Product Description
Here is a refreshing look at how American cities are leading the way toward greener, cleaner, and more sustainable forms of economic development.
In Emerald Cities, Joan Fitzgerald shows how in the absence of a comprehensive national policy, cities like Chicago, New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle have taken the lead in addressing the interrelated environmental problems of global warming, pollution, energy dependence, and social justice. Cities ar… More >>
Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development
Tags: american cities, chicago new york, Cities, Development, Economic, Emerald, emerald cities, energy dependence, joan fitzgerald, leading the way, portland san, problems of global warming, refreshing look, Sustainability, Urban, urban sustainability
#1 by Zelda Bronstein on April 16, 2010 - 2:04 am
In this breakthrough book, Joan Fitzgerald lays out a visionary yet pragmatic agenda that melds three concerns that are too often approached in isolation: economic development, urban sustainability and social justice. As she notes at the start, what makes the achievement of this agenda so urgent is the ongoing prospect of devastating climate change coinciding with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Written in lucid, jargon-free prose, Emerald Cities charts the way forward.
Fitzgerald examines five areas–renewable energy, energy efficiency, green building, waste management and transportation–and identifies three kinds of strategies cities can pursue within those areas: linking strategies that connect sustainability or climate change initiatives to economic development goals, such as Los Angeles’ tying efficiency retrofitting to work-needy residents and Chicago’s Waste to Profit Network; transformational strategies that enable existing businesses to expand into green markets or services, such as Portland’s local street car industry and Toledo’s move from glass to solar panel production; and–boldest of all–leapfrogging strategies that attempt to create an entirely new sector in a green technology, such as Cleveland’s offshore wind production initiative.
Focusing on the United States, Fitzgerald bookends her inquiry with encouraging examples from Germany and Sweden. Her aim, however, is not to cheerlead but to find out what works. One of her study’s distinctive strengths is its sobriety: she marks failures and frustrations as well as successes. Not all green jobs are good jobs. Not every city will be able to develop a renewable energy sector. Many of the efforts now underway are necessarily experimental. Cities and regions are trying to remake themselves and their economies along fundamentally new lines. Even if we applaud their intentions, we need to rigorously evaluate the outcomes.
But one of the key lessons of Emerald Cities is that good intentions are crucial. Our current predicament was not our foreordained destiny; it’s the result of myopia and inattentiveness–much of it willful. That’s actually good news, because it means we can do something about it. And as Fitzgerald repeatedly observes, “we” must include the federal government. No matter how well cities design and execute pathbreaking visions of green and equitable economic development, it’s going to take national leadership and investment guided by a broad and coherent industrial policy to achieve a prosperous and just green economy. For all who seek that goal, Emerald Cities is a must-read.
Zelda Bronstein, Former Chair, Berkeley Planning Commission
Rating: 5 / 5
#2 by Marco Trbovich on April 16, 2010 - 4:45 am
The possibility that green jobs may be the key to economic recovery and environmental sustainability is all the rage in media coverage these days. The New York Times has run several features on their prospects, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently published a 50-page, four-section feature entitled, “Going for the Green: Finding Growth through the Green Movement.”
The more zealous advocates for the “movement” assert its potential for creating millions of jobs and transforming the United States to a clean energy economy. Skeptics argue that the growth figures for green jobs are wildly overstated. But the projections of scholars and the assertions of advocates have seldom been buttressed with hands-on evidence of what’s presently at work in the U.S. economy.
Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development goes a long way toward filling this factual vacuum on clean energy development, including some laudable candor about the prospect of green job growth, given the shortcomings of current policies. Fitzgerald combines the academic discipline of an urban planner with the rigors of shoe-leather journalism in crafting a book that documents where real progress is being made and why the best of intentions among policy makers often go begging for want of a federal strategy to advance clean energy development
Rating: 5 / 5
#3 by David on April 16, 2010 - 7:19 am
If you’ve ever wondered why some city governments elaborate their own greenhouse-gas-reduction strategies – when it might seem odd to spend scarce resources fighting a global problem in exchange for such minor potential improvements in local environmental quality – then you may find much useful insight from Joan Fitzgerald’s Emerald Cities.
An urban planner at Northeastern University, Fitzgerald traces the reasoning that leads cities to conclude that they can extract economic- and job-development benefits by positioning themselves as leaders in the new “green” industry sectors. These are the industries that draw their economic relevance from the reality of long-term trends in energy pricing and from the moral commitment of sufficiently well-off populations to lead more sustainable lives.
This book systematically explores the crossover between four aspects of sustainability – renewable energy, energy efficiency, waste management, and transportation – and three economic-development strategies that Fitzgerald calls “linking” (connecting populations to new employment opportunities based); “transformational” (taking hard-hit local manufacturing industries into new markets); and “leapfrogging” (building entirely technology clusters).
Emerald Cities is fully accessible in style and tone. It relies heavily on insights from field visits and quotations from in-depth interviews but is also fully referenced, at scholarly standards, to government and industry data and prior publications. Overall, this is a first-rate synthesis of the state of the art in key sustainability sectors and their applicability to economic development. It should be read not just by environmentalists but by any working urban planner or economic developer.
Rating: 5 / 5