Sustainable Cities Need More than Parks, Cafes and a Riverwalk

There are many indexes that aim to rank how green cities are. But what does it actually mean for a city to be green or sustainable? 

We’ve written about what we call the “parks, cafes and a riverwalk” model of sustainability, which focuses on providing new green spaces, mainly for high-income people. This vision of shiny residential towers and waterfront parks has become a widely-shared conception of what green cities should look like. But it can drive up real estate prices and displace low- and middle-income residents.

As scholars who study gentrification and social justice, we prefer a model that recognizes all three aspects of sustainability: environment, economy and equity. The equity piece is often missing from development projects promoted as green or sustainable. We are interested in models of urban greening that produce real environmental improvements and also benefit long-term working-class residents in neighborhoods that are historically underserved. 

Over a decade of research in an industrial section of New York City, we have seen an alternative vision take shape. This model, which we call “just green enough,” aims to clean up the environment while also retaining and creating living-wage blue-collar jobs. By doing so, it enables residents who have endured decades of contamination to stay in place and enjoy the benefits of a greener neighborhood.

‘Parks, cafes and a riverwalk’ can lead to gentrification

Gentrification has become a catch-all term used to describe neighborhood change, and is often misunderstood as the only path to neighborhood improvement. In fact, its defining feature is displacement. Typically, people who move into these changing neighborhoods are whiter, wealthier and more educated than residents who are displaced.

A recent spate of new research has focused on the displacement effects of environmental cleanup and green space initiatives. This phenomenon has variously been called environmental, eco- or green gentrification. 

Land for new development and resources to fund extensive cleanup of toxic sites are scarce in many cities. This creates pressure to rezone industrial land for condo towers or lucrative commercial space, in exchange for developer-funded cleanup. And in neighborhoods where gentrification has already begun, a new park or farmers market can exacerbate the problemby making the area even more attractive to potential gentrifiers and pricing out long-term residents. In some cases, developers even create temporary community gardens or farmers markets or promise more green space than they eventually deliver, in order to market a neighborhood to buyers looking for green amenities.

Environmental gentrification naturalizes the disappearance of manufacturing and the working class. It makes deindustrialization seem both inevitable and desirable, often by quite literally replacing industry with more natural-looking landscapes. When these neighborhoods are finally cleaned up, after years of activism by longtime residents, those advocates often are unable to stay and enjoy the benefits of their efforts.

The River Walk in San Antonio, Texas, is a popular shopping and dining area catering to tourists

Tools for greening differently

Greening and environmental cleanup do not automatically or necessarily lead to gentrification. There are tools that can make cities both greener and more inclusive, if the political will exists.

The work of the Newtown Creek Alliance in Brooklyn and Queens provides examples. The alliance is a community-led organization working to improve environmental conditions and revitalize industry in and along Newtown Creek, which separates these two boroughs. It focuses explicitly on social justice and environmental goals, as defined by the people who have been most negatively affected by contamination in the area. 

The industrial zone surrounding Newtown Creek is a far cry from the toxic stew that The New York Times described in 1881 as “the worst smelling district in the world.” But it is also far from clean. For 220 years it has been a dumping ground for oil refineries, chemical plants, sugar refineries, fiber mills, copper smelting works, steel fabricators, tanneries, paint and varnish manufacturers, and lumber, coal and brick yards. 

In the late 1970s, an investigation found that 17 million gallons of oil had leaked under the neighborhood and into the creek from a nearby oil storage terminal. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed Newtown Creek on the Superfund list of heavily polluted toxic waste sites in 2010.

The Newtown Creek Alliance and other groups are working to make sure that the Superfund cleanup and other remediation efforts are as comprehensive as possible. At the same time, they are creating new green spaces within an area zoned for manufacturing, rather than pushing to rezone it. 

As this approach shows, green cities don’t have to be postindustrial. Some 20,000 people work in the North Brooklyn industrial area that borders Newtown Creek. And a number of industrial businesses in the area have helped make environmental improvements.

Just green enough

The “just green enough” strategy uncouples environmental cleanup from high-end residential and commercial development. Our new anthology, “Just Green Enough: Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification,” provides many other examples of the need to plan for gentrification effects before displacement happens. It also describes efforts to create environmental improvements that explicitly consider equity concerns.

