In preparation for our Future City event this Friday, we’re comparing progress towards urban sustainability in Portland and Seattle.
In its Cascadian context, Seattle is the middling city.
It’s true that it retains a vibrant central core, that it has had neighborhood planning since 1993, and that in general Seattle is more and more compact. Yet it is no Vancouver, where new development has brought the sustainability benefits of compact community to much of the city.
It’s also true that Seattle has a bold (if as yet underfunded) bike plan, a high level of commuter transit ridership, and a terrific new light rail line. Yet it is not Portland, where biking, walking and transit are more woven into the fabric of the city and its culture.
Seattle falls in the middle of the three Cascadian cities in all sorts of ways, from green building to green infrastructure. It excels in a few areas at the city level — for instance, Seattle’s utilities are national leaders in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, preparing the region for the impacts of climate change and promoting conservation — but as a metro region it is falling, by some measurements, behind cities like Denver and San Diego, at which, frankly, Seattle’s long turned up its nose.
The Seattle metro area’s growth management is weak, its regional transportation plan is hopelessly out-dated, and the political powers that be are driving forward a number of major new highway projects — including a waterfront tunnel and new cross-lake bridge — that are bound to not only soak up scarce transportation dollars but also lock the region into further car dependence. Meanwhile, the State of Washington has fallen to the back of the regional pack in legislating the kind of incentive shifts that are driving forward green development, renewables, district energy, sustainable design and innovative retrofit programs in other states. Perhaps nowhere else on the West Coast are the politics of sunk-cost thinking so powerful, even in supposedly progressive circles.
So bad is the regional record on land use, transportation and bright green economic issues that there are honestly times Seattle’s situation seems hopeless. Despite all its natural advantages and many achievements, it sometimes looks like Seattle will simply be drowned in a sea of sprawl, choked in traffic, and left to rust economically as the world moves rapidly into a post-carbon future.
But a countervailing force is showing itself as well: a concentration of some of the best bright green thinkers and innovators in North America. Seattle is home to an array of really brilliant people working in think tanks like Sightline and Stockholm Environment Institute; in advocacy groups like FutureWise and Great City, in start-up bright green tech businesses like FrontSeat and 3Tier; in leading design organizations like the Cascadia Green Building Council (authors of the Living Building Challenge) and AIA Seattle; in architecture firms like GGLO, LMN, Mithun, NBBJ, and Hybrid Architects and ORA Architects (winners of the 99K house competition); in media outfits like Publicola and Grist (and, of course, Worldchanging itself); and in a host of other great innovative projects. Writers, artists, designers, coders, engineers, ecologists, urbanists, food advocates, transportation geeks: Seattle has something just short of a bright green scenius emerging.
Perhaps even more importantly, these thinkers have a goal: carbon neutrality.
Now, it’s a little weird to write about the goal of the entire city of Seattle becoming carbon-neutral by 2030, since I’m the one who proposed it last Fall. I’m saved from immodesty by the fact that it’s no longer my goal at all: I’m pretty much superfluous to the carbon neutrality movement at this point. The goal is now on its way to becoming official city policy, driven by hundreds of smart, dedicated advocates and a responsive City Council (especially Council President Richard Conlin and Council member Mike O’Brien [disclosure: I campaigned for both of them as a private individual]). Carbon neutrality hearings are packed. Asked to form public teams and present recommendations for action, scores of leading citizens stepped up and just two weeks ago presented guidance on everything from zero waste to transit-oriented development policies. There is serious public momentum behind the effort, of a kind perhaps unmatched by any other North American city right now.
Smart people, a bold and necessary goal, and momentum: that’s a recipe for real change. Seattle’s well positioned to take leadership on thinking through the full implications of a bright green future. Which is good, because here’s Ecotopia’s dirty little secret: all the region’s cities are anything but sustainable, now.
Urbanites from Whistler to Monterey tend to overlook the importance of scope, scale and speed when we think about the strides we’ve made in sustainability. We like to ride our bikes (or talk about it at least), buy our local organic food, mention the latest green building, donate to environmental groups, go hiking or kayaking on the weekends. Yet the simple fact is that our lives are profoundly unsustainable, both in the sense that if everyone on the planet lived like we do, our combined impact would be catastrophic, and in the sense that the cities we’ve built are extremely vulnerable to the climate chaos, resource disruptions and economic turbulence we know lies just ahead. Our cities as they are now cannot last, period.
The region’s cities have achieved a small fraction of what they need to accomplish, and time’s running out. Current climate goals demand that the developed world be essentially climate neutral by 2050 in order to facilitate a 80% total global reduction in emissions and have any chance of stabilizing CO2 at 450 ppm — but a swelling number of climate scientists are shouting that even that goal is far too lax and our progress towards it too slow. Our observable emissions have been rising faster than predicted. Our existing national commitments are too weak to save us from a 4 degree Celsius rise. What’s more, our models have failed to take into account rapid and huge climate feedbacks we may be seeing, like the melting of the Arctic permafrost already underway. I suspect now that a realistic climate strategy — if by realistic we mean “one that won’t leave our grandchildren a catastrophic hell” — is something much more like carbon neutrality in the developed world by 2040, and worldwide by 2050, with a global goal of stabilizing greenhouse gasses at 350 ppm.
To do that, we need to rapidly decouple prosperity from pollution. Bill Gates is the most notable leader to take up the cause of a climate neutral economy this year, but thousands of others are seeing the outlines of the economy of the future in zero emissions technologies and designs. We know it is possible to build that economy. We also know that cities are the best leverage point we have for doing it. At the city level, systems are big enough to make a difference on big problems like climate change and materials depletion, yet small enough to grasp. If carbon-neutrality is going to happen, it’ll be lead by cities.
In short, we need trailblazing cities. That’s why we need cities that are willing to commit to carbon neutrality and back up their talk with funded plans and strong policies: establishing the greenest building codes in the world, rapidly reducing vehicle miles traveled per person, participating in regional foodshed protection, building green infrastructure. Perhaps most important are strong incentives for transit-oriented development, the political courage to override NIMBY opposition to compact communities and the willingness to massively shift money away from auto infrastructure and towards transit and complete streets (a shift Seattle’s Mayor, Mike McGinn, is a strong advocate for). All that coupled with a shift of philanthropic funding to support more political advocacy for urban needs, increased networking of urbanist interests, and more venture capital for design innovations — walkshed technologies and bright green industries — will make carbon neutrality not just a dream but a hard, achievable target.
For our region, the wealthiest and most naturally abundant corner of the Earth, anything less than that ambition tars us all with a profound moral failure. We have a chance, right now, to help lead the world in redefining what urban life can mean. No amount of virtuous living, not even a tidal wave of small steps, will make up for that lost opportunity, if in fact we lose it. Without action that responds to the scope, scale and speed of the challenges we face, nothing else much matters.
Seattle may well lag behind the rest of region in implementing change, but it stands on the threshold of taking a step that’s perhaps more important: committing to the right goals, and throwing the muscle behind those goals to set real, systemic change in motion.
Feature image of the Seattle waterfront courtesy of WSDOT via The Architect’s Newspaper.
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 12:00 PM)
