From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities

By Alison Sant

For decades, American cities have experimented with ways to remake themselves in response to climate change. These efforts, often driven by grassroots activism, offer valuable lessons for transforming the places we live. In From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities, design expert Alison Sant focuses on the unique ways in which US cities are working to mitigate and adapt to climate change while creating equitable and livable communities. She shows how, from the ground up, we are raising the bar to make cities places in which we don’t just survive, but where all people have the opportunity to thrive.

The efforts discussed in the book demonstrate how urban experimentation and community-based development are informing long-term solutions.  Sant shows how US cities are reclaiming their streets from cars, restoring watersheds, growing forests, and adapting shorelines to improve people’s lives while addressing our changing climate. The best examples of this work bring together the energy of community activists, the organization of advocacy groups, the power of city government, and the reach of federal environmental policy.

Sant presents 12 case studies, drawn from research and over 90 interviews with people who are working in these communities to make a difference. For example, advocacy groups in Washington, DC are expanding the urban tree canopy and offering job training in the growing sector of urban forestry. In New York, transit agencies are working to make streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians while shortening commutes. In San Francisco, community activists are creating shoreline parks while addressing historic environmental injustice.

From the Ground Up is a call to action. When we make the places we live more climate resilient, we need to acknowledge and address the history of social and racial injustice. Advocates, non-profit organizations, community-based groups, and government officials will find examples of how to build alliances to support and embolden this vision together. Together we can build cities that will be resilient to the challenges ahead.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jan 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781610918978

Book preview

About Island Press

Since 1984, the nonprofit organization Island Press has been stimulating, shaping, and communicating ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide. With more than 1,000 titles in print and some 30 new releases each year, we are the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues. We identify innovative thinkers and emerging trends in the environmental field. We work with world-renowned experts and authors to develop cross-disciplinary solutions to environmental challenges.

Island Press designs and executes educational campaigns, in conjunction with our authors, to communicate their critical messages in print, in person, and online using the latest technologies, innovative programs, and the media. Our goal is to reach targeted audiences—scientists, policy makers, environmental advocates, urban planners, the media, and concerned citizens—with information that can be used to create the framework for long-term ecological health and human well-being.

Island Press gratefully acknowledges major support from The Bobolink Foundation, Caldera Foundation, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, The Forrest C. and Frances H. Lattner Foundation, The JPB Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Summit Charitable Foundation, Inc., and many other generous organizations and individuals.

The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of our supporters.

FROM THE GROUND UP

LOCAL EFFORTS TO CREATE RESILIENT CITIES

Alison Sant

Washington

Covelo

© 2022 Alison Sant

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934509

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Designed by MacFadden & Thorpe

Illustrations by Packard Jennings

Manufactured in the United States of America

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Keywords: activism, bike infrastructure, bike paths, bike share, bus rapid transit, car-free public space, climate action, climate change, codesign, community-based planning, congestion pricing, COVID-19 pandemic, environmental design, environmental justice, environmental stewardship, equitable development, green infrastructure, greening playgrounds, green jobs, greenway, guerrilla tactics, habitat restoration, heat island effect, managed retreat, micromobility, multimodal transportation, nature-based solutions, oyster-tecture, oyster restoration, Park(ing) Day, parklet, pedestrian safety, pilot project, placemaking, purple-lining, racial justice, redlining, resilience district, Safe Routes to School, shoreline adaptation, Slow Streets, social resilience, stormwater management, street trees, sustainable development, systemic change, tactical urbanism, transportation equity, tree canopy, urban design, urban forest, urban forestry, urban resilience, Vision Zero, watershed planning

ISBN-13: 978-1-61091-897-8 (electronic)