For example, UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization, is combining racial justice activism with climate resilience planning in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. The group advocates for investment and training for existing small businesses that often are Latino-owned. Its goal is not only to expand well-paid manufacturing jobs, but to include these businesses in rethinking what a sustainable economy looks like. Rather than rezoning the waterfront for high-end commercial and residential use, UPROSE is working for an inclusive vision of the neighborhood, built on the experience and expertise of its largely working-class immigrant residents. 

This approach illustrates a broader pattern identified by Macalester College geographer Dan Trudeau in his chapter for our book. His research on residential developments throughout the United States shows that socially and environmentally just neighborhoods have to be planned as such from the beginning, including affordable housing and green amenities for all residents. Trudeau highlights the need to find “patient capital” – investment that does not expect a quick profit – and shows that local governments need to take responsibility for setting out a vision and strategy for housing equity and inclusion. 

In our view, it is time to expand the notion of what a green city looks like and who it is for. For cities to be truly sustainable, all residents should have access to affordable housing, living-wage jobs, clean air and water, and green space. Urban residents should not have to accept a false choice between contamination and environmental gentrification.

Trina Hamilton: Associate Professor of Geography, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

Winifred Curran: Associate Professor of Geography, DePaul University

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE CONVERSATION

How Nairobi Can Fix Its Serious Waste Problem

Uncollected solid waste is one of Nairobi’s most visible environmental problems. Many parts of the city, especially the low and middle-income areas, don’t even have waste collection systems in place. In high income areas, private waste collection companies are booming. Residents pay handsomely without really knowing where the waste will end up.

The Nairobi county government has acknowledged that with 2,475 tons of waste being produced each day, it can’t manage. Addis Ababa Ethiopia has a similar size population but only generates 1,680 tons per day.

Nairobi’s current waste disposal system is fraught with major problems. These range from the city’s failure to prioritise solid waste management to inadequate infrastructure and the fact that multiple actors are involved whose activities aren’t controlled. There are over 150 private sector waste operators independently involved in various aspects of waste management. To top it all there’s no enforcement of laws and regulations.

Nairobi’s waste disposal problems go back a long way and there have been previous efforts to sort them out. For example in the early 1990s, private and civil society actors got involved, signing contractual arrangements with waste generators. They often did this without informing or partnering with the city authorities.

More recently other strategies were put in place, some of which left parts of the city clean. They worked for a period, but unfortunately they weren’t sustainable because no institutional changes were made.

But there’s hope on the horizon with a new Nairobi Governor – Mike Sonko Mbuvi. He should learn from the mistakes of the past and put a new regime in place that addresses the structural problems that have plagued the city. This would include an improved improved collection and transportation plan that incorporates the private sector.

Learning from the past

In 2005 John Gakuo took over the management of city affairs as the Town Clerk. During his tenure (2005-2009) he made a deliberate effort to introduce new approaches.

When he took over the city only had 13 refuse trucks. They were able to collect a paltry 20% of the waste produced by the city. To overcome this, the authorities contracted private waste collection firms to collect, transport and dispose waste at Dandora dump site which is the biggest and the only designated site. This quickly boosted the total waste collected with levels oscillating between 45%-60%.

Other changes included:

• The development of a proper waste collection and transportation schedule with market operators. This meant waste from open-air markets was brought to identified collection points on specific days.

• A weighbridge to measure amounts of waste disposed at Dandora was introduced. An important way to know disposal levels vis-a-vis collection and generation.

• Enforcement officers were deployed to prevent dumping in parts of the city that were notorious for waste accumulation.

• Over 2,000 arrests were made, making residents aware that indiscriminate dumping was illegal and punishable under the city authority laws.

All these efforts paid off – for parts of the city. For example, the heart of the city, the Central Business District, was cleaned up and waste was brought under control.

But crucial elements that would have ensured that the changes were sustainable were left out. For example, no new physical infrastructure, like the construction of waste transfer centres and proper landfills, were built, nor was new equipment bought.

