Similarly, Bloomberg looked to private investment to remediate contaminated properties. Developers took advantage of the program to invest in properties with profit potential. Thanks to brownfield funding, they transformed former factories and gas stations into luxury lofts, Whole Foods, and other high-end retail outlets. Non-gentrifying neighborhoods, like the North Shore, were left with an array of contaminated sites and no mechanism for cleaning them up.
To make matters worse, as neighborhoods gentrified they became less likely to host waste-producing facilities, which then clustered in out-of-the-way neighborhoods. In , the EPA designated the canal as a Superfund site. Already the area had become a popular nightlife destination and developers were beginning to speculate on its future value; Gowanus now took off as a hotspot for both gentrification and—ironically—eco-friendly development.
New, luxury apartment buildings sprouted up throughout the neighborhood, featuring rooftop gardens, green roofs, fixtures made from recycled materials, elaborate bike rooms, and air filtration systems.
Promotional materials promised residents a post-Superfund future filled with canoe and kayak launches, waterfront esplanades, and outdoor amphitheaters.
Flag proposed expanding its operations to process dredged soils from across the five boroughs and repurpose them as concrete mixtures.
But cleanup on the Gowanus Canal had just begun. In , the EPA hosted a public meeting to announce the details of its cleanup plan. Part of that plan included transporting soil dredged from the canal to a facility off the shore of Red Hook, a neighborhood that was about a mile south of Gowanus. There, the dredged sludge would be mixed with concrete and repurposed as construction materials. Local residents received this news in a fury, demanding that officials take the sludge out of the area entirely.
Shortly after that meeting, the EPA changed course and declared that it would ship the waste out of Brooklyn Musumeci First on the agenda was a permit application from Flag Container Service, a local waste transfer station.
The Flag expansion proposal came at a time when North Shore residents were especially weary. Over the past several years, public agencies had also issued permits for a new cement plant and a natural gas pipeline. In light of the raising of the Bayonne Bridge, an expansion of the New York port was also under consideration.
For local activists, there was a direct relationship between environmental gentrification in Brooklyn and the intensification of environmental burdens on the North Shore. Between and , the New York City Department of City Planning published about a half dozen studies on North Shore redevelopment that reimagined specific North Shore neighborhoods as mirrors of gentrified Brooklyn.
In the backdrop, industrial cranes rose, dinosaur-like, from the Kill Van Kull while containers ships floated by. The contrasting visions conjured by the planning studies on one hand and new permits for industrial facilities on the other, seemed to offer North Shore residents an impossible choice. Since then, the trend has only continued, as the global urban population has grown year over year, to 54 percent of all people today. Cities, everywhere, are not sustainable.
In fact, the average city-dweller consumes many more resources, and emits far more greenhouse gas, than their rural compatriots, anywhere in the world. If more people move into unsustainable cities, resource consumption will increase, meaning urbanization could lead to near certain disaster, not just with global climate, but also with regards to air pollution and water. Mexico City, Mexico. The current model of urbanization is unsustainable.
The picture becomes worse when you consider that the true impact of a city is not just what happens within its boundaries. Cities are hubs of consumption, connected by increasingly long and complex supply chains to resource centers around the world. This ecological footprint can be massive. For example, Switzerland, which is highly urbanized, needs an area more that percent larger than its arable land just to feed its population.
Add in energy, consumer goods and other imports, and you can clearly see the problem. What is required are social, economic, and political [will] to translate these policies into reality. Currently, most city sustainability plans focus inwardly — on how to build better transportation systems and infrastructure to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
While these are worthy goals that must be achieved, the wider impacts are being mostly ignored. Cows and other livestock are also a major source of global methane emissions. Unfortunately, the impacts are all too real. Growth in urban demand for meat and soy is what led to the wave of Amazonian deforestation in the early s. More recently, it is the boom in palm oil production that led to the devastating fires that burnt more than two million hectares of rainforests in Indonesia last year and emitted more greenhouses gases last year than all of heavily-urbanized Germany.
But densely built-up urban spaces tend to come with challenges of their own. Therefore, there is a need to start ensuring today that these urban areas will be inclusive, safe, sustainable and resilient. But what does that mean? Simone Sandholz names five promising aspects how cities with their growing populations could develop to become more sustainable and resilient. Sustainable urban transport can include giving priority to bicycles over cars as done for example in Copenhagen where a bridge exclusively for bikes has been constructed, by introducing bus rapid transit BRT with dedicated bus routes like in Johannesburg, or cable cars as part of urban public transport systems to link hilly and often low-income urban communities to the city like in Medellin or La Paz.
Increasingly nature-based solutions are considered in urban climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. A growing number of tools are supporting cities throughout the implementation phase, for example this one developed by UNU-EHS scientists. Impacts from disasters such as floods or storms are often worst in densely populated urban areas.
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