For my mother, whose love of cities and their people was infectious

CONTENTS

Foreword by Eric W. Sanderson

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Interviewees

A Note on the Illustrations

Introduction: Reimagining Our Cities

PART 1: RECLAIM THE STREETS

CHAPTER 1. Places by People, San Francisco

CHAPTER 2. Safe Streets for Everyone, Minneapolis

CHAPTER 3. Making the City Accessible, New York City

ESSAY. Building Inclusive Cities from the Ground Up by Tamika L. Butler

PART 2: TEAR UP THE CONCRETE

CHAPTER 4. Living with Water, New Orleans

CHAPTER 5. Watershed Planning, Portland

CHAPTER 6. Green Spaces for All, Philadelphia

ESSAY. Green Infrastructure Lessons from US Cities by Mami Hara

PART 3: PLANT THE CITY

CHAPTER 7. Canopy Cover in the City of Trees, Washington, DC

CHAPTER 8. From Street Trees to Natural Areas, New York City

CHAPTER 9. The Forest in the City, Baltimore

PART 4: ADAPT THE SHORELINE

CHAPTER 10. Restoring Nature and Building Equity, San Francisco

CHAPTER 11. Growing One Billion Oysters, New York City

CHAPTER 12. Moving Away from the Coast, Louisiana

ESSAY. Adapting Urban Districts to Sea-Level Rise by Mimicking Natural Processes by Kristina Hill

Conclusion: A Path Forward

Notes

About the Author

FOREWORD

ERIC W. SANDERSON

Twenty-first century American cities are on the cusp of change. Climate change, whether it comes in the form of rising sea levels, devastating fires, heat waves, or prolonged droughts, is already remaking the urban landscape. Cities in the United States fail to provide benefits to all their citizens in a fair and equitable way, even the benefits that should be available to all, such as decent work, fresh air, clean water, healthy food, and access to green spaces. Writing from New York during the strange, awful summer of 2020, American cities are locked down, with too many suffering alone in the hospital, too many people out of work, thriving transit systems now abandoned, local economies in decline, and social unrest building in the streets—some peaceable, some not—even as a silent, invisible disease stalks among us. As deadly as the current moment is, one can’t help but feel we have been down this path before.

Many of us recognize that these bitter fruits reflect seeds long cultivated in the American experience. Few countries have contributed as much to climate change as the United States, with its mixed blessing of cheap oil and wide open spaces.

Cities were built around the car and, in some cases, for the car, rather than for people, assuming somehow that who you are and how you move are the same. Injustice did not just happen in cities, but was the direct result of racially prejudiced policies: red lines on maps and banker handshakes given or withheld. Americans’ inability to select leaders with vision and capability to guide the United States through these current troubled times is a mirror of people’s own cultural narcissism, which used to be called American exceptionalism. Yes, Americans live in the land of the free and the brave, but are finally starting to see that freedom only means something when deployed with intelligence and wisdom and that bravery is essential to compassion and character. Pique and nihilism are the coward’s way out.

If you are like me and hope sometimes fails you, I have good news: Alison Sant has come to help. From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities surveys US cities not for their failings, but for the means of their future remaking. Her solution: Listen. Watch. Inquire. Communities, most especially communities of color, are developing solutions that do work. Tactical urbanism is about starting close to the ground, finding a small group of change-minded people, talking about what’s going on, deciding what to do it, and then doing it. It’s okay to start small. Begin in the neighborhoods where you live and work. Show, don’t preach. If people like your idea, they will start doing it too. It’s ecological democracy. It’s not giving in. In this book are examples provided from sea to shining sea.

Talking with Alison Sant and reading the case studies presented here, I sense that a new American frontier is opening in US cities. The frontier is neighborhoods with abandoned houses being replanted with urban forests. It is parking spaces reclaimed as places for people. The unexplored edge is carefully returning oysters to coastal waters or digging rain gardens in front yards. We needn’t accede to poor choices made by our parents and grandparents; we can succeed by creating new realities on the ground for ourselves and our kids. Although it is not possible to rebuild cities from scratch, it is possible to change them in pieces, building by building, block by block, park by park, house by house. In the slow collapse of the old structures, in the gradual evolution of fresh ways of living, there is ample opportunity for new kinds of courage, freedom, and American character. We can all be homesteaders of a new kind of American dream.

For me, and as this book demonstrates, the future lies in rebuilding our relationship to nature, especially where nature has been most diminished in our cities. Every square foot of soil we unseal from asphalt, every few yards of stream we restore, and every acre or forest or wetland we repatriate—whether because we choose to or are forced to because of circumstances—will open new possibilities and provide new gifts. Nature gives to everyone. Nature’s possibilities are available to us all regardless of our race, gender, class, or circumstance. The truth is that after generations of taking—from the land, from Native peoples, from the enslaved and indentured, from each other—now is the time to give. The place to start is right here, wherever you are. Whatever you can see, lift your eye from this book and peer out the window before you. That is where the future begins.

ERIC W. SANDERSON is a senior conservation ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society and the author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City and Terra Nova: The New World after Oil, Cars, and Suburbs.

