Sustainable Development and American Cities
What's Happening?
CUDC Quarterly 3:3/4 - Winter 2004
Last October, the CUDC was fortunate to host two talks by Anja Starick, a landscape architect and planner from Dresden University of Technology who has worked on the practical challenges of implementing Agenda 21, the international framework for sustainable development. Her article includes some of what she presented in person.
One obvious question that emerges from her discussion of the European experience is, "What’s happening here?" The United States is a signatory to Agenda 21, but not much is heard about its implementation in this country. That number of the categories for monitoring implementation of Agenda 21 are answered with "no information is available." (No one could be bothered to do the research, and that was during the Clinton administration!) As this article was being prepared, we received word of an exciting new EPA program designed to focus the efforts of university-based programs like ours, but federal efforts in this direction are still sporadic at best.
The one active clearing house for information on Local Agenda 21 efforts in the U.S. is a non-governmental organization in the People’s Republic of Berkeley. They list a wide range of efforts, including some government-sponsored ones on the West Coast and a few other places. Mostly, they cite the efforts of advocacy groups. For Northeast Ohio, Ecocity Cleveland is listed as the sponsor of an Agenda 21 process. While our friends at Ecocity have done amazing things with a tiny budget and staff, they would be the first to admit that they don’t have the instruments at their disposal to do the kind of detailed and comprehensive planning envisioned in Agenda 21, a document that covers a daunting range of socio-economic and environmental concerns.
Agenda 21 envisions a participatory process that involves local officials and informs government actions at all levels, so that economic and physical development decisions lead to improved social and environmental conditions. Starick notes that, in Germany, public officials have been reluctant to take the lead on Agenda 21 because a participatory process would concede too much control to non-expert citizens. In the U.S., some form of public participation is more or less de rigueur, but the resistance or indifference may stem from other causes:
1) The balance between public and private power here is significantly different from that in Europe, resulting in a climate in which official planning is often reactive and a comprehensive planning process is widely viewed as an unwelcome intrusion on private property rights.
2) The urban periphery where most of the development and environmental degradation in America is happening tends to be the place least equipped to undertake an involved planning process that might make demands on private interests. The corollary of this is that the aging urban centers are focused on survival and see sustainability as a luxury.
3) Finally, there is Agenda 21 itself, an unwieldy document that attempts to balance the demands of science with the political interests of developing nations that, rightly or wrongly, feel they should have their "turn" at despoiling the planet to achieve quick growth, just as their former colonial masters did. It requires a lot of interpretation to figure out what Agenda 21 might be in any local circumstance, and one can only begin that process after reading it, an exercise painful enough to make one share Dick Cheney’s views on the UN (if only for a demented instant).
These issues are far from purely academic around the CUDC. One of the major reasons we exist is because struggling neighborhoods deserve the same attention to quality of design as rich ones. Agenda 21 makes social equity a central principle and, through the sort of local process Anja Starick describes, posits the development of a continuing grassroots organizational capacity as the best way to achieve a good result, regardless of the economic and social status of a community. This democratic vision allows one to talk about issues like the needs to include marginalized groups (as in Terry Schwarz’s article), to search for local solutions to local problems, and to think about how technical expertise can best inform community activism.
It also stands in marked contrast to the rather technocratic vision that underlies much discussion of "green design." Partly because of reasons 1 and 2 above, there has been a tendency in the U.S. to equate sustainable development with the application of specific green building technologies. These can be implemented by individual property owners, and they can be commercialized. Better yet, they can be celebrated, even fetishized, without getting into messy issues of social equity and regional priorities.
However, sustainable urban design ought to be more than just a shopping list of spiffy environmental technologies. It must be more in distressed places where almost any investment is welcome and every individual action has to do as much as possible to improve the whole. In the absence of concerted official involvement, sustainable development efforts in this country are necessarily limited and ad hoc, and groups like the CUDC are beginning to ask how to get the most value out of them. As in Europe (perhaps more so), the goal of developing local capacities is critical. We’ve seen some of this locally in efforts like the Cuyahoga Valley Initiative, a project of the County Planning Commission. These and other efforts suggest that a sustainable development agenda in America is going to be defined from the bottom up.
The First Church of the Nazarene in Cleveland’s Cudell neighborhood came to the Urban Design Center looking to make better use of a large parking lot adjacent to the church. Through a participatory process, the UDC developed a plan that provided needed recreational amenities for neighborhood children and teens, as well as an outdoor meeting space for the congregation. Funding is bound to be problem for this small church, so a phased implementation was devised, as reflected in the plans illustrated here.
Sustainable outcomes often require sustained involvement. A 1998 UDC study inluded proposals for transit-oriented development around a rapid transit station in the Cudell neighborhood. Some of that vision is beginning to take shape now with renovation of the historic Chicle building and new housing and recreational investments.
More on sustainable development
Local Agenda 21 in Germany
Making Space for Teens
Envisioning the Cuyahoga Valley (PDF File)