After Gakuo’s regime, the next one worth a mention is Evans Kidero’s regime (2013 - 2017). It can be credited for trying to fast-track the implementation of the Solid Waste Management Master Plan which assessed the waste management problem of Nairobi and developed projects that could be implemented to ensure a sustainable system was in place.

This ensured that while the private sector needed to help with waste collection and transportation, the government was key to institutionalising waste management services.

Thirty waste collection trucks were bought and serious investment was made into heavy equipment. And in an effort to streamline waste collection a franchise system of waste collection was rolled out. This involved dividing the city into nine zones to make it easier to manage waste.

The franchise arrangement gave private operators a monopoly over both waste and fee collections, but relied heavily on the public body for enforcement of the system.

The franchising system failed due to a lack of enforcement by the city. In addition, in-fighting broke out between the private waste collection firms that had individual contracts with waste generators and the appointed contractor.

But other changes introduced during this period were more successful and had longer lasting effect. For example new laws were introduced designed to create order in the sector. These included the solid waste management act in 2015. This classified waste and also created a collection scheme based on the sub-county system. It also put penalties in place.

In addition, in 2016, 17 environment officers were appointed and posted to the sub-counties to plan and supervise waste management operations alongside other environmental issues.

These changes planted the seeds of an efficient and working waste management system. But the regime fell down when it come to enforcement. This meant that the gains that had been made were soon lost.

What needs to be done

Expectations are high for the new regime that has taken over. It should look to fast-track the following programmes:

• Implement an improved collection and transportation plan that incorporates private sector and civil society groups;

• Establish a disposal facility to reduce secondary pollution from the city’s dumps;

• Decommission the Dandora dump site;

• Implement the re-use, reduction, and recycling of waste;

• Establish intermediate treatment facilities to reduce waste and its hazards;

• Create an autonomous public corporation;

• Put in place legal and institutional reforms to create accountability;

• Implement a financial management plan, and

• Implement private sector involvement.

Nairobi can fix it’s waste disposal problems. All it needs is focused attention, good governance and the implementation of systems that ensure changes outlive just one administration.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

LEAH OYAKE-OMBIS

Part-time lecturer and Director of the Africa Livelihood Innovations for Sustainable Environment Consulting Group, University of Nairobi

Unequal Scenes: Nairobi

“It has been estimated that the richest 10 percent of the population of Nairobi accrues 45.2 percent of income, and the poorest 10 percent only 1.6 percent,” according to a 2009 study on urban poverty by Oxfam.

Statistics on inequality and poverty are ubiquitous in the developing world. They are often underwhelming, however, in their impact. What does 45.2 of income look like? What does “urban poverty” look like? As, of course, every statistic is relative. 

The Royal Nairobi Golf Club sits directly adjacent to Kibera slum. Twice a day, a passenger train barrels through the slum, less than a meter away from people's homes and businesses. Next door, people play the game surrounded by greenery.  

In Nairobi, a city of chaos, dynamism, and incredible unequal growth, this is even more difficult to portray. Yes, it has easily the poorest urban slums I’ve ever visited. In Kibera, a hilly community, every drainage is choked with tons of raw sewage and rubbish. Children play on live train tracks, running through the middle of the slum. Government services, aside from electricity, are nonexistent. The houses are made from a mixture of mud, sticks, and tin.

But also, yes, the wealthy parts of Nairobi are more difficult to see. They are hidden behind gated communities, ensconced in shopping malls, or wrapped in dingy-looking apartment buildings. Moreover, researching these inequalities is made difficult by the lack of searchable data sets, a draconian drone flying environment, and Nairobi’s infamous traffic problems. 

Kibera is constrained not only by infrastructure but also the natural environment. The "river" at the bottom of the slum drains thousands of tons of rubbish into the Nairobi Dam every year.

The Unequal Scenes I have found in Nairobi are a mixture of traditional “rich vs. poor” housing images, but also depictions of how infrastructure constrains, divides, and facilitates city growth, almost always at the expense of the poorest classes. During my time there, I focused on a planned road that will bisect Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum. This road will cut the slum neatly in two, displacing thousands of people, and tens of schools and clinics that are in its way. This road will help alleviate the city’s traffic problem, but it may cause more problems than it will solve. Just to the south, a new road has already cut off part of Kibera, causing people to cross it illegally, resulting in many deaths. From interviews with residents, it is unclear whether or not the planned infrastructure upgrades have adequately taken into account the public opinion.