PREFACE

On September 21, 2007, I took my then two-year-old son Ben for a walk. I was living in the South of Market Street (SoMa) neighborhood in San Francisco. It was a part of the city overwhelmed by fast-moving cars and cut through with on-ramps and highways. SoMa has one of the highest number of pedestrian and bicycling deaths in the city and is one of the neighborhoods with the least access to public open space. Unlike many of the city’s residential neighborhoods built with the Victorian apartment buildings and houses so familiar to tourists, SoMa contained industrial buildings, many having been converted to spaces suited to artists and designers through the 1988 San Francisco Live/Work Ordinance. My husband, Rick Johnson, and I could house our wood and metal shop and design studio there, plus trade off parenting—all under one roof. The only hard part was going outside.

But on that September walk, everything changed. Some friends—John Bela, Matthew Passmore, and Blaine Merker—who had created an organization called Rebar, proposed that we all participate in the redesign of our cities, repurposing spaces used to store cars to create public places of our own design. On September 21, each participant paid the parking meter but instead of using it to park a car they used the space to create a park. Ben and I found out just what this effort could mean in a neighborhood that neglected its public spaces.

Just a few blocks from the warehouse where we lived, we came across our first stop, on the corner of Folsom Street and 8th Street, where a small nonprofit organization, Garden for the Environment, had installed some plants and benches, as well as some large buckets of soil. We stopped and talked with the organization’s Blair Randall. While I learned about household composting, Ben ran his chubby fingers through the imported earth. We got a waft of the dark, pungent soil, and even among the stream of cars going by on three lanes of traffic, we were buffered by the experience of a garden. Soon, Blair pulled a few wriggling worms from the heap and put them in Ben’s hands. Ben’s giggles and delight were infectious. Standing on this intensely urban corner, in roughly 140 square feet, he was having an experience of nature.

The day featured many other park installations. There was a two-spot croquet course, offering a lawn to lounge on and lemonade for all. There were libraries, urban beaches, public yoga classes, and urban chickens. And it was not just in San Francisco: Park(ing) Day 2007 featured two hundred parks in fifty cities, nine countries, and four continents.¹ This repurposing of automobile infrastructure captured the public imagination, and Park(ing) Day’s open-sourced design has allowed it to grow to such a scale that many who participate in it today know nothing about its original instigators. Park(ing) Day embodies the hopefulness and power of remaking our cities, one day at a time.

My life has been touched by much of the history described in this book, and in writing it, I have come to understand the deeper roots of these events and how they shape our country. I was born in California the day before the first Earth Day. Inspired by the environmental progressive-ness that passed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, my father transitioned from academia to government, where he worked through the days of the energy crisis to affect policies making the nation less reliant on oil and more energy efficient. When our family moved to Washington, DC, the City of Trees was being dismantled by Dutch elm disease. I remember at age eight or nine seeing plastic cups mounted around tree trunks injecting inoculations to save dying trees—and the empty stumps along our block where the trees came down. As Jill Jonnes describes in her book Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape, the District lost 64 percent of its tree canopy between 1973 and 1997, a loss the city is still recovering from.²

As I was growing up as a teenager in the nation’s capital, the crime and murder rate were climbing. In 1988, more than one person a day was killed in the District. And by 1991, the city had the highest homicide rate in the United States. At the peak of violence, 482 people were murdered in one year.³ However, the city was highly segregated, insulating me as a White child from much of that suffering.

I lived in New York City in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during an era of enormous crime and violence. I was a New York University art student at the time and had friends who were the victims of crime, but living in Greenwich Village was undoubtedly a much different experience than living in the South Bronx, which became a national symbol of the violence of that era.⁴ Patrick Sharkey, author of Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, wrote that spaces that had been created to support public life, to be enjoyed by all—those that defined city life in America’s greatest metropolis—were dominated by the threat of violence.⁵ In the early 1990s, there were approximately 30 homicides for every 100,000 New York City residents.⁶

Many of my impressions of the city in the 1990s match those described by Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City’s former transportation commissioner. In her book, Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, she wrote, Downtown Manhattan street life around this time amounted to sidewalk hot dog vendors and lunches eaten standing up. . . . Traffic safety wasn’t on the agenda. The quality of street life wasn’t on the agenda. Plazas definitely weren’t on the agenda. . . . There was little attention given to the way the streets looked or felt. Although that would all change, she noted that at the time, New Yorkers were desperately hanging on, trying to survive, not thinking about how these streets—the greatest asset in one of the world’s most walkable cities—could be used.⁷

