With millions moving from suburbs and rural areas into big cities, we’ll need creativity and innovation to sustainably manage rapid urban growth and revitalize flagging suburbs.

Forget paying for gas, mowing the lawn or spending hours of your week commuting to a faraway job. Why bother with all of that when you could hop on a bus or train at a moment’s notice, walk to the corner store, enjoy beautifully landscaped public parks and have all of the entertainment and culture you could wish for, right outside your door? There are plenty of good reasons why cities are looking so attractive, especially to youths who grew up in car-centric suburbs. But as cities begin to groan under the weight of all these new residents, the rising popularity of urban life begs the question: is rapid urbanization really a good thing? Can we manage the growth of cities sustainably, while maintaining all of the benefits?

Growing Pains

For years, urban advocates and economists have predicted that the trend of moving from cities to suburbs was about to reverse, and in a big way. The 2010 Census seemed to prove these predictions overblown, with suburbs continuing to grow while urban populations generally stayed about the same. But there was one notable trend: an increase in residential growth in city cores. The New York Times reported in November 2011 that, for the first time in decades, the number of people moving to New York City was higher than the number of people moving out.

Outside America, the trend is definitely picking up steam. In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population was living in cities. By 2030, this number is expected to reach nearly 5 billion – and a lot of this growth will take place in smaller cities and towns that aren’t quite prepared for such a huge influx of new residents.

Heavily populated cities have a long list of both positive and negative impacts on the economy, the environment and human well-being. Cities enable people to give up personal vehicles in favor of buses, trains, subways and bicycles. Vertical housing uses fewer resources and takes up less land, making it far more efficient than unnecessarily large single-family homes. Walkability means people living in cities may get more exercise than their suburban counterparts. And when more people live in urban centers, more of the surrounding land can be preserved for agriculture, recreational green spaces and protected tracts of natural landscape.

But within each of those cities is seemingly endless streams of greenhouse gas emissions, congested streets, lack of affordable housing and a whole lot of trash, sewage and other forms of waste. Large urban populations put a worrying strain on local resources like water and electricity, and all that concrete leads to the urban heat island effect, contributing further to climate change. As cities grow, they tend to swallow vast amounts of land, with suburbs pushing ever outward. And though a thriving city is a major economic hub, offering lots of jobs, it’s also difficult and expensive to maintain, with many smaller cities going through extremely painful growth spurts as they try to adjust to rising populations.

Suburban Ghost Towns

The suburbs and exurbs that swelled with domestic promise thanks to the rise of affordable automobiles in post-World War II America are losing their gleam. Sprawling upper-middle-class neighborhoods filled with identical McMansions seemed like a great idea back in the early to mid-00’s, and with many people willing to commute longer to their jobs in order to achieve the suburban American dream, developers built them further and further from city centers. Today, many of these exurbs are nearly deserted, their formerly pristine lawns brown and overgrown. These housing developments, often located in otherwise rural areas, tend to be fairly isolated from commercial areas, requiring residents to drive many miles just to reach a grocery store. And when gas prices inevitably fluctuate, these exurban developments can seem more impractical than ever.

Take a look around nearly any suburb or exurb in the United States and you’ll see one sign of a cultural shift that will only worsen in the coming years: empty big-box stores. These cheap, poorly-constructed, aesthetically unpleasing metal boxes left behind by Walmart, Best Buy, Circuit City and other retail chains are hard to convert for other uses, so that they’re either knocked down and sent to landfills or simply sit vacant for years on end.

“We have long seen signs that the suburbs are unsustainable in their current form – in many senses, they were designed to be,” says Kurt Kohlstedt, founder and editor-in-chief of WebUrbanist.com. “Meandering roads are not conducive to transportation. A lack of sidewalks around shopping centers curbs walking. Suburban plots of land are too big to promote community but too small to sustain agricultural conversion.”

Some experts have predicted that if the middle class does actually abandon the suburbs in favor of cities, these neighborhoods will be left to blight. An Australian study concluded that high gas prices could turn car-dependent suburbs into slums, and many suburbs are now more likely to be home to minorities as white youth flock back to cities. It’s all too easy to imagine suburbs falling prey to poverty as their populations are cut off from the opportunities that cities can provide.

The Green Cities of the Future

If expanding cities are inevitable, what can we do to make them more sustainable? Designers, architects, urban planners, economists and other thought leaders around the world are already dreaming up solutions that range from imminently achievable to pie-in-the-sky fantasies, turning cities into real-world laboratories that explore new systems using cutting-edge technologies.

