Blog Action Day: Cities and the environment

When I signed up for Blog Action Day, I had a vision of myself really pouring stuff out today--I'm in between jobs with nothing pressing on the horizon. Sadly, move-related stuff wound up trumping everything today, so here I am squeezing this into the last few hours of the day. Ah, well.

I think cities are underappreciated in their potential to be environmental solutions. It's not simply that they allow for more efficient transportation, it's that cities can be, and should be, understood as a social extension of natural phenomena. As their own peculiar kind of ecosystem, they're not living, but they are lifelike (see, for example, urban metabolisms). Understanding these flows of energy and materials through our cities is crucial to minimizing our impact on the earth, but that's just the beginning. Once we've got a better feel for those flows, we can start to imagine our urban systems as more like ecosystems, with one energy input (sunlight) and endless material re-use cycles. We can also start to better understand the interplay of different actors--the varied functions that trees can provide (water purity, material recovery, energy source, energy saver, wind break, climate control, and on), the cycle of food and wastes, the distributed production of energy.

But since they're also fundamentally social, cities are places where memory becomes culture and biographies become histories. Cities are where we're most exposed to one another--where differences can be perceived and overcome, where we have many roles to play, many ways to relate to one another, in many combinations of cooperation and competition, equity and inequity.

A proper understanding of the role of cities doesn't just create respect for them, however. I think it also creates more respect for the role of rural areas. In William Cronon's book on the history of Chicago, Nature's Metropolis, he talks about hinterlands--the non-urban areas that feed raw resources into cities. I think "hinterland" has a perjorative taint to it, which is too bad, because it's an evocative way to reinvigorate how we think about cities and the areas around them. Too often, urban and rural are seen as opposed things--urbanites mock hicks in the sticks, while rural folk mistrust and reject the urbane. Which is bad, because we're not at opposite ends of a spectrum, we're different parts of a whole. This becomes plainly apparent when we look at the metabolism of cities.

Contrarianism is finished

It really can't go any further than this: Why Americans should eat more excrement.

Zoning and neighbors

Matthew Yglesias comments (as he does from time to time) on the problem of zoning and land use for improving the environment. Megan McArdle jumps in to say that the problem is the whole endeavor--that zoning is too powerful, that the pattern we see of neighbors demanding low-density developments isn't a problem for most people, but the whole point. Therefore, the idea of saying "zoning, but"--of making zoning better--is nonsensical, since for most people it's working fine.

I agree with that. The problem is--there's no good solution. There are good reasons to zone--there are such things as truly incompatible uses, even if zoning out, say, duplexes from neighborhoods otherwise composed of single-family homes isn't one of them. And once the zoning is in place, it's easy to move it from those cases I see as appropriate to the ones where I think it's abusive and exclusionary. You are, after all, putting people who have something specific up against people who don't--present homeowners versus potential future renters, for instance.

But imagine if we jettisoned zoning--Houston is the typical example, but we can look at it without Houston. Right now, homeowner associations are used to pool resources to care for common-owned areas. Stronger forms also regulate things like aesthetics (ranging from lawn upkeep to house color to whether you can put up clothes lines). If we abolished zoning, it's not tough to see developers creating single-family neighborhoods that vest certain rights of ownership with the homeowner association, rather than the home owner. This wouldn't exactly replicate zoning, but it's not tough to see it hitting the high points, though in a more fragmented manner.

It could be that fragmentation would help developers, or it could be that it would hurt them. Overall, I think you'd see a lot more chaos, with no good result, only more unhappiness with the whole thing.

What I think we need are more tools for mitigating the problems of urban change. Chicagoland has, for example, home value insurance which pays out for local events that deflate home values. This takes the pressure off of homeowners to fight every last thing that might lower the value of their nest egg.

Improving how we approach gentrification in another issue. Typically, gentrification involves high-income households displacing low-income households--dispersing them to other parts of the city, but maintaining the present density. What if we worked to strike a grand bargain, welcoming high-income households in exchange for loosening development restrictions with the goal of allowing those otherwise-displaced low-income households to remain in their neighborhoods.

And we could re-orient zoning. The tools that we have right now are extremely crude--better ones (such as performance zoning or form-based zoning) are out there. I don't know as much about these, so I might be wrong, but my impression is that they try to compromise between development freedom and retaining important neighborhood elements.

The big thing, as Matt notes, is: how do we move beyond local control. I don't think there's anyway to do this in any ultimate sense. But stronger regionalism will help. More urban investment (and the strings that come with it) from the federal government will help. And states looking for more innovative tools will help.

Where it goes

Coming out of the Schnucks on Chatham Road yesterday, I got stuck in congestion. Not vehicular congestion, this was a slow-moving conga line of shoppers. I veered out of the path, off to the right, preferring the longer walk at a faster pace to the slower, shorter trudge. As I did so, something caught my eye: the plastic bag recycling bin had gotten a makeover: What had been, I think, a blue plastic bin with slogans draped around the slot in the top had become a faux-wood box.

My first reaction was not, I confess, very big-hearted: "That's tacky." But my eyes dropped down to the sign on the front of the bin, and I got interested. The faux wood is Trex, a wood and plastic composite molded into beams for use outside. The sign said that Trex is one of the materials made from recovered plastic bags.

This, I thought with the fervor of a convert, is pretty great. Whoever came up with this is pretty brilliant. One of the big problems with non-regulatory approaches to environmentalism is keying people into how the environment and economy interact, the way that individual actions build toward something ecologically sound or ecologically disastrous. Stuff like Fair Trade and Bird-Friendly labels on coffee is one way to work it on the consumer side. This, on the waste management side, is another. One of the problems with recycling is that at the point of disposal recycling and just throwing something away sort of feel the same. The blue bin counteracts it somewhat, but there's little in the way of positive feedback to help keep you going. (Seeing products advertised as made with recycled materials is another way, but that's complex since it's also a selling tool. The Trex box nicely reinforces what you're doing.

MT4 Upgrade

That "Hello is this thing on" was meant to be a re-introduction, not a dark joke. Unfortunately, an upgrade to MT4 got in the way. Things look like they're working again, though, so hopefully I can get started. This should be understood as a test post. We'll see how it goes this time.