When the world finally faces up to the challenge of climate change, cities will be important players
According to the World Bank, 56% of the planet’s human population already resides in urban areas, by 2050 “nearly seven out of 10 people will live in cities.”
It was in 2016 that Yale Climate Connections first focused on the roles cities have played and can play in causing and solving the climate crisis, highlighting 18 recently published books and reports in two paired bookshelves. (See here and here.) Many, many books and reports have been published since then, including 12 in the last year alone. It’s well past time for an update.
This month’s new list begins with an elegant overview, a nuts-and-bolts primer, and an eco-engineer’s prescription for the sustainable city.
It continues with two books on class, equality, and design before turning to three books that focus on transportation, including two that explain and defend the concept of “the 15-minute city.”
The last four titles address problems of planning and governance, both within cities themselves and in the international organizations and meetings that set agendas and formulate policies for sustainable urban development around the globe.
Included in this last set is a reminder that “Earth’s population will begin to decline within the lifetimes of people alive today.” Planning for our urban, climate-changed future now also means planning for “shrinking cities” later.
As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from the copy provided by their publishers.
The New City: How to Build Our Sustainable Urban Future by Dickson D. Despommier (Columbia University Press 2023, 216 pages, $39.95)
Cities are at once among humanity’s crowning achievements and core drivers of the climate crisis. Their dependence on the outside world for vital resources is causing global temperatures to rise and wildlife habitats to shrink. But we have the opportunity to make cities more sustainable by transforming the built environment. In The New City, Dickson D. Despommier proposes a visionary yet achievable plan for creating a new, self-sustaining urban landscape. Cities built from wood, for example, will be more resilient and less destructive; they will also encourage reforestation, boosting carbon sequestration. In its beautifully designed pages, The New City delivers both a passionate call to action for halting climate change and a bold vision of a sustainable future.
Radical Adaptation: Transforming Cities for a Climate Changed World by Brian Stone, Jr. (Cambridge University Press 2024, 166 pages, $39.99 paperback)
This book considers the pathways through which climate change is most likely to impact your life: the storm sewer drain on your street, the power-lines transporting your electricity, and the mix of vegetation in your backyard or neighborhood park. By establishing a framework for climate change adaptation, Stone’s aims to understand how climate change is altering our lives in this period of transition between the ancient, stable climate of our ancestors and the unfolding, no longer stable climate of our children. Stone’s concern is with the risks posed by a new environmental regime for which our modes of living are ill-adapted, and with how these modes of living must be altered – radically altered – to persist in a climate changed world.
The Nature of Our Cities: Harnessing the Power of the Natural World to Survive on a Changing Planet by Nadina Galle (Mariner Books 2024, 304 pages, $29.99)
An ecological engineer selected for Forbes’ 30 under 30 list, Dr. Nadina Galle is at the forefront of the growing movement to fuse nature and technology for urban resilience. In The Nature of Our Cities, she shows how scientists and citizens from around the world are harnessing emerging technologies to unlock the power of the natural world to save their cities. Galle reveals how technology can help nature navigate this precarious moment with modern advances such as laser-mapping, A.I.-powered robots, intelligent water gardens, and advanced sensors. Optimistic in spirit yet pragmatic in approach, by turns clear-eyed and lyrical, Galle writes persuasively that the future of urban life depends on balancing the natural world with the technology that can help sustain it.
The Rise of the Global Middle Class: How the Search for the Good Life Can Change the World by Homi Kharas (Brookings Institution Press 2023, 216 pages)
Sometime before 2030 the fifth billionth person will join the middle class. What started a little over two hundred years ago as a search for a better life in Victorian England has fueled an unprecedented global transformation—in China, India, and around the world. But in his new book, Homi Kharas also shows how the demands of this powerful dream have led younger generations to ask if it is all worth it. Can the middle class continue to thrive, or will it falter under the stresses of automation, consumerism, pollution, and political strife? In response, Kharas proposes a new middle-class manifesto that addresses the pressing issues of inequality, climate change, and technological advances.
Equality and the City: Urban Innovations for All Citizens by Enrique Peñalosa Londoño (University of Pennsylvania Press 2024, 312 pages, $39.95)
As mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa Londoño initiated development of the TransMilenio Rapid Bus Transit system, among the largest, most comprehensive, and accessible public transit systems in the Global South. It carries 2.5 million passengers a day along dedicated bus lanes, bike paths, and a rapid metro line. Peñalosa Londoño’s efforts to create public space were similarly ambitious: over his two terms, more than a thousand public parks were created or improved. For Peñalosa Londoño, city design is not just engineering; it defines happiness, dignity, and equality. “An advanced city is not one where the poor own a car,” Peñalosa Londoño writes, “but one where the rich use public transport.”