Renowned physicist Geoffrey West acknowledges that urbanization is responsible for a slew of economic, environmental and social problems, but shifts the focus to a big positive: cities as innovation hot-spots. In Thinking Cities, a 20-minute documentary by Ericsson, West discusses the ways in which cities can become “vacuum cleaners or magnets” for human creativity.

In order to prevent the many problems raised by rapid urban growth, we’ll need funding and political support for new technologies that can help us update infrastructure, manage traffic, build more efficiently, manage water and power supplies and reduce waste. Vertical urban farms that harvest their own water, run on renewable energy, recycle their waste and provide a number of essential functions to their residents are just one of the dazzling possibilities on the table. Sustainability-minded architects, engineers and planners are already beginning to imagine how old structures can be adapted for new uses, and new ones can be built to provide the ideal balance of residential, commercial, agricultural and recreational space.

Sustainable Visions For Outmoded Suburbs

And what about the big-box stores, malls and other relics of a suburban lifestyle that may go extinct? Many are already being reused in amazingly creative ways, transforming into cathedrals, farms, artist communities, roller skating rinks and indoor kart-racing tracks. An abandoned Kmart in California was even turned into a Spam museum. Big Box Reuse, a book by Julia Christensen, gathers ideas from designers and architects that include building an entire town in a single parking lot, adapting a warehouse-style store to include windows and a light-filled courtyard and swapping out a big-box store’s roof for translucent skylights so plants can be grown inside.

Dwell’s Reburbia competition solicited solutions that would envision a new future for suburbs, with the winning entry transforming McMansions into biofilter water treatment plants. Another idea involves rezoning suburbs for commercial use, specifically geared toward communities of small businesses. Judge Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabitat.com noted that this idea was “clearly the most practical, cost-effective and energy-efficient proposal submitted to Reburbia.” Incidentally, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agrees with this overall sentiment, advocating more mixed land use and other changes to suburban zoning codes in order to handle urban growth.

Of course, when it comes to actually putting these ideas into practice, caution will be required to prevent a bunch of half-baked projects that will only add to the problems. And on a global scale, there’s no telling how radical visions of the future will be put into practice.

“Perhaps the most interesting question is how cities, suburbs and countryside will be reshaped in places like China and India where booming populations are most rapidly changing both physical and cultural landscapes,” notes Kohlstedt. “In China, for instance, the dominance of the state paves the way for massive redevelopment projects on a scale unknown to the West. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it lends itself to economies of scale and rapid adaptation. On the other hand, it has also already led to entire ghost towns constructed from scratch then left eerily unoccupied.”

Photos: http2007, robertstinnett, vertical farm, dwell

The post The Future of Cities: Greening Urban Growth appeared first on EcoSalon.

Australians turn to artists to help with urban blight.

Consider colonized Williamsburg, not the Commonwealth one in Virginia but the gentrified and rarified one rife with models and brunching. A few decades ago, no one but the artist would venture there, drawn by the affordable convenience of massive swathes of abandoned industrial space. It was very much artist vs. the city. Eventually commercial and nonprofit development groups took note, and sought to replicate the formula in cities like St. Louis, Detroit and Cleveland.

The formula being: artists are natural born leaders in rescuing decentralized cities from blight, even transforming them into the next hot place to call home.

Each of the aforementioned cities has succeeded in turning their industrialized wastelands around, to a varying extent. Now, our comrades down under are attempting the same.

Australia is a very big place.

And 89% of its population lives in an urban area making it one of the most urbanized countries in the world.

But the nation of 22 million+ has been steadily creeping towards an urban crisis. An over reliance on cars, economic growth bolstered by highway construction, and shortsighted solutions that are threatening a number of their cities and towns.

A spirited editorial compared Australian sprawl to a cancerous growth on one hand, to America, on the other.

“As the colony sprawls outward, consuming resources and despoiling its environment, the inner core deteriorates. This is the route taken by many older American cities…whose cores were ghetto-ised by policies of sprawl favouring automobile and oil industries.”

Fair enough.

“Why this willful denial by Australians?” the editorial continues. “Partly it might be a consequence of our historical ‘escape’ from crowded and often terrible urban conditions in Europe. Like Americans, the promise of wide open virgin lands, seemingly allowing endless expansion and a quarter acre for everyone appeared feasible and was built into a persuasive cult. But it was never true, never sustainable.”

America holds that truth to be self-evident.

As such, social enterprise group Renew Australia is seeking to bolster their city cores by pairing up artists with abandoned commercial spaces in Newcastle, Adelaide and Townsville.