Later experiments, like New York’s public plaza program, were part of a new era for the city’s public life, where common space was valued, cared for, and safe. As Sharkey wrote, New York became the poster child for the Great American Crime Decline.⁸ This progression came with increasing police presence, police violence, and mass incarceration, however.⁹ As a young documentary photographer, I watched firsthand as many of the men I knew living in the parks of the East Village and West Village were carted off to jails or sent upstate to mental institutions. Mayor Rudy Giuliani had a reputation for being ruthless, and the city’s streets dramatically changed on his watch. This time also ushered in the collective efforts of organizations like the New York Restoration Project, formed to care for small parks throughout the city, whose members later helped plant one million trees across all five boroughs.¹⁰ By 2014, the city’s murder rate was down to 328 people, the lowest number since the first half of the twentieth century.¹¹

I have lived in San Francisco during a time of massive displacement, as the dot.com boom of the 1990s turned to the tech boom of the 2000s, still developing today. During this time, I have seen many neighborhoods that I have lived in completely transformed and art spaces, bookstores, and restaurants close. Cities change, but these changes have wiped out much of the Bay Area’s counterculture, distilling it along the way. I am a fan of change, but I miss the informality and creativity that once felt core to the experience of living in San Francisco.

When our children were young, my husband and I packed them on cargo bikes for school and became one of a growing set of families that decided to forgo using a car. We cheered on Critical Mass rides through our neighborhood. Our photograph showed up in San Francisco Bike Coalition newsletters. And we rode with the mayor on Bike to Work Day, where I spoke on the steps of city hall about our experiences riding as a family in the city.

In 2006, we started the Studio for Urban Projects, hosting events out of a storefront in the Mission District where we worked on public art and design projects. We tracked the urban agriculture movement, growing bike infrastructure, graywater systems, nature in the city, and climate change.¹² The Studio participated in the first Market Street Prototyping Festival, hosting talks, tours, workshops, screenings, and even a children’s playground curated with local organizations from our project Outpost, installed on 6th and Market Streets. We created a public field lab outside the Exploratorium, along the Embarcadero, to discuss the effects of climate change on the Bay Area. We were on a team for the Bay Area: Resilient by Design Challenge, proposing modular oyster reef systems for San Rafael’s low-lying shoreline and hosting kayaking, walking, and biking tours of prototypes underway. Moderating these talks, first in the storefront and then on the street, informed the content of this book.

From the Ground Up was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, the disaster of the Trump presidency, and the reigniting of the civil rights movement. As a White woman with privilege, I have felt the responsibility to raise my voice along with others. I am not insulated from a society in which racism is embedded in the systems that underlie our culture and am part of structures in which Black people and people of color have been treated inequitably. This has left me with blind spots. In the stories I relay, I have relied heavily on interviews with people whose expertise and experiences are close to the ground. I have also depended on the perspectives of peer reviewers to help me be comprehensive. However, I am still learning, and there are bound to be words in this book that may be interpreted as ignorant and even hurtful. This is not my intention. I am striving to understand perspectives outside my experience, but I would be foolish to claim the process is complete. Still, I am committed to bringing the clarity of the movement we experienced in 2020 forward in the work I do today and in the future. In that, there is a responsibility to become more aware of our own bias, to listen, and to act.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the making of this book, I interviewed more than ninety activists, community organizers, city officials, scientists, designers, policy makers, authors, and academics who generously shared their experiences and insights. I have been lucky enough to accompany Bram Gunther to the New York City Urban Field Station and the city’s wildlands; bike the greenways in Minneapolis on a collective bike ride with Matthew Dyrdahl, Bill Dossett, and Soren Jensen; and tour Philadelphia’s parks and green schoolyards with Paula Conolly and Owen Franklin. I traveled with Michael Houck through all his Wild in the City spots in Portland, Oregon, and Peter Malinowski hosted me on a boat ride from Governor’s Island to the Gowanus Canal and up the East River. It was my first taste of the spray of New York Harbor water! I was grateful to be virtually invited into the homes of Matt Burlin, Angela Chalk, Jessica Dandridge, Will Lumpkins, Margarita Mena, Lena Miller, Ricardo Moreno, Andrea Parker, Alexis Pennie, Samuel Schwartz, Destiny Thomas, and many others who took the time to talk with me during the depths of the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone I had the honor of interviewing was extremely generous with their time, insights, and passions for improving their cities.

