Greener cities: a necessity or a luxury? - Nature.com

Greener cities: a necessity or a luxury?
A vertical forest in Milan, Italy.Credit: Getty

The Living City: Why Cities Don’t Need to Be Green to Be Great Des Fitzgerald Basic Books (2023)

Age of the City: Why our Future will be Won or Lost Together Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin Bloomsbury Continuum (2023)

In 2021, residents in Manhattan, New York City, chained themselves to trees in the local park. They were protesting the East Side Coastal Resiliency project — a roughly US$1.5-billion flood-protection effort that would raise the level of the park, install flood gates and reshape a 4-kilometre stretch of New York City’s shoreline. The protest was not just about saving trees, but about fundamental questions: whether the city should change, how it should change, whose vision for change matters and who should decide what changes will be implemented. Much of the work has gone ahead anyway since then, but the project continues to be contested by some.

Other cities around the world are grappling with similar conundrums. And these two books take radically different stances. In The Living City, Irish sociologist Des Fitzgerald takes aim at the concept of green urbanism, but misfires. By contrast, in Age of the City, UK-based globalization and development scholar Ian Goldin and journalist Tom Lee-Devlin make a convincing case for cities as key to global sustainability — as crucial nodes for flows of global resources, whether they be digital, cultural, economic or human.

Cities are facing a polycrisis — from social challenges such as poverty, inequality and poor housing to ones arising from climate change and biodiversity loss, such as heatwaves, floods and sea-level rise. Solutions are needed. For example, Manhattan’s East Side project aims to avoid a repeat of 2012, when Hurricane Sandy caused tidal surges that flooded streets and power plants, leading to blackouts. Nature-based approaches are being increasingly deployed 1, such as planting trees. Vegetation, wetlands and soils can absorb storm water, regulate air and water quality and cool streets and buildings. Those grounds can also act as recreational spaces, which have health and well-being benefits.

A garden city

Yet, Fitzgerald derides such approaches in The Living City. Making his position clear — “I am against green cities” — he takes an impassioned stand against investing in nature as part of reimagining the city of the twenty-first century. The greening trend, he suggests, is being promoted by a group of elite architects and planners who want to realize a twentieth-century vision of the ‘garden city’. This outdated concept, Fitzgerald suggests, uses nature as a tool for improving the productivity of workers and creating amenities for wealthy people, including housing for middle-class professionals.

Fitzgerald is right that greening can be part of larger gentrification forces that displace residents. Yet, he skirts solutions, such as the provision of affordable housing, inclusive decision-making and increased access to jobs and basic services. His portrayal of urban developers as facing a simple choice of whether ‘to green or not to green’ is a false dichotomy. Greening shouldn’t be done in isolation, but as part of a wholesale agenda of urban transformation, with equity and inclusion at its centre.

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Ultimately, Fitzgerald privileges his own vision of cities. He loves the dirt, the grit and the seediness of the towns that he grew up in, such as Cork in Ireland, or has lived in such as Bristol, UK. He argues that cities don’t need to change, that they certainly don’t need to be made greener and that they are fine as they are: messy human constructs.

Yes, people can be emotionally attached to trees, he writes, which could stem from sentimentality or an anxiety about a lack of control over urbanization and industrial progress. This attachment can also be used as a political tool. Fitzgerald isn’t swayed by experts, and summarily dismisses thousands of scientific papers from ecologists, planners, designers, economists, social scientists and medical professionals that have shown the benefits of urban nature to people’s lives and livelihoods 2.

Fitzgerald’s argument will resonate with some. But it misses the big picture. Gone must be the days of paving over nature, car-centric development and growth for growth’s sake. Decades of climate change are inevitable, given the levels of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Existing cities will need to be retrofitted and redesigned to cope with the conditions of the future, and cities must adopt methods of climate-resilient development 3. Resilience requires a diverse array of approaches, including greening.

Age of the City recognizes this urgent need for transformation. Goldin and Lee-Devlin set out the immense challenges that urban areas face, regarding food, water, climate, the economy, health and education. For example, cities consume 75% of global primary energy, release 70% of greenhouse-gas emissions and produce 10 billion tonnes of solid waste annually.
Two activists chained to a tree, in protest of the destruction of the East River Park in Manhattan, New York City.Credit: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty

Yet, the authors see cities as places that are also ripe with opportunity, where money, ideas, knowledge, goods and services mingle. Cities are engines of innovation and economic opportunity, with the potential to lift entire countries out of poverty, as they have in China, for example. People want to move to cities to better their lives, as well as to escape poverty, war or climate extremes — and nearly all of the global population growth this century will occur in cities. The authors argue that, because cities host more than half of the world’s people and most of its infrastructure and economic productivity, protecting and improving them is the greatest global challenge of the Anthropocene epoch. Working in, for and with cities is the best way to address global inequities and unsustainability.

Goldin and Lee-Devlin are wary of gentrification, and its tendency to push people to the fringes of cities, through zoning laws, racist policies, lack of affordable housing, pay inequality and other forms of discrimination. How can cities become more equal, inclusive and fair? Through “fairer schooling, fairer housing and fairer public transportation”, alongside fairer wages and access to green spaces, which is crucial for physical and mental health.

Flipping how public transport is priced is one of the authors’ more compelling suggestions. In cities such as London and New York City, the cost of public transport is highest in outer zones. Yet, people living in more-affordable suburbs must endure long commutes and poor transport links, which make it hard for them to get to their jobs in the inner city. Travel from the outer rings should be less expensive, not the other way around, Goldin and Lee-Devlin propose.

A fairer city

The authors document case studies of other mechanisms that work. For example, in Vienna, more than 60% of residents live in subsidized housing, compared with just 5% in New York City, with half of the units owned by the Austrian government and the other half by non-profit cooperatives. Japan has balanced its regional development through policies such as decentralized production and investments in high-speed rail networks. These allow for consistent standards of living across cities, as well as ensuring that other regions benefit from Tokyo’s economic growth. Leipzig in Germany has devolved decision-making and redistributed tax revenue to increase support for education and transportation.

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However, both books focus on cities in high-income countries. Most examples are drawn from the United States and United Kingdom, despite three-quarters of urbanites living in low- or middle-income countries. Urban growth this century will be driven mainly by the expansion of cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. China has more than 160 cities with more than one million residents each. Urban megaregions are emerging, such as the Pearl River Delta in China, which is home to 65 million people and has an economic output of $1.2 trillion. Two-thirds of cities with the worst air pollution are in India.

Science has made clear that if we want human-positive cities, they also need to be nature-positive 4. People need to reconnect with each other and with the biosphere, not because of some philosophical ideal of a garden city, as Fitzgerald worries, but for the practical reasons outlined by Goldin and Lee-Devlin. This can only be done by tinkering, experimenting and scaling up what works.