothing to win their favor. But Julian is very
discontented. He is working in an office at four dollars a week, and
feels that life is not worth living under his altered circumstances.
Rupert's real estate has increased largely in value, and he is worth
quite a competency in his own right. His young charge, Fred, has
developed a taste for study, and Rupert intends to have him prepare
for college.
"You ought to have gone to college yourself," said Mr. Packard.
"No," answered Rupert. "I am cut out for business. Fred must be the
scholar, and I will be the business man."
Frank Sylvester, Rupert's first friend, has returned from Europe, and
the friendship between them has been renewed. Though Rupert has
been so prosperous, he is never ashamed to refer to the time when
he was a bell-boy.
Nor does he forget his old friends. Recently he met Leslie Waters
standing in front of the Coleman House looking seedy and
dilapidated.
"How is the world using you, Leslie?" he asked.
"Badly, my dear boy," answered Leslie, mournfully. "Our company
was stranded at Pittsburg and I had to walk all the way to New York.
The profession isn't what it was."
"Then why not leave it? I think I can get you a business position."
But Leslie Waters was too much enamored of the stage to forsake it.
When he is in hard luck Rupert always helps him, and he still works
on, hoping some day to achieve eminence. But the prospect does
not look encouraging.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RUPERT'S
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