These people are at the forefront of forming a bold, new vision for US cities in a time of urgency and uncertainty. The questions they are asking, challenges they are facing, and solutions they are generating are carving a path for many others to follow in creating a better future for millions of people in cities across the United States. I commend them for their commitment and spirit in working to make a difference in their communities and country. Collectively, they share a common goal of meeting the urgency of climate change while healing this nation’s divisions and creating an inspiring future. Behind these individuals sit networks of people who do the work of the hundreds of organizations featured in this book. They are the restoration volunteers, foresters, bus drivers, bike mechanics, pavement stripers, gardeners, canvassers, interns, administrators, and data collectors who give momentum to the grassroots and compel people to participate in remaking their cities. The success of participatory democracy relies on their energy.

I am extraordinarily grateful to Robert Ungar, my tireless research associate, who signed on for the short term of this project and was committed over the long term to its final notation. I cannot overstate how much I relied on him for his wisdom, passion, worldly perspective, and extraordinary research in writing this book. Artist Packard Jennings leant the full weight of his artistic talent to this project, filling its pages with data-informed illustrations that capture the spirit of the projects this book focuses on. Robert and Packard were an extraordinary team, working with me over countless Zoom meetings during the pandemic to make sure the drawings were informed, spirited, and beautiful. Scott Thorpe, Anna Carollo, and Maggie Wallace, of MacFadden & Thorpe, skillfully translated the ideas in this book to the crisp design of its pages.

In her role as an advocate and friend, Emma-Louise Anderson was an insightful companion on site visits to several of the cities and projects featured in this book. Our conversations have broadened my understanding of climate solutions and her passion for making a difference emboldens my own. She also reviewed initial versions of chapters and provided significant help with final edits. I will be forever indebted to her for spending her precious time helping me with this book. Yasmin A. McClinton, editor at Tessera Editorial, and Maria X. Ipis-Bautista lent their perspective to making sure the book’s words and illustrations truly represent the people and places they intended to describe. I also thank Kathleen Lafferty, copyeditor at Roaring Mountain Editorial Services, for her careful edits. Lauren Worth and Milo Vela contributed to the early stages of this book, researching potential directions and projects that informed its context, and Nehama Rogozen finished it up with her careful citations. I am grateful to the Headlands Center for the Arts for giving me the time and space to begin working on this project.

Island Press is a one-of-a-kind publisher. It consistently produces books that inspire the world and inform solutions. I am grateful to cofounder and former president Chuck Savitt, who encouraged me to write this book, and to David Miller, current president, who saw it through. Heather Boyer, my brilliant editor, stuck with me through the long and winding path of conceiving, researching, and writing From the Ground Up. Her advice, clarity, and friendship shaped every detail of its pages.

My thanks also go to this book’s contributors, Eric W. Sanderson, Tamika Butler, Mami Hara, and Kristina Hill, who took time from their own projects to write thoughtful and passionate additions to mine. The guidance and thorough comments of my expert peer reviewers improved this book enormously. I am grateful to John Bela, Adrian Benepe, Simon Bertrang, Matt Burlin, Douglas Burnham, Richard Campanella, Sarah Charlop-Powers, Paula Conolly, Jessica Dandridge, Jaime Ramiro Diaz, Robin Grossinger, Morgan Grove, Steven Higashide, Michael Houck, Jill Jonnes, Ian Leahy, James Lodge, Ashwat Narayanan, Liz Ogbu, Alexis Pennie, Matt Sanders, Rachelle Sanderson, Lex Sant, Samuel Schwartz, and Darryl Young, as well as to the team of Portland experts that supported Matt Burlin’s review: Megan Callahan, Kate Carone, Daniel Kapsch, Jennifer Karps, Naomi Tsurumi, and Marie Walkiewicz.

I entrusted my twin brother, Lex Sant, with some of the most critical parts of this text. I am thankful for his steady advice, confidence in me, and appreciative prodding along the way. My father, Roger Sant, cheered me on with enthusiasm and deep interest. He has set a beautiful example to me with his extraordinary life, resilience, and integrity. When I was a child, he also showed me how to write in the early hours of the morning as he finished his own book, Creating Abundance: America’s Least-Cost Energy Strategy. My mother, Vicki Sant, had enormous warmth and kindness, which she offered to most everyone she encountered. She cultivated a spark in me that compelled me to reach out to so many people for their perspectives in writing this book. I will be forever grateful for her generous spirit and wish more than anything that she had lived long enough to read this text. My parents’ commitment to making a difference in this world set the bar for me.

