How to Save the City: A Guide for Emergency Action

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Introduction

In 2018, dozens of people died in Tokyo as temperatures exceeded 40°C for several continuous days, and in California the town of Paradise was largely destroyed by a wild fire in just a few hours killing 85 people. In the summer of 2021, deadly flash floods killed scores of people in the Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler area of Germany. In early 2022 Cyclone Batsirai left 120 people dead and nine out of ten homes destroyed in Madagascar’s coastal city Mananjary, while later that year residents of Jacobabad in Pakistan endured temperatures almost intolerable to humans at 51°C.

As these climate disasters unfold, our urban world continues to grow. One recent estimate suggests that 290,000 km2 of natural habitat could be converted to urban land between 2000 and 2030, with huge implications for habitat and biodiversity loss (McDonald et al. 2020). In the UK, between 2006 and 2012, 22,000 hectares of green space has already been lost to urban sprawl, the equivalent of an entire city, while in Shanghai urban greenspace declined by 30 per cent between 1980 and 2015 (Wu et al. 2019).

Equally worrying are the persistent social challenges facing our urban world. In Africa only 15 per cent of residents in Lagos and Kampala have piped water to their dwelling (Beard & Mitlin 2021), while in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chad only around 40 per cent of the urban population have access to electricity (Our World in Data 2020). A recent study found that 51,000 premature deaths could be prevented each year across 1,000 European cities if they achieved levels of small particulate air pollution (PM2.5) recommended by the World Health Organisation (Knomenko et al. 2021). In New York, according to the Eviction Lab (2022), there were almost 180,000 evictions filed by landlords between 2020 and 2022.

Getting into emergency mode . . .

These examples are not isolated or trivial. What we make of them is the core argument of this book. They are a selection of events and facts that represent the broader climate, ecological and social emergencies currently experienced in our urban world. We now know that our global climate system is in breakdown and that this has unquestionably been caused by human activity over the last couple of hundred years since the industrial revolution and fossil-fuel capitalism; we know that scientists have warned that unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions stopping dangerous levels of global heating will be beyond reach; we know that the fast-growing model of urban development based on ceaseless economic growth is pushing our natural world to its limits, with almost half of non-human species now under threat; and we know that the long-standing social challenges of poverty, inequality, hunger, malnutrition, oppression and fear are everyday realities for too many people. We know that these converging emergencies are not natural phenomena, but human-made problems, lock stepped with the growth of our globalized, corporate-dominated, industrialized urban world.

How to Save the City is a wake-up call about what we can all urgently do faced with what I call the accelerating and converging triple emergencies – climate, nature, social. Transforming our cities is no longer discretionary. Without decisive action we are facing the possibility of an Earth that is not safe and habitable for humans. In stark terms, there are no cities on a dead planet. This book is a guide for what we can all do to mount emergency responses, in order to, literally, save the city. We have a huge amount to do in the decade ahead; every year counts and immediate changes are required. Our efforts need to focus on all three emergencies. A core focus of this book is that this is not just about reducing greenhouse gases, although that is a central priority. As we create post-carbon city futures, we must also tackle the longer term ecological and social emergencies. You might be a planner changing local regulations, a teacher looking for course material, a student or researcher writing an assignment, a politician leading change, a city official lobbying for a new policy, an entrepreneur supporting local well-being or an activist developing campaign skills. Whatever your role in city life, this book can support you to get into emergency mode, and galvanize your networks, communities, workplaces and institutions to this task.

. . . as emergency first responders

As a guide for emergency action, this book has a particular approach. We know that the idea of emergency can instil panic, fear and a sense of powerlessness. But this is only one set of responses in the face of emergency. We panic when we do not have the skills and experience to deal with an issue. An improved understanding of the challenges ahead and the kinds of responses that work can support our ability to act and think clearly about the options available to us, and what needs to be done. Therefore, rather than seeing ourselves as passive recipients of terrifying and overwhelming emergencies, I encourage us to see ourselves as first responders on the scene tackling the climate, nature and social emergencies. A first responder is someone who has a basic level of training and is the first on the scene of an emergency. They are part of a longer tradition of non-professional civil society action, community-based volunteering and mutual self-help work where ordinary people provide services and assistance often during emergency and war-time situations.

Seen in this way, we can avoid the barriers of just relying on professionals and experts, and explore how being an emergency first responder can fit into our own lives, experiences and skills. The broader intention is not to enter into a drawn out and exhausting emergency mode, where we are on constant red alert against each other and an invisible enemy. Emergency situations can offer an opportunity to get equipped with the insights, skills and connections to make a difference and act effectively, rather than freeze through despair, denial or anger. Our emergency action needs to be urgent and decisive yet also empowering and inclusive. It needs front loading with a burst of action that creates immediate gains for climate, nature and people every year from now, laying down the conditions for a better urban world as we go through our decade of transformation into the 2030s.

