Cities need to plan for the future now by developing infrastructure and communities that make them resilient, rugged and adaptable to planetary change. Coastal cities are particularly vulnerable to increased flooding from larger storm surges and sea level rise. And, as Bruce Stutz noted last year, "adapting to this reality has become a key part of future planning for London, Rotterdam, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, and Seattle, as well as low-lying cities across Asia" and New York City. Here's another waterfront city that is taking future-adaptive urban planning seriously: HafenCity.
HafenCity is marked by the red dot adjacent to Hamburg, Germany and along the river Elbe. | (Image captured with Bing Maps)
HafenCity, or Harbor City, is a new city quarter under development in the old...
The following are remixed highlights of Beth Noveck's talk "Transparent Government" that she gave as part of the Long Now Foundation's Seminars about Long-Term Thinking. As with Noveck's original talk, these highlights, as remixed by Hassan Masum, are made available under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.5 license.
We have been concentrating decision-making power in the hands of too few people - whether legislatures, or cabinet officials, or bureaucrats and agencies like the patent office. We construct our institutional practices around the notion that this is the best way that we have to make decisions. Even though we do not have a system of monarchy or aristocracy, we still believe in the notion of political expertise, and the notion that we have to rest power at the center.
What...
Paul Robbins has been an environmental activist and consumer advocate since 1977. He has worked on many issues related to the environment, including clean energy, recycling, and air pollution. He is currently based in Austin, Texas, where he publishes, and writes much of the content for, the Austin Environmental Directory,, a source book of environmental issues, products, services, and organizations. (While some of its articles are specific to the Austin bioregion, others are relevant to the entire United States.)
Robbins has been described as "the city's most indefatigable green activist," and the Austin City Council recognized him by renaming the downtown "District Cooling Plant 1" the "Paul Robbins District Cooling Plant." Why a cooling plant? The Austin Chronicle's...
Global media thinker, writer and former Worldchanging board chair Ethan Zuckerman just gave a TED talk on the importance of seeking out global information in order to be better able to think about global issues:
Way to go, Ethan! Below you can find Ethan's notes and slides from his talk in full. Additionally, Ethan has been doing quite a bit of blogging on other presenters at TED Global 2010. His posts are well worth reading, please visit these links for more:Sheryl WuDunn – Empowering Women, Defending Development Aid
Nic Marks and Happiness that Doesn’t Cost the Earth
Jessica Jackley’s New Project, Profounder
Auret Van Heerden and Bringing Human Rights into the Global Supply Chain
Peter Eigen and Global Transparency
...
Ethan Zuckerman:
Here are my notes – I can’t...
Bruce Nussbaum has stirred up a fierce debate with his new article Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?. Nussbaum criticizes groups like Project H, Acumen Fund and Architecture for Humanity for being perhaps naive about the post-colonial landscape they face in Asia and Africa:
Is the new humanitarian design coming out of the U.S. and Europe being perceived through post-colonial eyes as colonialism? Are the American and European designers presuming too much in their attempt to do good?
What's more, Nussbaum says, we ought to be focusing our efforts closer to home: "And finally, one last question: why are we only doing humanitarian design in Asia and Africa and not Native American reservations or rural areas, where standards of education, water and health match the very worst...
(Urban Renewal #5, City Overview From Top of Military Hospital, Shanghai, 2004. By photographer Edward Burtynsky; used with permission.)
If we want to anticipate the future of cities, we should look to China. China is urbanizing at a rate unprecedented in history. Between now and 2030, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, Chinese cities are expected to add more than 350 million people, swelling to a total urban population of more than a billion. By then, China will have more than 220 cities with populations of more than a million (by comparison, Europe today has only 35 cities with one million+ inhabitants), and 24 emerging megacities with more than five million inhabitants.
Building that many cities is an almost incomprehensibly huge task. It will demand massive...
Carbon neutrality by 2030 is the new standard for climate policies, and again the UK is leading North America in the climate debate with a bold national-level proposal about how to get there. The Centre for Alternative Technology just launched zerocarbonbritain2030 (ZCB2030), a collaborative project showing one possible scenario for making the entire UK carbon-neutral by 2030.
ZCB2030 is a well-researched, well-written, and well-designed report on a set of possible pathways to a zero carbon Britain by 2030 (The goal, though bold, is not unique: Alex Steffen called for a very similar position for Seattle, a target which the Seattle City Council has included in their legislative priorities this year; and a variety of other nations and cities are approaching the same target, from...
We've gotten a few inquiries lately about why we aren't devoting a lot more discussion to the BP Spill. After all, isn't this the "worst environmental disaster in American history?" Shouldn't a site whose purpose is to explore solutions to planetary problems be all over the planet's most visible current problem?
