Collaborative Strategies for Sustainable Cities

Economy, Environment and Community in Baltimore

Eric S. Zeemering

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138647305
• eBook ISBN: 9781135130756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Baltimore, like many other cities around the globe, is redesigning local government policy and programs in order to become a more sustainable city. Sustainability, as a concept guiding public action, encourages city officials to integrate policy and programs addressing the economic, environmental, and social health of the community. City governments, including Baltimore, have adopted plans to integrate this new priority into local policy and program management. Reorienting city policy and programs to address an emergent concern like sustainability requires collaboration between city government and various actors and organizations in the community.

C ollaborative Strategies for Sustainable Cities examines how cities define sustainability and form policy implementation networks to integrate sustainability into city programs. Using the city of Baltimore to describe and analyze the involvement of the participants in local sustainability efforts in rich detail, Eric S. Zeemering argues that when we think about the sustainable city, the city government is not the best unit of analysis for our investigations or policy planning. Instead, policy networks within cities carve out slices of a sustainability agenda, define sustainability in their own ways, and form implementation networks with city government officials, neighborhood and community organizations, funders, and state and federal agencies in order to achieve specific goals. When cities begin to integrate sustainability into policies and programs, surveying and understanding competing definitions of sustainability within the community may be central to their success.

The book's rich array of data, including qualitative data from elite interviews and public documents, Q-methodology and social network analysis will make for an engaging read to scholars of political science or public affairs as well as the interested citizen or policy advocate.

1
Being a Sustainable City

On Labor Day weekend in 2011, the first running of the Baltimore Grand Prix introduced IndyCar and American Le Mans Series racing to the streets of Baltimore. The public debate swirling around this event contained the often proffered view that economic growth in a city stands in conflict with local environmental quality. As described by proponents of the downtown auto race, the event was a success and its continuation fuels economic benefits for the city. The first Grand Prix of Baltimore attracted large numbers of spectators to the city’s downtown on an otherwise slow summer weekend. The influx of people and dollars was expected to benefit local restaurants and other small businesses, though post-event media coverage and academic analysis called these claims into question (Coates and Friedman 2011). Media images of the race featured Baltimore’s iconic Inner Harbor and gave the city a chance to present a positive image to a global audience of television viewers. The racing event was the latest manifestation of a development strategy that has driven public action in Baltimore for decades, channeling resources to the visitor and entertainment core of the city, bringing suburban residents and tourists to the city’s heart for entertainment, spending, and consumption (Eisinger 2000; Friedman, Bustad, and Andrews 2012; Norris 2003). While the racing event symbolized another positive step in downtown prosperity to some, the event set off alarms for others.

For those concerned with local environmental quality, problems began before the race cars even arrived. Trees became a symbol of the environmental costs of hosting the racing event. A photographer for The Baltimore Sun took pictures of healthy trees being removed from streets along the raceway in early August, sparking a public outcry and online petition (Wheeler 2011a). Residents lost their attempt in court to obtain a restraining order to prevent the removal of additional trees, but drew publicity and expressed satisfaction about making the terms of the city’s tree deal with racing organizers more transparent (Wheeler 2011b). A commitment to plant 198 trees was made by event organizer Baltimore Racing Development, but their financial plight and dissolution after the race left the pledge unfulfilled. In total, thirty-two trees were removed for the race. The city fulfilled the original commitment for replacement and new tree planting at a cost of $41,500 in public funds (Wheeler 2012). Beyond the tree controversy, The Baltimore Sun reported race promoters took steps to make the event the “greenest Grand Prix ever,” with bio-degradable concessions containers and the wide availability of recycling bins. Still, uncertainty existed about the air quality impacts of the race and accompanying event traffic, the scope of carbon dioxide emissions, and health complications for city residents with breathing problems (Wheeler and Cohn 2011). The public discussions about tree removal and air quality highlighted environmental costs of the racing event and the apparent trade-off policymakers and event promoters confront when pursuing new economic opportunities.

For cities striving to be vibrant places in which people want to live, work, and invest, debates that pit economic opportunity against the environment may seem inevitable; however, different discussions are possible. Cities are giving serious attention to urban sustainability. These cities seek to develop cities that are economically prosperous, boast robust environmental amenities and healthy ecosystems, and attend to social equity for all city residents. While environmental protection and economic growth may stand in tension, this need not be true (e.g., Daily and Ellison 2002; Feiock and Stream 2001; Hempel 2009; Portney 2013). Policymakers have opportunities to frame discussions about growth and development in more constructive ways (Hoffman and Ventresca 1999). The concept of urban sustainability offers a different way for policymakers and residents to discuss a city’s future. By asserting value in balancing economic, environmental, and social goals for the long-term intergenerational health of a community, those advancing urban sustainability are asking challenging questions about how previously siloed urban policies can be integrated and reconciled. Some cities will use urban sustainability as a buzz word to trumpet scattered environmental initiatives, but cities truly working to be more sustainable will use the concept as a strategy to guide policymaking, growth, and community development.