While we cannot fully control what is ahead, we are all capable of empowering and skilling ourselves and others to be able to understand the challenges, and what responses and solutions we can develop now to build a safer city. This is not the work of individuals working in isolation. To effectively respond to the challenges ahead, we need what I call a breakaway coalition of emergency first responders – a network of people across business, research, civic and public sectors who are prepared to support and build a new kind of city based on equality, regeneration and the common good rather than extraction, ceaseless economic growth and hierarchy. It is these first responders who can deploy the guide for emergency action I outline in this book.

What I propose in the coming pages is not some utopian fantasy. It is based on 20 years of action-based academic research on workable solutions that can meet the converging emergencies and set a course for a safer future. How things will turn out is impossible to predict. Therefore, this book is also based on hope and imagination, inspired by examples of positive practical action that actually work in the here and now. With clarity on the challenges, strategic thinking and collective action, a coalition of actors can indeed save the city, and change it for the better.

City politicians and campaigners are waking up to these emergencies. Billionaire and former Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg boldly stated that cities across the world should mount a challenge to the existential threat of climate change (Bloomberg & Pope 2017). In 2018 London became one of the first cities around the world to declare a climate emergency, in an effort, as London mayor Sadiq Khan put it, to meet the existential challenge of climate change (Taylor 2018). Since then, thousands of localities around the world have followed this lead and declared climate and ecological emergencies. A year later the protest group Extinction Rebellion held its International Day of Rebellion with thousands of protesters engaging in acts of non-violent civil disobedience in 60 cities around the world, while the Global Youth Strike, inspired by Greta Thunberg, mobilized millions of young people across the world to strike for climate action.

Grassroots networks for change such as the Climate Emergency Alliance, 350.org, Build Back Better, Green New Deal Rising, the Rapid Transition Alliance, Fridays for the Future, Black Lives Matter, Decolonising Economics, and the Doughnut Economics Action Lab represent a new zeitgeist of ideas and skills for our emergency action. They share an approach that is key to this book. We need to mount responses that regenerate nature and mitigate against climate breakdown in ways that also tackle long-standing urban problems – poverty, alienation, segregation, social isolation, racism, violence, precarious work, corporate greed and powerlessness. Whoever we are, and whatever we do, we also have to realize that change will not come easy. Our efforts to build creative alternatives and new exciting coalitions will need to be paired with resistance and direct action if we are to disrupt powerful interests and create the urgent, bold and decisive transformations required. As the triple emergencies converge and amplify, we will be forced, largely out of necessity, to use more drastic measures to ensure a safe future for all.

About the book

How to Save the City is a provocative and disruptive, yet playful and game-inspired, book. I organize it around three main chapters – strategy, players and moves – that together represent a systematic way of approaching emergency change in your place. This structure provides the ideas and practical tools needed for you to move through the city as change-makers in an emergency context. Let’s take a look at these three aspects.

Strategy: our approach to change

First, we need to deal with strategy. A strategic approach creates a plan of action designed in a way to achieve an overall aim. Starting with strategy encourages us to think about how change happens, what some call a theory of change. Having a theory of change is nothing new and indeed not unique to grassroots, radical or civic movements. It is used by groups across the political spectrum who want to intervene in how change happens (van Tulder & Keen 2018; Alexander & Gleeson 2020). This part of the book, then, outlines the strategic rules of the city game, and how you can use them to make emergency change.

I base my strategy around what I call the Learn‒Act‒Build approach drawing on a wealth of thinkers, activists and campaigners that have worked on change over the years. These include Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone’s work on the Great Turning in their book Active Hope (2012), Eric Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias (2010), Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics (2017) and Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan (2001). Learn, act and build do not all have to happen at the same time. But they have to feature at some point in what we do. First, we have to learn new ways of knowing and being in the world and unlearn those that harm and stop change; second, we have to act, resist and make a stand against that which causes damage; and third, we have to build alternatives that make real the world we want to see.

Players: who will do it?

Second, once we have a strategy, we need to explore who will use it and what they can do to get into emergency mode. These are the players – groups and individuals we will meet and engage with in our quest to save the city. I have selected nine players. Clearly, this is not an exhaustive list, and they will vary immensely across social contexts. Consider them pen portraits to stimulate thinking and action about the breadth and diversity of actors involved in emergency action. We need to know how these players work, what role they can play in saving the city and what social power and resources they can leverage. Just as interesting is how we can work between and beyond these personas. How can we integrate amongst them – sharing lessons and making coalitions that can break away from the current status quo. One of the real opportunities is how we can operate outside some of the narrow institutional roles in the world of work and politics that maintain things the way they are. We need to recognize that we all have multiple roles to play, and skills to offer, in reclaiming a safe future.