City Science: Performance Follows Form by Raman Gras and Jeremy Burker (Actar Publishers 2024, 400 pages $49.99)
This inaugural book by Aretian Urban Analytics and Design illuminates the relationship between a city’s spatial design and the quality of life it affords for the general population. Innovation Districts, social networks and organization patterns, and the topology, morphology, and scale underlying 15 Minute Cities are just some of the frameworks presented in this volume. With them, urban designers, architects and engineers will be able to successfully tackle complex urban design challenges in their own work. Case studies are then used to present insights from advanced, data-driven geospatial analyses of cities around the world. City Science gives readers a new set of tools for promoting the healthy growth of cities and regions around the world.
The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet by Carlos Moreno (Wiley 2024, 304 pages $32.00)
In The 15-Minute City: A Solution for Saving Our Time and Our Planet, human city pioneer and advisor Carlos Moreno delivers an insightful discussion of the simple but revolutionary idea that everyday destinations like schools, stores, and offices should only be a short walk or bike ride away from home. The idea quickly gained speed. Hundreds of mayors worldwide embraced the concept as a way to help recover from the pandemic. Deeply committed to science, progress, and creativity, in The 15-Minute City Moreno presents a timely resource that will prove invaluable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the consistently challenging urban issues that have bedeviled policy makers and city residents since the invention of the car.
See also Bicycle City: Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future by Dan Piatkowski (Island Press 2024, 244 pages, $32.00 paperback) and City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways by Megan Kimble (Crown Books 2024, 368 pages, $30.00).
Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities by Veronica C. Davis (Island Press 2023, 176 pages, $32.00 paperback)
In Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities, transportation expert Veronica O. Davis shines a light on the inequitable and often destructive practice of transportation planning and engineering. She calls for new thinking and more diverse leadership to create networks that connect people to jobs, education, opportunities, and to each other. Davis aims to disrupt the status quo of the transportation industry. She urges transportation professionals to reflect on past injustices and elevate current practice to do the hard work that results in more than an idea and a catchphrase. Inclusive Transportation is a call to action and a practical approach to reconnecting communities based on principles of justice and equity.
Global Sustainable Cities: City Governments and Our Environmental Future edited by Danielle Spiegel-Feld, Katrina Miriam Wyman, and John J. Coughlin (New York University Press 2023, 376 pages, $35.00 paperback)
Over half of the world’s population now lives in cities, a share expected to increase in coming decades. With growing urbanization, cities and their residents face substantial environmental challenges such as higher temperatures, droughts, wildfires, and increased flooding. In response to these pressing challenges, some cities have begun to develop regulations that supplement national and environmental laws. Global Sustainable Cities takes stock of the policies that have been implemented by cities in several key areas: water, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate adaptation. It offers a critical comparative assessment of the actions that major cities in the global North and South are taking to advance sustainability.
Sustainable Urban Settlements within the Global Urban Agenda: Formulating and Implementing SDG 11 by David Simon (Columbia University Press 2024, 160 pages, $35.00 paperback)
The UN’s urban sustainability goal (#11) is fundamental to the global sustainable development agenda. David Simon explains the anatomy and dynamics of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11, and critically assess how it is being used and understood in different local, regional and national contexts. Supported through by case studies, Simon shows how SDG 11 interacts with other SDGs and explains the tough challenges to implementation. Drawing on lessons learnt so far, Simon considers how realistic sustainability goals are for cities and settlements worldwide, and asks how different will cities be by the end of the SDG’s 15-year lifespan in 2030. His book provides a timely and authoritative assessment of one of the most important and integrative SDGs.
Our Urban Future: An Active Learning Guide to Sustainable Cities by Sabina Shaikh and Emily Talen (The MIT Press 2023, 164 pages, $40.00 paperback)
While the problem of urban sustainability has long been a subject of great interest, no single source has provided a multi-disciplinary view of how it can be effectively taught. Our Urban Future uses active learning techniques to relate the theory of urban sustainability and the what, why, and how of sustainable cities. It concisely covers key subjects of the field: ecosystem services and transects, the design and patterning of urban elements, how cities mitigate and adapt to climate change, and questions of environmental justice. It functions as both an illuminating roadmap and an active reference to which any student of sustainability can turn to find essential resources and perspectives in pursuit of creating sustainable cities.
Smaller Cities Within a Shrinking World: Learning to Thrive Without Growth by Alan Mallach (Island Press 2023, 336 pages, $35.00)
Over the past hundred years, the global motto has been “more, more, more” in terms of growth. But reality is changing in front of our eyes. Growth is already slowing down; Earth’s population will begin to decline within the lifetimes of people alive today. In Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World, urban policy expert Alan Mallach seeks to understand how declining population and economic growth, coupled with climate change, will affect the world’s cities in the coming decades. What will it mean to have a world full of shrinking cities? Are they doomed to decline in other ways, or can we uncouple population decline from economic decay? In this book, Mallach weaves his experience and research into a realistic look at how shrinking cities can thrive.
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