Working under the premise that cities “play an integral part in bringing together diverse communities, offering an alternative to unsustainable urban sprawl and providing a real sense of public space,” they find short and long-term solutions for vacant and abandoned properties until they become viable businesses or are redeveloped.

Started in Newcastle by writer, broadcaster and arts festival director Marcus Westbury in 2008, the program bills itself as “a permanent structure for temporary things.”

Renew has since gone national, a pairing that grants property owners, caretakers and the downtown another opportunity to become cool again.

Images: Brian Costelloe; NASA; Winter for Elbows; Renew Australia; ZeHawk

The post The Gentrification of Australia’s Urban Blight appeared first on EcoSalon.

1. Highways

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When gas prices rose dramatically in 2008, Americans began flocking to mass transit in droves, resulting in declining revenues for the Federal Highway Trust Fund. Naturally, the Bush Administration’s response was to take money from already underfunded mass transit and use it to pay for highways that are already, as Slate put it, “paved with gold”. Billions of dollars are pumped into the highway system every year, which encourages the polluting car culture and leads to further sprawl, while mass transit continues to fall by the wayside.

2. SUVs

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In case you aren’t already taking optimal advantage of the polluting power of our nation’s sprawling web of highways, the government would like to make your impact even greater by setting you up in a nice gas-guzzling subsidized SUV. A portion of the tax code revised in 2003 gives business owners a huge deduction for up to 30% of a large vehicle’s cost, which can add up to $25,000 in the case of a Hummer – far more than the credit given to individual purchasers of energy-efficient vehicles. Attempts to axe this provision in 2007 failed.

You only get the credit if it seats more than 9 passengers or weighs more than 14,000 pounds, but they don’t really care whether your business actually requires such a vehicle. So, by all means, get the Escalade.

3. Paper Mills

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Paper mills cut down trees while sucking up massive amounts of fossil fuels and get big money from the government to do it – all through a loophole in a law that was supposed to benefit renewable energy. A law enacted in 2005 contains a section that gives businesses an incentive to mix alternative energy sources with fossil fuels. To qualify for the tax credit, paper companies started adding diesel fuel to “black liquor”, a pulp-making byproduct that they were already using to generate electricity on its own.

But time might be running out for this egregious misuse of taxpayer money: the unemployment extension bill approved by the Senate and on its way to the House would eliminate this loophole and use the funds for health care. (Editor’s note: We’ve contacted both the editor and writer of this story at BusinessWeek to confirm that this loophole will still be closed in the bill just passed by the Senate, and will update if more information becomes available. In the meantime, there’s this resource which seems to confirm the loophole is in fact being closed.)

4. Commercial Fishing

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About half of the $713 million in subsidies given to the U.S. fishing industry directly contributes to overfishing, according to a new study by the Environmental Working Group. The subsidies – which equal about a fifth of the value of the catch itself – lower overhead costs and promote increased fishing capacity, meaning more fish are caught than can be naturally replaced.

Overfishing is a huge environmental problem – up to 25% of the world’s fishery stocks are overexploited or depleted, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.  But that’s not the only result of the subsidies; because roughly half of the money goes toward fuel costs, other consequences include wasteful fuel consumption as well as air and water pollution.

5. Nuclear Power

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The nuclear industry’s decade-long, $600 million lobbying effort finally paid off as President Obama agreed to grant loan guarantees for nuclear power plants.  Obama has been promising since the early days of his campaign that he would find a way to “safely harness nuclear power”, but the $55 billion taxpayer-backed loan guarantees are going forward despite continued reservations about uranium mining and the storage of radioactive waste.

6. Factory Farming

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American factory farms are literally filthy cesspools of their own making, and who else is cleaning up all that shit but American taxpayers? Giant factory farms make up just 2% of the livestock farms in the U.S. yet raise 40% of all animals in the U.S., and they do it using practices that are not only harmful to workers and the animals themselves, but to the environment.

The government heavily subsidizes factory farms so they can provide über-cheap meat and dairy, raising as many animals as possible in the shortest amount of time with the least amount of care. And why should they care about finding better ways to manage manure when the government hands them $125 million annually to “deal” with the consequences, and then doesn’t bother to check up on them?

Despite the backwards funding given to clean them up, gaping lagoons of livestock waste packed with pollutants continue to be one of the biggest environmental problems in America, fouling our water and causing those depressing dead zones in our oceans.