I am enormously grateful to my husband and creative partner in the Studio for Urban Projects, Rick Johnson. He encouraged me to write long before the idea of this book had hatched, he helped lay the foundation for its writing, and he covered home when I could not. His talent has been the backbone of our practice and created the context for the experiences that seeded this book. His scope and curiosity have always infected my own and sent me researching new ideas and projects throughout this process. I am also beyond thankful to our children, Ben and Caleb, whose lives make my commitment to improving the world all the more pressing.

LIST OF INTERVIEWEES

The following people were extraordinarily generous in allowing me to interview them and in sharing their remarkable work for this book.

Robin Abad-Ocubillo

Mike Anderer

Kristin Baja

Erin Barnes

John Bela

Adrian Benepe

Bethany Bezak

John Bourgeois

Katharyn Boyer

Matt Burlin

Douglas Burnham

Mark Busciano

Tamika Butler

Marc Cammarata

Tracey Capers

Kate Carone

Jeff Carroll

Angela Chalk

Aron Chang

Seth Charde

Sarah Charlop-Powers

Steven Coleman

Meredith Comi

Paula Conolly

Mark Conway

Jad Daley

Jessica Dandridge

Danielle Denk

Jennifer Dill

Susan Donoghue

Bill Dossett

Matthew Dyrdahl

Sheryl Evans Davis

Ethan Fawley

Cara Ferrentino

Shannon Fiala

Jacqueline Flin

Owen Franklin

Maureen Gaffney

Phil Ginsberg

Robin Grossinger

Morgan Grove

Bram Gunther

Mami Hara

Cameron Herrington

Sarah Hines

Michael Houck

McKay Jenkins

Soren Jensen

Kenneth Jessup

Ian Leahy

James Lodge

Kaitlin Lovell

Jeremy Lowe

Will Lumpkins

Peter Malinowski

Natalie Manning

Patrick Marley Rump

Jodie Medeiros

Margarita Mena

Tracy Metz

Lena Miller

Greg Moore

Ricardo Moreno

Ashwat Narayanan

Liz Ogbu

Kate Orff

Andrea Parker

Alexis Pennie

Shaun Preston

Jeff Risom

Guillermo Rodriguez

Eric Rozell

Jessica Sanders

Mathew Sanders

Eric W. Sanderson

Rachelle Sanderson

Samuel Schwartz

Jane Silfen

Dani Simons

Andrew Stober

Jeff Supak

Laura Tam

Destiny Thomas

Gretchen Trefny

David Waggonner

Fiona Watt

Liz Williams Russell

A NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS

The illustrations in this book were drawn by artist Packard Jennings to provide a visual representation of the complex realities described in each chapter. The characters depicted in the drawings were inspired by volunteers and participants of community events as reflected in images published by featured organizations in public platforms or shared with the author. To represent places as realistically as possible, the demographics of each area were taken into account, and cultural signifiers were included to reflect the many identities, styles, ethnicities, and body types consistent with those places. Maps are based on GIS data and planning information provided by the organizations and individuals involved in the projects described in this book.

Image: Thousands of people hit the streets in Washington, DC, to demonstrate in the People’s Climate March, demanding action on climate change rooted in economic and racial justice. (2017) (Source: Astrid Riecken/Getty Images)

Thousands of people hit the streets in Washington, DC, to demonstrate in the People’s Climate March, demanding action on climate change rooted in economic and racial justice. (2017) (Source: Astrid Riecken/Getty Images)

INTRODUCTION

REIMAGINING OUR CITIES

For more than three decades, US cities have experimented with ways to remake themselves in response to climate change. From tactical interventions and urban prototypes to pilot projects, streets have been reconfigured to accommodate people, bikes, and transit. Roads, parks, and backyards have been made absorbent. Forest canopies have been broadened and urban waters restored. These efforts have been motivated by necessity as the impacts of the changing climate are not only projected into the future, but are being experienced today.¹ However, the set of opportunities to remake cities as more vibrant, equitable, humane, and joyous places is also aspirational. Today, the bar is being lifted to make cities places in which people don’t just survive the future, but thrive in it.

