Saving the planet begins with re-imagining our global cities

It has been a tremendous honor to take part in the 2017 International Women’s Forum World Cornerstone Conference in Stockholm. This year I had the unique privilege of participating in a panel discussion focusing on the very timely and important topics of urbanization and climate change with distinguished panelists like Swedish Minister for the Environment Karolina Skog, Habitat for Humanity International COO Tjada McKenna, Housing and Development Board of Singapore CEO Cheong Koon Hean and President and CEO for Edelman Europe Carol Potter. Over the course of a wide-ranging conversation that uncovered many important solutions to challenges we are facing all over the world, I believe that we demonstrated the importance of viewing our current moment as a time of unprecedented opportunity to leave the world a better place than we found it.

The resounding message from this panel is undoubtedly that we cannot make a change to our cities unless we are all working together; business, government and communities must be full stakeholders in this transformation. Karolina Skog said she sees a big change in Sweden, where environmental sustainability had largely been viewed as the responsibility of government actors over the past 40 years. She noted that this perception has given way to a new reality where Swedish businesses and civil society organizations have begun to take the lead in generating new ideas and implementing innovative solutions to environmental issues. Referencing the influence H&M has had on the Swedish waste system, Karolina said “there was no policy for it, so I had to rapidly write the law permitting H&M to do what they do. We have had to create the legal space for these innovative things to happen afterwards.”

Our panel was in unanimous agreement that global cities continue to hold enormous potential, and that their many successes and contributions to society should be celebrated. It was widely noted that most of the greatest innovations that we’ve seen over the past several decades have been generated in our global cities, but we still have a lot of work to do to improve the environmental impact of urban living in the 21st century. Neither extreme urban density nor its inverse, unplanned and poorly designed urban sprawl, are helping us to meet our sustainability goals, and we must address these issues because the health of our planet is inexorably tied to the health of our cities.

Dr. Cheong Koon Hean provided many important insights about how long term planning has been essential to the sustainable growth of Singapore, describing how the practice of future-casting and analyzing different scenarios helps her government explore important choices and their tradeoffs regarding major investments in infrastructure, housing, economic growth and environmental sustainability. According to Dr. Hean, these long-term decisions are best made when they are guided by the holistic principals of supporting livability, resiliency and long-term sustainability. I strongly agree.

Tjada McKenna was also quick to remind us that it would be a huge mistake to focus solely on cities at the expense of also developing rural areas, noting that these two modes of living in our modern world are interdependent and part of the same social, cultural and economic ecosystem. “You need healthy rural areas for cities to thrive,” McKenna added, “particularly in some lower income countries in Sub Saharan Africa and Asia where the economies are almost 40 percent driven by agriculture.”

At Gensler, we believe that the purpose of our work is creating a better world through each and every project. At the end of the day, everything we do is about people, because improving people’s lives is the only legacy that really matters. We work on more than a half billion square feet of projects annually, and our goal is to use each and every one of these projects to create the kinds of communities that will be both resilient and healthy in the future. We also believe in looking at the twin challenges of increased urbanization and solving for climate change as interconnected phenomenon, with solutions that are within our reach and proven to be effective. To quote former Deputy Secretary-General of the UN and former Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Jan Eliasson, “we have a Plan A but we do not have a Planet B.”

"At Gensler, we believe that the purpose of our work is creating a better world through each and every project. At the end of the day, everything we do is about people, because improving people’s lives is the only legacy that really matters. We work on more than a half billion square feet of projects annually, and our goal is to use each and every one of these projects to create the kinds of communities that will be both resilient and healthy in the future. We also believe in looking at the twin challenges of increased urbanization and solving for climate change as interconnected phenomenon, with solutions that are within our reach and proven to be effective."

-Gensler Co-CEO Diane Hoskins at the International Women's Forum 2017 World Cornerstone Conference (Shaping our World: Sustainable Places)

The Future of Cities: Re-balancing the Conversation on Urbanization

Cities are the engine of civilization, and they remain one of the greatest achievements of human history. They succeed and thrive because of their ability to attract diverse groups of people with a wide range of skills and perspectives. Cities are about sharing resources and leveraging collective strengths. These are great virtues. Urban life requires a wide range of complex interactions and the resulting civility is healthy. The exchange of ideas serves as the basis for social innovation. In our current era for example, theoretical physicists Geoffrey West has found a linear correlation between the size and health of cities and the number of innovations and patents a society produces, demonstrating how urbanization remains an inherent condition for economic development. It’s no coincidence that the most economically advanced nations today are led by some of the world’s most dynamic, innovative and livable cities.

But cities are not just valuable because of their cultural, economic and technological contributions, it is also true that well designed cities can be the model for environmental sustainability. This is especially true for small to mid-sized cities like Stockholm, Boston, Zurich and Vienna which dominate the Sustainable Cities Index. These are cities that manage to achieve scale and density without suffering from the same level of toxic air pollution and congestion found in some larger cities. In the face of a rising global population that is projected to reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050, it is critical that we begin solving for higher levels of density and scale, which is why it is so important that we also re-balance the conversation on cities and environmental sustainability.

