Damek.

What Ezra says, and the Mark Kleiman he links to:

Today’s Washington Posthas a story about tree-planting in urban areas. The numbers are spectacular. In Los Angeles, tree-planting could reduce temperatures by as much as 5 degrees F., in addition to reducing air pollution and improving visibility. Yet apparently the urban, and especially suburban, tree cover ratios have been shrinking severely.

[...] There’s a big political problem here. A candidate who says he’s going to deal with our energy problem by drilling in ANWR will have his opinion taken seriously by reporters and pundits, even though the actual contribution of such drilling to reducing imports is trivial. But a national-level politician who proposed tree-planting or chalk dust would wind up the butt of jokes on late-night TV. Somehow the ideas lack gravitas. I have no clear idea what to do about that.

[...] For some reason, you need the thrill of danger, the lure of technology, or the threat of economic pain to inject a policy into the national agenda. Small bore, technocratic fixes that offer massive benefits while requiring relatively little sacrifice or sorrow just get ignored.

I think a similar problem comes in at the state and city level. If Bloomberg were to propose a massive city effort to increase bike lane milage, people would not only say, “meh” about bike lanes, they’d be angry over losing car space, even though most people here don’t own cars or drive. And you can’t just call it something else, like an “economic boost package” that includes transportation improvements or something. People see through that. Imagine if Democrats relabeled intelligent foreign policy, in a reverse Orwellian sense, something like “Anti-Terror Tactics” or something. It might sell a little better, but a lot of people would wonder where their explosions and guns went.

In NYC, we definitely need more greenery (integrated with the city, not in separate parks) and other heat-island reduction techniques, in addition to more efficient transportation, waste management, etc. How to sex up these ideas? How to sell them to a human population that in general wants to hear how you’re going to “attack” this or “destroy” that? The only thing I see is to present a comprehensive vision that most people would desire. Some idea of what the future city could be like. Sadly, so far no one in city government seems to have that, and individual developers both A) can only influence individual buildings; and B) seem to get their visions straight out of Blade Runner.

And in NYC, you also have the problem of the boroughs. Queens doesn’t want to be like Brooklyn, Brooklyn doesn’t want to be like Manhattan, da Bronx doesn’t want to be like Staten Island, etc. Each with a different flavor and a different vision of how they want their neighborhoods to be, their lifestyles to be. What sells in one won’t necessarily sell in another, but they need to be knit together.

BTW, and totally unrelated, Ezra also had a great post on Wal*Mart and how it isn’t just about the wages their cashiers earn — it’s much, much more. In fact, in general, I think Ezra is my new favorite blogger. Not that he’s new…

Via Starts and Fits, we discover futurebird, who is writing an “urban naturalist” series. Interesting stuff, particularly the post Starts and Fits highlighted about the integration of public space into urban living:

Urban living cannot be understood without seeing each urban dwelling as larger than the private spaces of apartments. The urban living space is integrated with the public realm in the same way that rural living is (ideally) integrated harmoniously with green nature. The city is like a palace with many rooms, but in this palace the rooms are shared with other people.

I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while now. To me, a well-designed city is sort of like a generational spaceship: many shared resources throughout, with ways for dealing with waste and obtaining resources. New York City is far from well-designed, and the Upper East Side is not set up for integrated urban living. It’s set up as quite the opposite: “suburbia in towers.” Wealthy families can afford to have large apartments with the rooms futurebird finds outside of hers. So they don’t care about finding those spaces elsewhere, so they don’t exist.

I’m hoping that changing demographics changes this a bit, because this style of living is unsustainable and untenable.