Each player has a particular role to play as they shift into emergency mode. These include:

•The scientist/researcher and how they can create an experimental approach to the city where our places become living laboratories for emergency solutions to the problems we face;

•The teacher/educator and how we make use of teaching and education to relearn the art and skills of community so we can navigate the emergencies ahead;

•The entrepreneur and how we build a new economy which has at its heart the communities it serves and embeds city wealth building;

•The city-maker and the skills of being an interconnected practitioner that can work across silos and departments and lead a breakaway coalition;

•The social activist and how everyday activism can harness broad social power in ways that involve and engage people to take action;

•The consumer and how we link buying and making, instilling an ethics of care into our daily trading which becomes more local and community responsive;

•The citizen and how we manage the urban commons, bringing the city’s land and buildings into use for communities to build resilience and sustainability;

•Big business and how we harness their power and skills as a force for transformation through a circular and regenerative economy;

•The non-human and how humans can reconnect with plants and animals and rewild the city in the face of the rapid extinction of the natural world.

Moves: making it happen

Finally, what will our players do with their newly acquired strategic approach? Here, I present emergency action areas, what I call moves, that our players can do to save the city. I offer moves in areas that will resonate with modern city life, and importantly underpin thriving, safe and equitable city futures. Each move topic is essential to tackling the emergencies we face and I have framed them in a way that highlights multiple gains across climate, social and nature challenges. I want us to think about the inter-connections between these move topics – how change in one area impacts another. As we explore these moves, the key aspect to interrogate is the roles of the different players and how our strategic approach informs and guides them. More than anything, I want us to see these move topics not as static things to change in isolation, but as broader city systems that combine to create transformative system change and an urgently needed basis for living well within the limits of our natural world.

Emergency move topics include:

•Mobility. This is the big one. Fossil fuel vehicles are accelerating city carbon emissions and a whole basket of problems around air quality, road deaths and nature loss. I call this move car-ism: a largely invisible culture of the car that has taken over our cities from top to bottom. I explore how we can unravel car-ism to unlock a very different mobility system that is affordable, efficient and a route out of our emergencies.

•The economy. Most of the challenges we face can be traced back to the economy. What we do, make and buy impacts us, others, and the natural world. I explore how we can build a new city economy based on community-responsive businesses and workplace democracy that can allow us all to thrive within the limits of our planet.

•Placemaking. Planners, architects and developers make places to live. But this move is about a very different agenda – what I call climate emergency placemaking. How can we shape beautiful, affordable places while also adapting to climate change, reducing dangerous greenhouse gases and restoring nature?

•Aviation. This is one of the few areas of city carbon emissions without a plan. The aviation industry advocates constant growth while claiming it can tackle the climate emergency based on untested technologies and sustainable fuels. Without slowing aviation growth and rapidly embedding alternatives, this is one area that will compromise our shared safe future.

•Democracy. City Halls and local decision-making often feel distant and out of touch. We need to renew local democracy, participation and engagement to unleash the power of communities to tackle the triple emergencies.

•Nature. As human demand for space continues to expand, the extinction of non-human life on this planet continues at a rapid pace. How we create a new deal for nature and reverse the mass extinction of our fellow species is one of the key challenges ahead. This is not a nice to have addition. Our ability to live safely depends on the survival of other species.

It is best to read this game-inspired book sequentially. Strategies lay a bedrock of ideas that help illuminate our understanding of the role of different players, which then informs our moves. But equally, rules are there to be broken. That is the point of saving the city. We will have to break out of existing ways of thinking and acting. Clearly, no book can reflect the diversity and complexity of our urban world. There will be much I have left out, or places where I have not captured nuances. Additions and amendments need to be teased out in further conversations that I hope this book prompts.

This book, then, represents an unfinished and ongoing story. It is about what might happen over the next decade. For this reason, the final chapter is a short description of life in the early 2030s around the ideas in this book. Imagine if they all happened – if we actually saved the city, retrofitted and shaped it along the lines in this book. The next decade is also a story of people who will be born into, or come of age in cities that they did not directly make or shape. But they will take up the story. My account is told through the voice of a teenager – reflecting the many young people, family, friends and students I am surrounded by in my own life. Stronger bonds of allyship and support will be required between the adult world and young people to ensure the needs of future generations are at the heart of saving the city. The book also features a collection of cartoons by graphic illustrator and novelist James McKay. These cartoons feature three young people in dialogue as they explore what saving the city means for them.

The following chapters feature specific ideas for emergency action, some current examples to check out (I have purposefully not provided weblinks as these change), and a list of web resources at the end. These ideas, examples and resources can be used to create better city futures right now. I have chosen them as they push beyond what is already possible, familiar and known. They are stretch activities that rise to the challenge of our triple emergencies and take us beyond the business-as-usual model of urban development. But