More than 80 percent of urban growth in the next 35 years will be based in small to medium sized cities ranging from 500,000 to 1 million people. These cities are the “sweet spot” and can be examples of balance between livability, prosperity and sustainability. We have a tremendous opportunity to ensure that these places embrace sustainable design solutions like mixed-use development, progressive building codes and pedestrian friendly neighborhood design. Newly urbanizing areas in developing countries should not follow the example set by post-war cities in highly developed countries, which prioritized the needs of the automobile over the needs of people and community development. In fact, we are seeing that the American cities that were most influenced by automobile-centric design concepts are moving in the opposite direction today, choosing to promote walkability, diversity and people-centered neighborhood design instead.

70 percent of the population of North America, Latin America and Europe live in cities big and small, and this has been true for decades. In these places, the challenge is often rethinking the city to ensure that it prioritizes the needs of people over the needs of modern inventions such as the automobile and industry—a delicate balance, but one that we are getting progressively better at achieving. In the age of driverless technology for instance, we need to question whether it still makes sense to mandate that half of our cities’ land continues to be set aside for parking instead of creating more parks, bike lanes, mixed-use development, and effective public transportation. 

On the other end of the spectrum, we know that most of the new urban growth up to 2050 is projected to occur in developing nations like China, India and Nigeria as well as other countries throughout Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. These are regions of the world where urbanization rates are still below 50 percent, and the majority of people continue to live in rural communities. There are 45 mega-cities of 10 million people or more today, accounting for only 12 percent of the world’s urban population. We are expecting over 60 cities of this size to exist by 2050. These cities do present a different set of challenges than small and medium-sized cities, and most new mega-cities are projected to be located in regions with rapidly developing economies and high rates of rural to urban migration. We have significant opportunities to improve human health, environmental sustainability and human experience in these places if we seize on the people-centered design strategies that are emerging today. 

Rejecting urban sprawl

In a world of 10 billion people, sprawl is the enemy of a sustainable economy and a healthy community. Poorly planned and unmanaged sprawl strains infrastructure, land, natural resources, lengthens supply-chains, increases air pollution, and separates people from economic opportunities. Our best defense against harmful models of urban sprawl is creative, people-centered design that extends the benefits of city living across every building, city block and neighborhood. There is no one size fits all model to make this work, but we can focus on strengthening our communities from the ground up by promoting a full range of commercial, mixed-use, residential, and cultural opportunities in every city section.

This is especially important in an extremely dense city in a rapidly urbanizing country such as New Delhi. Mega-cities like Shanghai, Mexico City, Beijing, Sao Paulo and Lagos can be very problematic from an air quality and human experience standpoint. High levels of traffic congestion and strained public infrastructure can make urban mobility much more difficult in these places than in a smaller-sized city like Stockholm. Promoting mixed-use development and thoughtful transportation strategies in these places will be critical for resource efficiency and the health of the people who live there.

At Gensler, we are very proud of the Shanghai Tower, which has been shaped by many of the best ideas surrounding sustainable urbanism today. Shanghai Tower is a testament to the power of vertical urbanism, promoting a diversity of uses including retail, hospitality, office space, restaurants as well as courtyards and green spaces for people to gather. The Shanghai Tower also prioritizes environmental sustainability. It is the tallest building in the world to achieve LEED Platinum certification, and has an advanced design that eliminated the need for 34 thousand tons of steel, saving 65 thousand metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. Shanghai Tower is an example of the kind of solution that we need to be pursuing in emerging mega-cities where space is limited at the ground level, but smart growth and a smart approach to density can help foster a sense of community and shared prosperity for everyone.

It is very important that buildings in communities like this are energy neutral in the future, and they should also focus on creating a vibrant public sphere that is not always available at the ground level. Fortunately, many design solutions do exist for these rapidly growing urban areas, which have an incredible opportunity to catapult directly into the 21st century. New technologies like micro-grids can allow cities to skip the development of a carbon intensive, single utility energy grid, focusing instead on the creation of a decentralized (and much more resilient) energy system powered by renewable resources. These systems can help alleviate high levels of air pollution, and they also don’t require the enormous social investment associated with 19th and 20th century electricity grids.

Major advances in battery technology are unlocking the next wave in energy innovation, paving the way for a future that will allow every building to be powered by its own energy source. At the same time, advances in design are allowing architects to create projects that use natural lighting and ventilation systems to reduce the amount of energy a building needs to consume. The PNC Tower in Pittsburgh is a great example of this kind of innovative sustainable design in action, and it presents a blueprint for other buildings to follow in the future. PNC Tower’s double-skin face allows the building to use natural ventilation for up to 42 percent of working hours, creating a building that ‘breathes’ in the process. Continuing to push these forms of innovation forward will be critical for the development of a cleaner, healthier city.

 Conclusion

We have to view urbanization as an opportunity to create the kind of sustainable 21st century economy that we need. Throughout our history cities have provided the rich cultural fabric that brings people together, while also providing the economic opportunities that we need to ensure a shared sense of prosperity. Every generation has its challenges, and it is incumbent upon every generation to rise to the task at hand with a sense of optimism and an ability to see the positive possibilities for change. Climate change is a serious issue, but it also provides a blue print for a new generation to decide how our physical environments should be designed to ensure that everyone will benefit in the future. We have an opportunity to create cleaner, healthier, more sustainable and resilient communities all around the world, and I believe that we will be successful if we maintain a sense of optimism and confidence in the future.

*This article was also published on Medium