Rivers Forgotten - The Underground World Beneath City Streets

I was in Toronto last week and finally had a chance to get my hands on Rivers Forgotten, Jeremy Kai's stunning book of underground photos (Koyama Press, 2011).

Kai has spent years exploring the cavernous system of storm sewers that runs below Toronto's streets. Working in very challenging conditions, he has produced a book that is gritty, beautiful, and adventurous. There is something almost magical about the way he reveals a hidden world that has always been there, right beneath our feet.

Cities are in many ways a sort of illusion.
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Community Scale Solar: Portland (OR) and Durban (South Africa)

[A piece I wrote is running in the most recent edition of UN-Habitat's Urban World magazine.  The article covers a gutsy and successful residential solar project in Portland (OR), and a similar project that I gave a hand with in Durban (South Africa). OK, I admit I'm a bit late putting this up. But the craziness of finishing my PhD in December meant that the edition initially slipped under my radar. You can download the article here (.pdf), or read a slightly expanded version below.]

Until recently, when we talked about urban responses to climate change, the focus was on what the city government was doing to improve its own operations. Mayors from around the world talked about the huge impact that cities could have, but concrete projects were more modest: energy-efficient traffic lights here, a few green municipal buildings there.

The discrepancy isn't hard to explain.

Yes cities have a huge footprint, but municipalities only control a small fraction of it. Really transformative change needs to happen at the level of communities all across a city – not just in city hall.

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Quebec's New Electric Car Network: Therapy for Range Anxiety

Electric cars have always seemed like a natural for Quebec. Nearly all of the province's electricity comes from hydro, and 40% of its GHG emissions come from transportation. In a jurisdiction where electricity is coal-fired things are less straight forward and you end up debating the merits of running cars on coal. In Quebec electric vehicles (EVs) are a clear win. But the province had been lagging behind other spots like Oregon, California, British Columbia, or New York. 

What sense does it make that a city like Portland (where 44% of the electricity comes from coal) has electric car charging points and Montreal doesn't?  That question had been irking me for years.

But that all changed two weeks ago, when the province announced what will be the largest public electric car charging network in Canada.
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Republicans and Democrats Together on Climate Change...in Florida

It's easy to forget that climate change hasn't always been  such a partisan issue. This is Mitt Romney, current Republican front-runner, in 2003: “I think the global warming debate is now pretty much over and people recognize the need associated with providing sources [of energy] which do not generate the heat that is currently provided by fossil fuels.”

Good luck trying to get him to say anything remotely similar today. The closer he gets to leading the Republicans in the next US election, the more he is distancing himself from climate policy.

But an article by Micheal Lemonick on Yale's E360 shows unlikely partnerships forming between Republicans and Democrats in the US as lower levels of government begin to tackle the need to climate proof their cities and counties.
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New Sustainable Cities Research Program - New Job, Exciting Prospects

Vancouver-based NGO Sustainable Cities International is an excellent outfit that runs a network of cities focused on green urbanism that spans the globe. The research that I've been able to do in South Africa, Canada, the States, Senegal (and other spots in between) has been in part thanks to their help.

I've been working with SCI for six years now, and in 2009 we started having conversations about increasing the amount of research going on in the network. SCI-affiliated cities include many international leaders in green-city-building like Curitiba, Durban, and Portland. It seemed to me that taking a closer look at their successes, and communicating that research to a broader audience was important work. But it was also well beyond what one researcher could do.

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