This dynamism contributes to make Nairobi one of the most fascinating cities I’ve ever been to.

Read more at http://www.thisisplace.org/shorthand/slumscapes/#nairobi-48752

The Southern Bypass road has already lopped a portion off of Kibera, in the quixotic search for a less congested city. Although there is an underpass (visible at the bottom), people often cross the road from above, resulting in many accidents.

A planned road will bisect Kibera slum in Nairobi, displacing thousands of people.

The Southern Bypass road follows the contours of the river and slum next to it. In the distance, you can see the construction beginning on the new road, which will connect Ngong Rd to Langata Rd.

Cars glide over the brand new road, above the slum below. 

The suburb of Loresho is home to the wealthy and the poor alike. 

As in many places around the world, the rich and poor are separated by only a thin concrete barrier. But it represents much more than that.

These barriers, whether concrete or imaginary, represent an entire class separation, one that may not be surmounted for generations to come. 

Amazing geometric patterns emerge from the air. "Straight" lines become slightly curved. 

The train is a part of life to Kibera, a source of transportation, of annoyance, of time passing. 

The chaos, noise, and density of the slum is neatly juxtaposed with the orderly calm green of the Royal Nairobi Golf Club, which opened in 1906. 

THIS ARTICLE AND PHOTO SERIES WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON UNEQUAL SCENES.

JOHNNY MILLER

Johnny Miller is a freelance documentary photographer and filmmaker based in Cape Town, South Africa. His 'Unequal Scences' project is meant to show the stark inequality seen in South Africa and in cities around the world. Check out his website and Facebook to find out more.

INDIA: Timelapse in Mumbai and Bangalore

This short film is a timelapse throughout Mumbai and Bangalore. The film shows India's cultures in the cities and beaches. Through aerial shots and video on the ground, the video shows India to all viewers.

Should one use an airbnb?

From the consumer’s side, the sharing economy is pretty fucking rad. Anyone who grew up riding in taxis and then suddenly switched to Uber knows why: getting into a cab used to be like stepping into a scene from Mad Max: Fury Road, with drivers who were very frequently about as sane as the War Boys.

Uber drivers, however, depend on good ratings from those riding with them, and as such, have an incentive to not drive like lunatics. Likewise, you as the consumer get rated, so you have an incentive to be on your best behavior.

Consumers get the same sort of benefit with Airbnb: it’s not free, like traveler favorite Couchsurfing, so it doesn’t have the same sketchy feel, and it grants customers the opportunity to stay in actual homes in the neighborhoods they’re visiting, rather than in a generic hotel room.

The problem is that the “sharing economy” manages to conveniently undercut decades of labor laws, housing laws, and civil rights laws in ways that the legal system hasn’t caught up to just yet, which is causing some pretty ugly side effects. Uber deserves attention — it dodges and fights regulations that would apply to other cab companies, underpays its drivers, and leave cities that set a higher standard for them — but for now, we’re just going to focus on Airbnb.

What’s wrong with Airbnb?

Airbnb has two really big problems with it that ultimately stem from the same issue. And to be fair, these aren’t necessarily issues that were created by Airbnb, so much as they are issues that stem from the entire concept of the “sharing economy.”

1. Airbnb is playing by a different set of rules.

I live in the seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, and Airbnb is a thing here: a lot of people will rent out their homes for a weekend to get some extra money, and Airbnb and its competitor VRBO are the simplest ways to do it. This is a tourist town, so the town encourages people to invite tourists into their homes. But some of the larger businesses in town are hotels, and there’s a good number of boutique hotels and BnB’s as well. And while they are large for the town, they aren’t mega-conglomerates like Hilton or Marriott. They’re small businesses. So it’s easy for them to be undercut by Airbnb. A homeowner’s profit margin doesn’t need to be as big as a hotelier’s — they aren’t running a full operation, they’re just trying to make some extra cash.

