Urban climate change plans: how holistic?

Abstract

Urban sustainability issues including climate change mitigation and adaptation, ecological enhancement and livability initiatives have become the rhetorical focus and rationale of many plans and policy documents created by American cities in the last decade. This paper analyses the recent environmentally focused plans for three largest cities of USA to determine how and if their strategies to protect the natural environment engage with the holistic nature of sustainable development strategies promulgated in the literature. Despite the mainstreaming of the sustainability concept, the research shows that these much-lauded and emulated plans largely fail to substantively engage with a fully realised holistic approach, failing to adequately address issues of equitable economic development and environmental justice in their attempts to create a more environmentally sustainable city. The lack of attention paid to such issues suggests not merely that they are perceived as being separate from environmental objectives, but that in some cases they may be seen as oppositional, particularly when contrasted with the way that environmental issues are seen to converge with global city and overall economic development aspirations.

Keywords:

• urban sustainability
• environmental policy
• social equity
• economic development

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the participants in the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy's “Race to the Top” symposium and Hunter College's Center for Community Planning and Development colloquium series for feedback and critique on earlier drafts. Two anonymous reviewers provided insightful comments resulting in a much more comprehensive document. Finally, we wish to thank our research assistant, Morgan Campbell for her valuable contributions. All claims, errors and omissions are the responsibility of the authors.

Notes

Extensive websites are devoted to all three climate initiatives (Chicago Climate Action Plan Website 2011, EnvironmentLA Website 2011, PlaNYC Website 2011). However, each city also produced a document (or, in the case of Los Angeles, two documents) intended to distill the key elements of the plans and position them for public consumption. We focus primarily on these takeaway documents as our main objects of analysis, while acknowledging that copious amounts of other information are available online to supplement the arguments and agendas found within the main documents.

The Mayor's Office chose a Sustainability Advisory Board halfway along in the plan-making process to offer expert advice from a variety of stakeholders from business/real estate, city council, academia, environmental and community advocacy, philanthropy and labour. These board members were requested to maintain confidentiality about the board's discussions until the plan was ready to go public (ICLEI-LGSUAS/NYC 2010).

PlaNYC is currently being revised for a planned 2011 update, and the city is having a number of open community meetings as part of the process.

At a public forum about PlaNYC at the New York Municipal Art Society (MAS) on 14 April 2008, Jeanne DuPont, Executive Director of the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance, argued that PlaNYC authors “came out of nowhere and stole a bunch of our ideas”.

As for PlaNYC being available in Chinese, the Census also reports that 7.6% of New Yorkers speak all “Asian and Pacific Islander languages” combined at home.