7.  Corn Ethanol

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In the quest to beat back fossil fuels, cleaner fuels that we can grow seemed like a good idea – until we realized that some, like corn, make a huge dent in the world’s food supply. But that isn’t stopping the U.S. government from giving billions in subsidies to the corn industry in general, and corn ethanol in particular.

Corn-based ethanol gobbled up 76% of federal government renewable energy subsidies in 2007, leaving little for more environmentally sound renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Worse yet, it’s a huge drain on water resources, gulping down up to 2,138 liters of water per liter of ethanol.

This isn’t just an unwise investment – it’s also destroying the rainforest. As American farmers have abandoned soy for subsidized corn, soy prices have risen worldwide – and led to an increase in Amazon deforestation. Brazil is the world’s second-largest producer of soy next to the U.S., and growing demand has meant more clear-cutting for soy plantations.

8. Processed Foods

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Ethanol isn’t the only product that comes to us courtesy of U.S. corn subsidies. There’s also plenty of craptastic processed “food” products packed with multiple subsidized ingredients: wheat, sugar, soy and of course, corn. Gee, could the obesity epidemic have anything to do with the fact that our government makes junk food cheap, and encourages its consumption through the food stamp program?

It’s a sad state of affairs when a Twinkie costs less, calorically speaking, than a carrot. Meanwhile, farmers who produce fruits and vegetables (aside from corn), don’t get a dime in government subsidies. While the government is considering junk food taxes, a change to the Farm Bill might be more efficient.

9. Coal

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You would think that the coal industry’s long-held dominance of the American energy market would have eliminated the need for subsidies. After all, the industry spent $47 million last year on PR alone. But the fact is, coal companies are milking the government for all it’s worth while continuing to pump greenhouse gases and carcinogens into the air and turn the Appalachian Mountains into post-apocalyptic hellholes.

Coal subsidies have survived this long because of the industry’s staggering influence on lawmakers, and because constituents in coal states often fear the economic repercussions of a scaled-back coal industry more than they fear the harm to their health and homes. And on top of the federal coal subsidies lumped in under “˜fossil fuels’, the industry gets untold breaks on a state and local level in places like Kentucky, where the coal industry netted $115 million in subsidies in 2006.

10. Oil

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Climate change: brought to you by the U.S. government! According to a study by the Environmental Law Institute, fossil fuels received over $70 billion in subsidies between 2002 and 2008, while traditional sources of renewable energy were given just $12.2 billion.

But the oil industry won’t even admit that the direct spending and tax breaks they get are subsidies – they prefer to call them “incentives”, and claim that attempts to roll back some of those subsidies are actually “new taxes”.

As Grist notes, the ELI report is actually pretty conservative – it didn’t include things like military spending to defend oil in the Middle East or infrastructure spending. But the fossil fuel industry’s free ride is almost over: President Obama’s new federal budget proposal wipes out these breaks and increases funding for clean energy research (and, unfortunately, nuclear power).

Photo credits: The following photos are from Flickr and licensed for commercial use under Creative Commons: “Freeway” by Payton Chung; “SUV” by The Car Spy; “Paper mill in Washington State” by Jan Tik; “Fish face” by Andy Welsh; “Nuclear reactor” by Intamin10; “Factory farm protest sign” by johnnyalive; “Corn” by normanack;  “Coal” by Duncan Harris; “Oil rig” by kenhodge13.

The post The 10 Least Green Government Subsidies appeared first on EcoSalon.

Raze the roof for green.

I’ll let you in on one of my secret eco-dreams: to tear down dilapidated buildings and allow nature to recover the land. As it turns out, this just might be a new municipal strategy in combating urban blight.

The first site of this radical experiment? Flint, Michigan: a sprawling and impoverished, underpopulated city. At 34 square miles, Flint requires a lot of maintenance and upkeep (think: garbage trucks, road repair, electricity lines).

So, how to maintain a city’s integrity without the taxpayer base to support it? Just tear down the buildings and parts of town that are already on the decline. It’s “pruning the deadwood,” to put it in gardening terms. The idea is to raze decrepit buildings and replant them with trees or allow natural meadows to grow on the land.

According to Dan Kildee, the brains behind this project, nobody is being forced to move and people are being offered better homes in more maintained parts of town. The ones who choose to stay will simply have more natural areas surrounding their homes.

The U.S. government and various charities have approached Mr. Kildee and asked him for advice on how to proceed with this idea in other declining cities around the United States. Seems like “less is more” and “back to nature” may come together on a grand and tangible scale.

Image: Saquan Stimpson

The post A Tree Grows in Michigan appeared first on EcoSalon.