All of this would be fine — competition makes the market work, etc., etc. But users of websites like Airbnb and VRBO often don’t submit to fire safety and coding regulations that would be required of hotels and regular BnB’s, despite being legally required to. It’s also relatively easy for the Airbnb hosts to dodge paying their taxes, as they’re small enough to fly under the radar. This puts the Airbnb users at an unfair advantage, and it pisses a lot of hotel and BnB owners off.

Airbnb presents themselves as scrappy underdogs fighting big mean corporate hotel chains. When New York hoteliers claimed Airbnb was cutting into their business, Nick Papas, an Airbnb spokesperson told Bloomberg News:

“In fact, without Airbnb many of these travelers wouldn’t be able to visit New York City at all or would have cut their trip short. While the big hotels have been clear that they are concerned about losing the opportunity to price gouge consumers, we hope they will disclose the percent of their profits that stay in New York City and the percent they send to corporate headquarters outside of New York and, even, outside of the country.”

But Airbnb is not an underdog — last year, it was valued at $20 billion. That’s in the same league as Hilton ($27.8 billion) and Marriott ($22.9 billion). Since Airbnb isn’t responsible for making sure it’s users are paying taxes and are up to code, it’s basically just playing with the bumpers up.

By presenting themselves as a mere platform connecting people in the “sharing economy,” rather than as the manager of a huge network of small vendors, Airbnb is skirting regulations and making out like bandits.

2. Airbnb may be the reason “the rent is too damn high.”

The publication Grist explained the basics of this problem in a recent article, using the example of Tarin Towers, a resident of a rent-controlled building in San Francisco. Her building was bought by a real estate developer who wanted to charge way more for the rooms, so he offered the residents buyouts. Towers did the math and realized that even with the buyout, she wouldn’t be able to afford a new apartment in the city’s absurdly inflated rental market. From Grist:

“Towers held out as her old neighbors left and new tenants started moving in. Unlike the old neighbors, these new people were young, mobile, transient. And there were a lot of them. [Her landlord] O’Sullivan, it turned out, had leased the building to a startup called the Vinyasa Homes Project. Towers soon discovered that Vinyasa had listed her building on Airbnb, advertising it as a ‘co-creative house.’ The listing made it sound almost like a commune. ‘You want to join a community of like-minded peers who are doing inspirational things?’ it read. ‘This is the place for you.’ Unlike in the communes of yesteryear, however, each bed is going for more than $1,500 a month — and these are bunk beds in shared rooms. That means each apartment could now be bringing in $10,000 a month in rent.”

Towers eventually was forced out of her apartment, and took the buyout. She can’t afford a new rental in the city, so she’s housesitting until she figures something out.

This is a problem everywhere, though: in Barcelona, in Berlin, in New York, in New Orleans. It’s particularly tragic in the Big Easy, as it’s forcing out the last long-term residents who held on in neighborhoods devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

It’s the worst for cities with tight housing markets and a heavy flow of tourists. Remember the New York City mayoral candidate whose platform was “the rent is too damn high”? It may have gotten that high in part because of services like Airbnb — it’s way easier to wait for someone who will pay $2 grand a month for an apartment when you can rent the apartment out for exorbitant prices to travelers in the short term.

Photo by Leigh Blackall

You could argue that Airbnb isn’t responsible for the misuse of its service. But they aggressively fight any measure that would put the onus of responsibility on them. When San Francisco tried to pass a measure that would restrict the number of nights a year a unit could be used for short-term rentals, Airbnb spent $8 million fighting against it. When San Francisco tried to pass a rule that would force Airbnb to ensure its hosts were up-to-code, they donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to local political campaigns.

Some cities have fought back effectively. Barcelona has seen a population drop in its historic neighborhoods thanks in large part to its tourism industry, and as a result, have started slapping Airbnb with fines for offering apartments that weren’t registered with the city, and Berlin and Paris and even New York have been fighting back as well. But this is a problem that’s far from solved.

3. It’s not totally Airbnb’s fault.

In Airbnb’s defense, there’s no good business reason they would voluntarily take responsibility for policing their users. It’s not a charity, and it would be very expensive for them to check up on every single host. It would be a guaranteed way to decrease profits, which, incidentally isn’t legal — companies are required by to take actions that benefit their shareholders.