In a word, no. The decision not to cover the BP Spill has been fairly straightforward for us: we don't do problems, unless we're covering them in order to explain how a solution could work, or unless a new analysis of a problem is so telling that it changes the way we understand how it could be solved. The BP Spill is huge, but not particularly unique.
The BP Spill will almost certainly go down as the decade's most visible industrial accident. The BP corporate leaders...
A medley of interesting, worldchanging items:
The Secret Powers of Time, a fascinating talk exploring the ways different people look at the future, with thought-provoking observations about the ways technology is changing our relationships to time.
If the world can rally $18 trillion in new investments by 2030, we could supply 95% of the energy needed globally with renewables by 2050, says a coalition of groups led by Greenpeace in a new report Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook. Lots of challenging assumptions in the report, but also lots of great information on best practices and technology innovation curves.
The Audi Urban Future Award is an interesting competition between six architectural firms (including Worldchanging friends B.I.G.) to design...
Upon returning from the Global Voices summit in Santiago, Chile Ethan Zuckerman reports on the lessons of "four days spent with dear friends from around the world – who happen to include some of the best minds in participatory media." His discussion of the Polyglot Internet and the role of love and money in sustaining an independent media outlet like Global Voices raises some interesting issues about how to create the right balance between paid and volunteer work in cash-strapped organizations.
A breakout group at the GV summit, at the Santiago Public Library
We’ve thrown five summits so far, including our inception meeting at Harvard in 2004, and from each meeting, an informal theme has emerged. For me, the theme of GV Santiago was “love or money?” This isn’t a new...
You're invited to join the Worldchanging network in Attention Philanthropy 2010 by giving the gift of attention to a person, cause or resource you think deserves more attention than it gets. Please post your "grant" in the comments below.
It couldn't be easier. Here are the guidelines:
1. Your grant may be to a person, organization, event, website, book, database -- really anything, as long as you have no financial stake in its success.
2. Your grant must either be for a solution (or person/organization working on or exploring solutions) or for a resource for understanding a given problem that is so new and insightful that it is in itself a step towards solving the problem.
3. Your grant should come with a citation of 200 words (or fewer), simply explaining what the awardee...
At Worldchanging, one of our three main missions is to practice attention philanthropy.
Attention philanthropy is a gift of notice. In a noisy world, deluged in advertising, overrun with PR flacks and crowded with the superficial, one of the biggest barriers to success for a small, good idea or noble enterprise can simply be getting noticed in the first place.
Attention philanthropy is all about shining a light on good work, work worth supporting: it is grant-making that deals in praise, rather than money (though because many funders, journalists and change makers read Worldchanging -- and because these usually kick up a lot of buzz -- the result is usually also more media coverage, funding and networking opportunities).
Over the past few weeks, we have reached out to our...
The future that my parents' generation warned us about forty years ago looks an awful lot like our present. The ice caps are melting, deserts are spreading, the planet is thick with people, most of the world's primeval forests are gone, the seas are in crisis, and pollution, famine and natural disasters kill millions of people a year. Compared to the world we might have had, had the progress of the early 1970s continued steadily through the following four decades, we live on a half-ruined planet.
That half-ruined planet, though, is our home. People old enough to remember the first Earth Day can well grieve for that other, healthier Earth we might have had if only older generations had made different choices. Kids born today won't have that luxury. This world is the only one...
by Alan Durning
01 - Juice Hawgs: Electric bikes aren't the answer to our prayers. We are.
Mmmm. An electric bike. Zipping through the city. Surging up hills without gasping for breath. Riding in business dress and arriving fresh and dry. Healthy, moderate exercise. No traffic jams. Free parking. Huge load-hauling potential. Near-free fueling. Zero emissions. Breeze in your face. Appealing!
So why haven’t e-bikes caught on (yet)? Especially in the Pacific Northwest, which is brimming with well-heeled tech enthusiasts? What’s stopping electric bikes from devouring automotive market share the way DVDs killed VHS? At least in good weather? Why aren’t they as commonplace on our boulevards as motorcycles or scooters or muscle-powered bikes or even motorized wheel chairs? Will...
There was a time when people thought the Internet would isolate us from one another, that we'd all end up spread out across the landscape in suburban enclaves, too absorbed with television and the Net to want to meet any actual people. A funny thing happened on the way to that asocial future, though: we discovered that the most important thing about the Net is that it connects people, and that connected people tend to want to meet, socialize and work together. Rather than separating us, the Net has made us more social than ever, both online and in the "real" world. In fact, the more connected we are online, the more time we're likely to spend hanging out offline with friends, family and neighbors.