As the United States grows in its capacity to respond to climate change, the path to progress will go through US cities. The year 2007 was the first time in human history that the majority of the world’s population lived in urban places. By 2018 in the United States, 83 percent of the population lived in just 3 percent of the country’s total land area.² This density makes cities one of the most significant opportunities for addressing human’s impact on climate change. Together, the world’s cities are responsible for 75 percent of global carbon emissions.³ The United States faces unique challenges in addressing the climate crisis. It is the second-largest emitter in the world after China, a country with a population four times larger.⁴ Transportation alone accounts for the largest share of emissions in the United States.⁵ The dense footprints of many US cities support low- and zero-carbon mobility options, including transit, biking, and walking. Expanding these modes is essential to mitigating climate change and holds the promise of building more equitable transportation systems, creating more equally distributed opportunities, and increasing economic mobility.

From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities focuses on the unique ways in which US cities are expanding the scope of global solutions that mitigate and adapt to climate change while creating equitable and livable communities in the process. The best examples of this work bring together the energy of community activists, the organization of advocacy groups, the power of city government, and the reach of federal environmental policy. At its strongest, the structure of American democracy—stacked with local, state, and federal structures of governance—provides a context for local innovation that doesn’t exist in the same way as places with centralized authority. However, when administrations leave much undone, more is taken up by the American people. As a result, this country has a long history of grassroots activism and local invention. Americans are used to rolling up their sleeves and digging in. When ignited by funding and government leadership, and supported by science and policy, the United States provides fertile ground for local solutions to grow quickly.

This book details the pathbreaking work that is remaking US cities, providing evidence that the best of American ingenuity holds the promise for more livable, equitable, and resilient communities in the century to come. The twelve chapters in this book focus on projects in nine places throughout the nation. They profile the questions, provocations, and insights of more than ninety activists, practitioners, academics, government officials, scientists, and advocates who are working in their communities to make a difference.

Part 1 starts at street level, describing how the land allocated to cars is being reclaimed for people. The narrative cuts through the concrete in part 2, describing how streets, yards, roofs, and parks are being made porous to function within watersheds. Part 3 focuses on how US cities are being reforested to mitigate air pollution and heat while making neighborhoods lush. The book ends along the US shorelines in part 4, examining how large-scale ecological restoration is helping buffer future storms in vulnerable communities while returning life to our urban waters. It also looks at the processes by which communities are migrating to higher ground.

Three essays provide national context. Tamika Butler, a national expert on the built environment and equity, writes about the experience of systemic racism and public space. A civil service perspective is offered by Mami Hara, who discusses her work in Seattle Public Utilities and the Philadelphia Water Department. And Professor Kristina Hill, who studies urban hydrology’s relationship to design and social justice, focuses on the ways in which nature-based solutions in watersheds and along shorelines will help populations adapt to sea-level rise and severe storms.

This book is a call to react creatively to the challenges we face. Tested experiments can be built upon and scaled to keep pace with the urgency of climate change. As witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, change can happen overnight. Humans’ future resiliency will be measured not just by the infrastructure put in place to manage stormwater or make transit accessible, but by how well we have supported the social infrastructure that allows our communities to respond to the challenges that lie ahead.⁶ Much of the work profiled in this book charts a path to confronting racial inequities, focusing on climate mitigation and adaptation as a context for creating opportunities for all communities while making neighborhood-led solutions the centerpiece of change.

Tragically, the comfort of the private automobile has been prioritized above the quality of life in cities. As Richard Rothstein described in his book The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, the US highway system ripped through Black communities to serve mostly White commuters.⁷ As described in part 1, the Rondo neighborhood, the center of Saint Paul’s Black community, was demolished in 1956 to construct the I-94 freeway.⁸ In the 1960s, highspeed roadways were run through the Tenderloin, a community of color in San Francisco where many residents live well below the poverty line, creating the city’s most dangerous streets.⁹ Nationwide, a staggering number of traffic injuries and fatalities occur each day on US roads. As Angie Schmitt documented in Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, more pedestrians died on streets in 2018 than at any point in a generation, disproportionately killing low-income, Black, Brown, elderly, and disabled people, many of whom exclusively rely on walking and public transit.¹⁰

Living near roads and highways also exposes residents to toxic levels of air pollution. More than 45 percent of Americans live where pollution