But this is why we have regulation. Airbnb isn’t tasked with doing what’s best for the local communities: our governments are. So this is a problem that’s fixed not by Airbnb being benevolent, but with good policies and effective enforcement. Which means it’s a battle that needs to be had on a city-by-city and country-by-country basis.

The problem is that we simply don’t know how serious the problem is yet — there’s been a little bit of research, but it’s far from conclusive, and has possibly been biased against services like Airbnb. There’s no reason to think that good policies couldn’t help solve the problems that Airbnb and its “sharing economy” counterparts cause. But more work needs to be done.

So what can we as travelers do?

Let’s be up front: staying at an Airbnb is a cooler experience than staying at a hotel. I have a friend who stayed in a goddamn castle in Italy. I know people who have stayed in treehouses in Oregon and igloos in Norway. In the Netherlands, you can stay in an honest-to-god windmill. And it’s cool that we’re giving regular people this platform to make some extra money, host out-of-town guests, and maybe try something new. So I won’t say “don’t ever stay at an Airbnb or a VRBO.” This is the future, and the solution to its problems will be through systemic change, not through any single individual’s actions. But it’s also time to call bullshit:

There is no such thing as the sharing economy. It’s just called the economy, and it’s been around for millennia.

Are you trading goods and services for cash? Yeah — that’s the economy. You’re just doing it in a different place. Airbnb and Uber haven’t reinvented the economy, they’ve just used the internet to create a new space in which economic transactions can happen.

So with that in mind, here are a couple of things you can to be a part of the solution:

1. Support fair regulation of Airbnb & VRBO in your hometown.

If your town has a lot of tourists, try to be supportive of government attempts to regulate businesses like Airbnb and VRBO. The companies will do shitty ad campaigns about how your city is turning it’s back on money and innovation, but that’s just a scare tactic. Anyone who has lived in a tourist town knows that, even if the economy is dependent on tourist dollars, what’s good for the tourists isn’t always good for the locals. Try and push your local governments to strike a balance between making money and supporting the local community. Get involved. Get organized. This is pretty much always the best solution to anything.

2. Try to avoid the shitty Airbnb hosts.

You can take steps to avoid giving money to the douchebags who are misusing the service. Think of it as another thing you want to research, along with “safety,” “service,” and “cleanliness.” In short, you want to seek out spots that the current owners actually live in.

Becky Caudill over at Casa Caudill has some great tips for spotting the shitty hosts using the platform itself. Here’s what she suggests looking for when you’re checking out the photos of the location provided by the host:

"

• Seek out properties that are decorated like you or your friends would decorate your own homes.
• Look for plants (not just fresh flowers).
• Check out the art. Is everything from Ikea or another mass market supplier? Or are there original prints or photographs on the wall? On shelves? Is there any artwork at all?
• Does the kitchen come with basic supplies like salt, pepper, olive oil, etc? People who live somewhere will have these things on hand. (Although maybe not in NYC? It’s my understanding from friends there that people eat out every night and never cook so maybe they don’t need these things?)
• Do the owners read? Are there books other than travelogues visible in the pics? (And for goodness sake, if you see hundreds of travel brochures that’s a dead giveaway this place is operated solely as a vacation rental property).
• Stay in real neighborhoods, not tourist areas."

It also helps to delve into the comments a bit. Can you get a sense from the comments as to whether this is actually someone’s home, or is it more of an “operation”? Are there big discrepancies between the reports of the rooms? That could be a sign that there are multiple rooms that are lived in by different people in your building, indicating that this is being done by a landlord, not an owner or a tenant.

And of course, if you end up in one of these “operations” in spite of your best efforts, it’s okay: just go onto Airbnb and mention it in the comments. Helping others identify exploitative hosts is as important as helping them identify bigots or creeps. And that’s what the review process is for.

As always, the name of the game is damage control — try your best to support the local communities you’re visiting. Sometimes you’ll fail. Other times you won’t. And don’t assume that all things that are shiny and new are inherently good.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON DON'T BE A DICK TRAVEL. 

MATT HERSHBERGER

Matt Hershberger is a writer and blogger who focuses on travel, culture, politics, and global citizenship. His hobbies include scotch consumption, profanity, and human rights activism. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and his Kindle. You can check out his work at the Matador Network, or over at his website.