Planning the Future, One City at a Time

About a month ago I shared a turbulence-ridden plane ride with a consultant for an urban planning firm in Madison, WI. After talking briefly about my intemperate weekend there – evidenced by my visible hangover and anachronistic “Mifflin 2009” T-shirt – our conversation turned to her plans. She told me that after she landed in Chicago she was heading straight to Amsterdam (which would have been interesting enough for me) and from there flying directly to conduct business in Abu Dhabi of the United Arab Emirates.

Learning about urban planning in Abu Dhabi? If there would be any redeemable aspect to my stay at UW, this was certain to be it.

Flooding her with an array of questions, I soon found out that she was part of a team probing the city to set up bike lanes to make it more convenient and safe for the residents. She told me that aside from being very densely populated, Abu Dhabi currently has a crucial transportation issue to deal with, including road congestion, on-street car parking, and widespread commuting troubles. She and her team were traveling to the Middle Eastern city to redesign the roadway system to alleviate some of these problems part of an overall urban revamping effort called Abu Dhabi 2030.¹

After discussing both her excitement and apprehension about her inaugural visit to the Middle East, I decided to share some of my admittedly limited knowledge of her field. I told her that a few months earlier, I attended a lecture in Syracuse by sustainability expert Alex Steffen, whom I had the privilege of interviewing beforehand. Listening to Steffen, I was shocked to learn many things about our current environmental failures. Yet what surprised me the most was his belief that people should actually move into cities to limit carbon emissions from cars and other forms of transportation. Urban planners like the one sitting next to me could then implement structures to prevent congestion and allow city-dwellers to trek with lower carbon imprints, rather than driving vast distances from their suburban homes.

What urban plans such as these point to is the mindset we need to demonstrate if we want to start thinking about real environmental change in this country. As Mr. Steffen aptly put it during his lecture: it’s not about doing things differently, it’s about doing different things. Chiefly this means re-thinking and re-designing the way we live to provide for a sustainable future. While continued efforts like Abu Dhabi 2030 and New York’s “PlaNYC” can provide the blueprint, we still must convince a vast majority of Americans that it’s possible. Urbanization should no longer be looked at as a mayor’s pipe dream to create money and business for the city, but as a practical way to achieve minimal carbon emission.

Apart from traditional techniques listed on the above Website, there are countless measures we can take to make cities more sustainable and desirable places to live. While many of these are certain to work, the issue still seems more psychological to me. We have to rid ourselves of the notion that urban, suburban, and rural are all inter-dependent entities we can all be a part of at once. Instead we should focus all our resources on urban centers, letting only the necessary agricultural population live rurally with almost everyone else living in or close to compact, neatly regulated cities.

Of course radically changing Americans’ beliefs about anything, much less their comfortable suburban lifestyles, will never be easy. One of the greatest hurdles to this may just be our country’s physical expanse. When I lived in Copenhagen for 5 months, it amazed me to see how far the urban area seemed to extend outside the heart of the city even though the city itself wasn’t that big. Those living on the outskirts could easily navigate their way into town by bike (a preferred method) or train without feeling the suffocating barrage of cars, traffic, and pedestrians everywhere.

For some reason in this country we are captivated by the ideal of the urban metropolis. We think the presence of huge office buildings somehow proves our economic and international potency. This may be fine from an urbanization standpoint – building up isn’t always a bad thing – but not when the people who work in those buildings drive their SUVs 40 miles every day back to their centrally air-conditioned mini-mansions. While Americans take pride in sacrificing for a war or providing aid, they seem to care less when it’s about something less tangible and perhaps more important: our future.

Any political measures to disrupt this corrosive cycle will of course come with some backlash from the auto and energy industries and their respective lobbying ilk. But like so many of the other issues we face today, this is one that requires a staunch sense of vision from our political leaders. This means not succumbing to the pressures of economic and political capital, but finally standing up for what needs to be done.

As many great leaders have noted in the past, sometimes people need to be told what is right rather than decide for themselves. It’s time to put aside our selfish indulgences and show that we can make this work, both for the greater good of coming generations and one another.


¹The population of the city is expected to rise dramatically by then, soaring from its current level of 900,000 to more than 3 million by 2030.