The Climate Solutions Hiding in Plain Sight

Two years ago, Tony Jordan went to Climate Week NYC looking for conversations about cities. At the Javits Center, he found a parking lot full of electric Hummers.

It was progress, in a sense. A familiar machine powered differently. But for Jordan, president of the Parking Reform Network, the scene also captured something missing.

“There’s got to be more to this conversation,” he remembered thinking.

This year, some of that ​“more” filled four panels at kyu’s New York headquarters.

Hosted by kyu member company Gehl, the event brought together urbanists, housing advocates, policymakers and sustainability leaders to explore how cities can respond to climate change through the way they grow, move and power themselves. 

The conversations revealed how seemingly separate issues, from electrification and infrastructure to rapid urban growth and the politics of getting anything built, are deeply interconnected. The city emerged not as another category of climate action, but as the place where many of its solutions meet.

How Climate Action Hits Home

Take something as simple as distance.

“Proximity is in fact a climate strategy,” said Matthew Lewis of California YIMBY.

Where a home sits in relation to jobs, schools, shops and transit can influence how much someone drives, how much infrastructure is required to support a community and how much land a city consumes as it grows.

Ben Holland of the Urban Land Institute came to that idea while working on a very different vision of sustainable transportation. His team in Austin was exploring electric and autonomous mobility when an urbanist offered a simpler goal: build more housing in places where people could walk and bike.

While his team was trying to make driving cleaner, the urbanist was asking how much driving needed to happen in the first place. Neither question makes the other irrelevant. That contrast was one of the more interesting ideas running through the day.

Decarbonizing the things people use matters. So does changing the environment in which they use them.

Housing makes that relationship particularly visible. Build a home in one place rather than another and the effects extend beyond its walls. Transportation patterns change. Infrastructure needs change. Building form, energy use and the amount of land consumed by growth can change with them.

And increasingly, the home itself is becoming part of another system entirely.

Aimee Witteman, chief impact officer at the Urban Land Institute, described a future in which electrified homes do more than consume power. Heat pumps, smart thermostats and electric vehicles can connect to the grid, shifting demand away from peak periods and, in aggregate, forming what the energy industry calls a virtual power plant.

Witteman also offered one of the simplest reminders of the day: most people are not walking around thinking about grid capacity. 

“[They are thinking] I need to worry about making dinner for my kids and holding down two jobs,” she explained.

That gap between the systems experts design and the lives people actually lead matters.

“One of the ways that we can make the climate movement more powerful,” Witteman said, ​“is by making sure that there are tangible benefits to people’s lives.”

For example, a shorter commute can mean fewer emissions and more time at home. A more efficient building can use less energy and feel more comfortable. A neighborhood where someone can walk to a store can eliminate a car trip without requiring that person to think of the decision as climate action at all.

But even those ideas begin to look different when the map changes.

A Look at Climate Action Abroad

Much of the American conversation around climate-friendly urbanism begins with places that have already been built. How do we add housing, make existing neighborhoods less car-dependent or retrofit buildings and infrastructure created decades ago?

Cynthia Goytia, head of the Master of Science in Urban Economics Program, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, described a different challenge in Latin America. Many cities there are already dense. They are also expanding rapidly, often into areas where transit, drainage and other infrastructure have not kept pace.

Density, on its own, is not the answer. The harder question is how to guide growth so housing, transportation and infrastructure develop together instead of forcing cities to repair the gaps later.

Solly Angel of NYU offered a striking comparison: for every one person expected to be added to cities in the Global North over the next 25 years, 23 people will be added in the Global South, and 10 people in Sub-Saharan Africa.

“The Global North must largely transform cities that already exist,” he said. ​“Sub-Saharan Africa must accommodate cities that are still being built.”

One place is trying to change patterns established generations ago. Another has an opportunity to shape patterns that could last generations into the future. The same playbook cannot simply be carried from one to the other.

Changing the Scale of Climate Action

For years, one criticism of urban climate policy has been that it is too fragmented. Zoning, parking, housing and land use can be governed municipality by municipality, turning seemingly simple reforms into hundreds of individual political fights.

Brian Hanlon of California YIMBY described attacking that problem by changing the level of government involved.

“We just changed the scale at which you apply,” he said of moving housing advocacy from individual municipalities toward state policy.

That shift moves the conversation away from identifying a single solution and toward creating the conditions that allow solutions to happen.

Policy, financing and political coalitions all play a role. So do the desires of the people who will actually live with the result.

Which is why, amid conversations ranging from emissions modeling to electrical grids to land regulation, one of the most useful observations may have been one of the least technical.

“People have to want it,” said Gehl Partner and Senior Project Director Anna Muessig.

A transit line does little if it is inconvenient to use. Density alone does not create a neighborhood people enjoy. A climate solution that works beautifully in a model still has to work on a Tuesday morning when someone needs to get a child to school and themselves to work.

Across four panels, the ideas at kyu headquarters did not collapse into one answer. They revealed how many questions meet in the same place.

The house. The street. The commute. The grid. The policy that determines what gets built next.

The city has been sitting at the intersection of them all along.