As technology has suffused our cities -- think not only iPhones and GoogleMaps, but...
As you may have gathered, the idea of city-wide carbon neutrality by 2030 has gained a lot of steam here in Worldchanging's home base of Seattle. Our City Council has embraced it as a goal (though it's wrestling with the timeline) and some of our smartest people are wrestling with what carbon neutrality might mean and how it might be accomplished.
Eric de Place offered one set of concerns here last week, exploring the example of Copenhagen -- which at this point has the world's most ambitious urban climate goal of carbon neutrality by 2025 -- and asking some tough questions about Seattle's plans.
Copenhagen, he notes correctly, does not have a plan to achieve zero emissions -- as far as I know, no city has a plan for that. What Copenhagen has a plan for is to achieve zero net...
A piece in the latest issue of Science shows that there's a considerable amount of methane (CH4) coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, where it had been trapped under the permafrost. There's as much coming out from one small section of the Arctic ocean as from all the rest of the oceans combined. This is officially Not Good.
Here's why: methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, significantly more powerful than carbon dioxide. There are billions of tons of methane trapped under the permafrost, and if that methane starts leaking quickly, it would have a strong feedback effect -- warming the atmosphere and oceans, causing more methane to leak, and on and on. The melting of methane ice (aka "methane hydrates" and "methane clathrates") is probably the most significant global warming...
(February 2010)
Top stories from our Canadian blog:
On-street rumble strips for bike paths—removing barriers to active transportation in the Winter City | Rod Edwards
"The best idea I heard was to use rumble strips—make the strip as wide as the painted line on the street, and drivers suddenly have a great haptic reminder when they invade the bike lane. And, rumble strips won't get scraped off by snowplows, won't wash away like paint, don't interfere with cross-traffic (like curbs), and still allow for parking."
Visions Desirable, Present and Future | Mark Tovey
"Here at WorldChanging, we often have conversations about how best to envision desirable futures. .... Alex Roman's masterfully rendered film, The Third & The Seventh, points the way. .... Herein we find a...
It's understandably common for people working on bright green issues to be dispirited these days. We're currently living in the wake of the failure of climate talks in Copenhagen, the miring of climate legislation in the swamp of the U.S. Senate and what seems like a steady torrent of bad news (from methane melt to the tragedy still unfolding in Haiti). We're not only failing to move rapidly enough towards zero-impact economies, we often seem to be losing ground these days, both because of political attacks by entrenched interests and because as the science of planetary boundaries is better understood, the problems look worse than they did before.
In private conversations, more and more people I respect have told me that they suspect the war for humanity's future is...
Readers in the design world were no doubt following last week's events in Cape Town, South Africa, where emerging and established talents from all corners of the design industry gathered for the 15th annual Design Indaba. The 3-day conference is one of the industry's leading events; a unique showcase where top minds in branding share the stage with graffiti artists and cutting-edge talents from the rapidly rising nations known collectively as BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China). The event is also a source of pride and exposure for South Africa's burgeoning creative scene. As South Africans prepare to host the continent's first FIFA World Cup less in than four months, the energy and expectations are running high in Cape Town, and the Design Indaba spotlight offered a...
Monday afternoon, the Seattle City Council announced that Seattle will aim to become carbon neutral, and explore whether it can realistically commit to hitting that target by 2030, which would make it the first carbon neutral city in the United States.
If Seattle can in fact lead the way toward North American climate neutral cities, it may well have an impact far greater than the size of its population would suggest. It may, for instance, help accelerate the race towards a bright green future already engaged by cities like Vancouver, Portland and San Francisco. It may even help spur further action in internationally leading cities like Copenhagen, Melbourne and Stockholm. Since much of the innovation needed to achieve ecologically low-impact prosperity is urban innovation,...
On Friday, the world's most successful businessperson and most powerful philanthropist did something outstandingly bold, that went almost unremarked: Bill Gates announced that his top priority is getting the world to zero climate emissions.
Now, I'm not a member of the Cult of Bill myself (I'm typing this on a MacBook), but you don't have to believe that Gates has superhuman powers of prediction to know that his predictions have enormous power. People who will never listen to Al Gore, much to less someone like me, hang on Gates' every utterance.
And Friday, Gates predicted extraordinary climate action: zero. Not small steps, not incremental progress, not doing less bad: zero. In fact, he stood in front of a slide with nothing but the planet Earth and the number zero. That...
