Читать книгу The Climate City - Группа авторов - Страница 13

A staggering two billion people live in extreme poverty and 789 million people do not have access to electricity.¹ Many of these people will seek a new life in the city, they will seek employment, and they will seek a home. They will join the rest of the population as consumers of energy and water, and makers of waste, and demand will go up. We have no right to deny anyone this opportunity, but it makes the challenge of reducing CO₂ emissions even greater.

If you look back in history, all of the great cities have progressed through economic focus and trade and always to the detriment of the environment. This has, in nearly all cases, been a problem that has reached a critical level, public outcry has ensued, and the error rectified. If I were a true cynic, I would say this is how we solve all of our problems. This constant iteration of growth and advancement followed by a “fix” is what has enabled this walk along the London embankment to be all the more remarkable. Cities through time have developed governance structures that are so in tune with the life of the city that the problems can be identified, captured, analysed, debated, and “fixed” without upsetting all of the other critical elements that make city life so enchanting.

The myriad of governing entities developed over time are able to respond and enact new policy, with the benefits to the wider city being the overriding decision. Perhaps this is what was so troubling about the rapid rise of ride-sharing. They just came. They used public advocacy for cheaper and more convenient travel but at a cost to the overall balance of city life. I don’t blame the ride-sharing companies who see this service as invaluable to the citizen, and there is clearly demand for their service, but they can’t possibly understand or calculate the overall impact to the whole city population.

In his book If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities,² Benjamin Barber makes the case that modern cities are best poised to meet the challenges posed by the global economy. Ben’s book reflects on urban manifestoes with the theme that local governments are uniquely positioned to save the planet. Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley made this case in The Metropolitan Revolution.³ Ben advocated for a parliament of cities, which would ratify a shift in power and political reality that, he argues, has already taken place.

“Because [cities] are inclined naturally to collaboration and interdependence, cities harbor hope,” Barber writes. “If mayors ruled the world,” he says, “the more than 3.5 billion people who are urban dwellers and the many more in the exurban neighborhoods beyond could participate locally and cooperate globally at the same time – a miracle of civic ‘glocality’ promising pragmatism instead of politics, innovation rather than ideology and solutions in place of sovereignty.”

Barber claims that national sovereignty is a handicap. Cities, by contrast, can capitalise on diversity, share intelligence on security and the environment, and face up to inequality in housing, jobs, transportation, and education.

“My proposal for a parliament of mayors is no grandiose scheme,” Ben writes, “no mandate for top-down suzerainty by omnipotent megacities exercising executive authority over a supine world. It is rather a brief for cities to lend impetus to informal practices they already have in place.” And he notes that, “in changing the subject to cities, we allow imagination to cut through the historical and cultural impediments to interdependent thinking in the same way a maverick Broadway cuts through Manhattan’s traditional grid”.

So if cities are so effective at rectifying problems, then why did the air get so bad? The water so polluted? The traffic so congested? The answer to this is simple. Firstly, nobody fully assessed the external factors impacting these basic elements of air, water, and nature; secondly, nobody assessed the impact on our health and wellbeing; and thirdly, our guesses of future growth and future expectation have been underestimated.

My journey since advising the Mayor of London on the environment has enabled me to look at technology and how it can tackle climate change and how it can meet city targets for climate change mitigation. This has enabled me to visit some amazing cities, such as Ephesus in Turkey; Madain Saleh in Saudi Arabia, which is the first settlement after Petra; Matera in Italy (Figure I.1), where you can stay in a hotel room where a cave-dwelling troglodyte once slept; and cities like Venice that help challenge the conventional wisdom of how cities can thrive. These trips have given me insight into why people live in cities and what is important to them, something that every mayor understands all too well.

Figure I.1 Matera, Italy. Many consider this to be the oldest inhabited city on Earth. (Source: Siempreverde22/Getty Images.)

Madain Saleh, for example, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, can tell this story. While not as well known as Petra, the Nabatean’s second-largest city was once a thriving metropolis along the ancient spice route and played a crucial role in building a trade empire. Today, its monumental stone-hewn tombs are some of the last, and best-preserved, remains of a lost kingdom. The Nabateans achieved wealth and prosperity from their ability to source and store water in harsh desert environments. They also held a monopoly on desert trade routes as far southwest as Madain Saleh and north to the Mediterranean port of Gaza. They extracted taxes from camel caravans – laden with frankincense, myrrh, and spices – that stopped at their garrisoned outposts for water and rest. The tomb inscriptions, written in Aramaic, give insight into names, relationships, occupations, laws, and the Gods of the people who lie there. Walking around Madain Saleh (Figure I.2) you can understand how people came together in cities to live in proximity as a community, to do business together, to be safe, to honour those that pass, and to live by a set of rules that make sense to that community.

Figure I.2 Left: Madain Saleh, Saudi Arabia. Right: The Editor in Madain Saleh. (Source of left photograph: amheruko/Adobe Stock.)

In today’s cities nothing has changed, but these basic requirements can be overshadowed by events, obscured by temporary nuances of daily life, which upset the fine balances that keep this ecosystem functioning. We see parts of the city that have been segregated, vulnerable subcommunities that have been distanced, cut off from the collective attributes of the city and so no longer receiving the benefits of city living.

Cities like London, New York, Copenhagen, and Singapore are far from perfect, but they have ensured a governance setup that responds to the needs of their city, the principles and policies of urban living. The rationale for investment is anchored to these principles that ensured a thriving Mesopotamia, Ancient Rome, and Madain Saleh.

The climate crisis will not change these basic requirements. We don’t have to give things up. We will innovate without compromise, but the longer we leave it the more difficult the challenge becomes.

I learned something very powerful in my time in public office – “good ideas are hard to kill”. If we can align the interests of the wide set of stakeholders that need to come together to enact change, with programmes that strike at the core of the problem and offer co-benefits that improve people’s lives, then they will be successful. We can deliver on serious commitments in the timescales required. The mayor’s office is designed to speak and transact with its citizens. People are generally motivated to seek information that validates their world view, and so the city must inform citizens of their place in a status quo in the most highly diverse communities – and in some places highly segregated, with the greatest inequality within the same spaces – that exist anywhere on Earth and in a world where we stream information and news that polarizes our views by the choices we make. If cities can overcome this to keep this delicate ecosystem in balance through communication that helps people have understanding of “why” they must compromise in order to co-exist, then they can communicate the need to tackle climate change even if it means citizens will have to compromise more than they ever had in history.