Читать книгу The Climate City - Группа авторов - Страница 20

Cities have been magnets to ambition for centuries. From fairy tales to ancient Rome (Figure 1.1), to contemporary migration trends, and everything in between, people have come to the city to seek their fortune – to “be somebody”, to “make it” and make things happen.

Figure 1.1 A depiction of Ancient Rome, a concept shaping many cities that followed. (Source: ZU_09/Getty Images.)

If cities are to truly take the lead in combatting climate change, we need an ambitious city with purpose-driven city leaders to accelerate a just transition to a sustainable future. We need them to help define the city’s goals and for individual ambition to inform and feed into collective ambition for a city we all want to live in, and where we think our children and grandchildren will in turn want to stay or return to.

But alongside ambition we need clarity. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there,” said Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland (Figure 1.2). There are cities all over the world with a number of sustainability goals, but to truly take the lead on climate change we should reach and then surpass “Net-Zero” (capital letters to be explained) into carbon negative, eco-restorative territory – as soon as each city is able, and well before 2050.

Figure 1.2 If you don’t know where you are going any road will take you there. (Source: EllerslieArt/Adobe Stock.)

To achieve this necessary climate goal while managing all the other priorities of the complex modern city, we need leaders that are truly connected: to themselves; to the team around them; to their communities and stakeholders; and to an awareness and appreciation of the entire system they are trying to manage and change.

What could this look like? A city would have a bold, clear, co-created goal that the city leadership, community leaders, and citizens readily understand and support. A city’s climate action plan would target a fully scoped, science-based, Paris-Agreement-compliant, cumulative “Net-Zero” well before 2050; and it would do so in a way that also makes the city greener, more equitable, more resilient, smarter, friendlier, healthier, and all the other qualities to be examined in later chapters.

And just as Maya Angelou told us as individuals to “Be yourself, only better”, cities will have achieved this in a variety of complex, adaptive, ingenious ways – peculiar to their own unique assets and their own unique, ambitious citizens.