Project Summary:
Over the course of this research period I will be looking at sustainability across major cities in America. In times of growing environmental challenges, it is imperative that we take a step back to learn how to adequately address these problems. I hope to uncover the best methods for working towards sustainability, and what a sustainable city looks like.
During these 8 weeks I will be looking at New York City, Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles. I will establish an environmental profile of each city in order to give context to the unique environmental issues they have, and shed light on how they plan to address them. By looking at city government plans, public policy, and city-wide initiatives, I will be able to put together a report of the ways in which sustainability is being addressed. It will also be important to look at how effective these solutions are to improving each city. From this, we can find out how we can most efficiently deal with these concerns, and learn how we can better develop our cities in the future.
In hopes to bring more attention to sustainability, I will be creating an interactive map where users can click on these cities to learn more about their environmental issues and how they plan on fixing them. It will especially highlight features of sustainability such as green spaces, mass transit, and repurposed areas. Not many people tend to consider or notice urban sustainability, as the environment is not something we generally think about in these highly developed areas. By raising public awareness, we can more easily accomplish goals for sustainability and define the cities of the future. In times of extreme pollution and climate change, it is time we take a look at the way we live, and find ways to fit the needs of our planet.
Environmental Scan:
There is quite a bit of work already on urban sustainability. Many organizations, including the World Bank, have put together guidelines for urban sustainability. Most of the established framework helps in defining various key universal features for urban sustainability. Guidelines tend to focus on transportation, energy, water management, and reaching carbon neutrality. There is also a plethora of research on each of the major cities I will be looking at. Most work done is about major environmental issues and their consequences for the future. Additionally, studies have been done on how each city can adapt to work through these issues.
One source that I came across is very similar to the way in which I will going about my research process. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Engineering, and Medicine released a report titled “Pathways to Urban Sustainability” in 2016. In this report, there are profiles of select U.S. cities that are making great strides in becoming more sustainable. The profiles cover the topics that I am also looking to cover. For each city, a geographic background is established and environmental issues are discussed. The report then goes onto then look at how each city has worked to improve the area. The report even has a map of where the cities are located on the North America, as well as zoomed-in shots showing the boundaries of each city discussed.
While this is report is very similar to what I am doing in terms of content covered, I plan on making a condensed and interactive digital representation. In my search in projects on urban sustainability, I found that everything having to do with this topic were lengthy written works. While very informative, I think it lacks appeal to anyone who is not already in the environmental or urban planning field. My goal is to make something that conveys the same information that would potentially reach a wider audience. I feel that this information deserves a larger audience, and my hope is to give it a greater chance at reaching that audience. We all either live in, or travel to cities at one point or another, and I think that urban sustainability has the potential to cause curiosity in a large audience if presented in a more intriguing way. I think making the transition from lengthy reports and studies could greatly help in making it an issue more widely viewed by the public.