The annual publication of the State of Green Business Report drew sustainability experts of all kinds to San Francisco in the first of two U.S. events presented by Greener World Media. While the State of the Union delivered in Washington was a stark reminder of the impact of a tough economic year, the State of Green Business Forum gives hope to sustainability supporters and solid indicators of the steady growth of a green economy.
(Company Commitments: Percentage of S&P 500 Companies Reporting Reduction Targets. Source: Carbon Disclosure Project. Click image to enlarge.)
At the PG&E Auditorium in downtown San Francisco, Joel Makower presented the 2010 State of Green Business Report -- a compilation of over 1500 news stories, blogs, and media collected from all sources of...
Today, I took a long walk through the old neighborhoods of Long Beach: craftsman bungalows, Mission-style courtyard apartment buildings, quaint and walkable streets, old trees shading the sidewalks, the beach breeze blowing through. It put me in mind of the L.A. that might have been, the one that was proposed time and again, and overruled by boosters and developers and the politicians they owned.
L.A. might have been a paradise, of course, had it come up differently. Had it been a city of walkable neighborhoods, street cars, home solar, wild rivers, undeveloped beaches, gardens of water-sipping native plants (all proposed more than 100 years ago), it might have ended up the greenest major city on the planet, and a marvel of livability. Instead, of course, it's Gatsby's green...
Here at WorldChanging, we often have conversations about how best to envision desirable futures. Not just on how to collaborate on designing them, or accelerate development on the kind of technology that would get us there, but how to portray inspiring green futures that people would want to live in.
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(Posted by Mark Tovey in Features at 11:03 AM)...
Big, red 'For Sale' signs flapping in the wind are the tumble weeds of the 21 century. Signaling emptiness and recent catastrophe, these markers of market disaster are said to have proliferated because of predatory lending and lax standards. But a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) shows another cause of the rapid foreclosure rate: car dependency.
Looking at data from more than 40,000 mortgages throughout Chicago, San Francisco and Jacksonville, Fla., the researchers behind the Location Efficiency and Mortgage Default report found that the rate of mortgage foreclosure actually decreased in neighborhoods that were more compact, walkable and connected to public transportation (after accounting for important factors like income). According to a recent...
Just by clicking a button, you can help us win a $5,000 grant from Brighter Planet.
Worldchanging's project proposal, Advocate for Climate Neutral Cities, has just been accepted for Brighter Planet's Project Fund, which provides seed money for people and projects working to help others fight or adapt to climate change. Our idea to create a climate neutral cities mini-magazine is one of nine projects up for the grant money.
Brighter Planet members decide—as a community—which projects to fund. The project with the most votes at the close of a voting period receives the grant. Join today to cast your vote for Advocate for Climate Neutral Cities.
PLEASE HELP US BY TAKING ONE MINUTE TO VOTE
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STEP 3: Vote for...
A Worldchanging Interview
Solving the world’s biggest problems will require a superhuman outpouring of energy, passion, creativity, and collaboration. Fortunately, Jane McGonigal has a strategy for unleashing people’s capacity to take on hard challenges: playing games. A celebrated designer, researcher, and future forecaster, McGonigal specializes in alternate reality games that engage massive online audiences in real-world issues ranging from energy shortages to health pandemics.
McGonigal brings to the task both academic credentials (Ph.D. in performance studies from U.C. Berkeley) and veteran gamer instincts (as a kid, she hacked games on the Commodore 64). As director of game research and development for the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., she...
In November, shortly before heading off to COP-15, Alex Steffen spoke for two nights at Seattle's Town Hall. Over the course of these two talks, Alex explored why the planetary crisis we now face demands a different vision of sustainable prosperity - a bright green future in which sustainability becomes the means through which we provide increased prosperity, security and quality of life for every person on the planet.
Cities are the fulcrum point we can use to leverage that vision into reality. Alex explained that the powerful forces of urbanization and the global spread of knowledge (forces that some see as a symptoms of unsustainability) may in fact be the very tools we need to build highly prosperous, ecologically low-impact lives. If we can develop a model of bright green...
As you may have gathered, there's a lot afoot here at Worldchanging. Over the next couple weeks, we'll be releasing some new work (including the video of the talks I gave in Seattle shortly before COP15 and of the talk I gave at the Bright Green Expo there), some news about changes in editorial direction (including updates about the upcoming second edition of Worldchanging: A User's Guide and Bright Green) and a whole mess of announcements of speaking gigs and other public appearances over the next year.
Last year, as you also may have gathered, was a remarkable year for us. We suffered the slings and arrows of recession (like so many other nonprofits), but we also put out an astonishing amount of new work, much of which appeared elsewhere in print, on the radio or on television...