What can Baltimore do in order to be a more sustainable city? The answers to this question hinge on the definition of urban sustainability. Cities around the globe are taking action to become more sustainable places, but surveying the range of local programs linked to the elusive concept may only lead to more questions about how sustainability can be defined for a city. Baltimore is not alone in confronting this complicated public policy puzzle, but the city provides a practical case in which government, businesses, community based organizations, and the public are contesting the concept with the hope of definitional clarity and policy progress. Urban sustainability may be hard to define, but definitional problems do not stop communities from taking pragmatic steps to improve their long-term economic, environmental, and social health.

This book uses Baltimore City as a case study in order to better understand the coordinated action that occurs between governmental and nongovernmental actors in order to advance sustainability goals within a community. Before any action is taken, participants in urban policy must come to some conclusions about what urban sustainability means and how the concept can be translated into policies for implementation. An inquiry into the meaning of urban sustainability in Baltimore can benefit urban policy well beyond the city’s roughly 80 square miles and estimated 621,342 residents (U.S. Census Bureau 2013). As a case study, the book offers rich descriptive detail about programs and goals at the center of Baltimore’s efforts to be more sustainable. However, readers who care about what cities are doing to be more sustainability should seek more than examples. With the surge of interest in urban sustainability has come a cascading list of professional reports, best practice advice, and case studies of what cities can do to pursue more sustainable development. News about innovative sustainability programs can spread quickly through online blogs and social media sites. To make new contributions to our understanding of sustainable cities, a case study of Baltimore must push us to think about how many separate definitions of sustainability link into a larger policy dialogue. Then, we must explore the relationship between the city’s dialogue about sustainability and the implementation of programs to make the city more sustainable. In other words, our understanding of urban sustainability can be advanced by examining the connections linking the many initiatives and actors in the city seeking to improve urban conditions.

By learning more about urban sustainability in Baltimore, we can grapple with how local actors define and take action on this complicated concept. Studying Baltimore helps us confront two critical questions for cities that hope to make progress on urban sustainability. First, how is urban sustainability defined within a city? Policymakers and activists may reference definitions of sustainability that emerge from international policy dialogue about the environment and climate change or from the actions of other cities. Yet, urban sustainability takes on unique local meaning within individual cities. Research on urban sustainability must unearth the details about how sustainability has emerged as a priority for action within an individual city. The research reported in this book can help us understand how advocates of urban farming, tree planting, downtown housing, and large public entertainment events can all discuss connections between their work and the goal of a more sustainable future for Baltimore. Learning about Baltimore’s work in urban sustainability should encourage scholars and policymakers to consider the intricate connections that exist between a city’s unique context and the understanding of urban sustainability held by local actors.

To understand how sustainability is defined in Baltimore, in-depth interviews have been used to uncover a diverse range of perspectives on the concept from actors inside and outside of city government. This research advances our understanding of urban sustainability by investigating how the concept is defined at the ground-level by the actors who seek to translate the complicated policy goal of sustainability into action. This case study offers insight into the meaning and complexity of urban sustainability through the words of those grappling with the concept in Baltimore. The insights of eighty-five different individuals from government, nongovernmental organizations, and local businesses provide a greater breadth of commentary on the challenge of making a city sustainable than can be found in most other current works on the topic.

To provide systematic analysis of how local actors define urban sustainability in Baltimore, this research uses Q-methodology to measure actors’ operational definitions of the concept. Research using Q-methodology asks respondents to systematically sort statements in order to explore their subjective understanding of a concept. In Baltimore, local actors working on sustainability were asked, “What are the most important things Baltimore can do in order to be a more sustainable city?” By sorting policy statements taken from the local political dialogue about urban sustainability, this research measures differences in how actors conceptualize and operationally define the concept. In Baltimore, this research identified three distinct operational definitions of urban sustainability— one focused on the environment, a second focused on urban rebuilding and economic development, and a third focused on civic health and justice. Each definition of urban sustainability is discussed in detail, with examples of urban sustainability initiatives underway in the city.

This approach to exploring the local definition of urban sustainability is important for two reasons. First, this inductive research approach takes the local political dialogue about urban sustainability as a starting point, rather than assessing the extent to which a city conforms to an externally derived definition of sustainability. A deep understanding of a city’s political, ecological, and social conditions should inform policy discussions about urban sustainability. Yet, current trends in public policy may push cities to look elsewhere for insights about sustainability before they look inside their own jurisdictional borders. With the growing popularity of urban sustainability, city policymakers may find copying examples of successful policies and initiatives from other jurisdictions to be an easy way to begin work on sustainability. Pressure for government accountability also pushes public officials to measure indicators of progress on sustainability goals. Comparisons of urban sustainability performance across cities can push policymakers to focus on similar types of measurable activities. While some value exists in learning from other jurisdictions, cities can benefit from exploring the meaning of sustainability within their own communities. Reflection on how local actors in a city are already taking action on urban sustainability can help a city government better integrate their sustainability strategy with the capacity for action that already exists within the community. Baltimore’s experience with sustainability illustrates the value of understanding how local actors engage with the concept of urban sustainability and how they can aid city government with policy implementation.

Second, Q-methodology is presented as a social science research technique that policy analysts in other cities can use in order to better understand how urban sustainability is uniquely understood in the context of their own city. Policy analysts and city government officials responsible for urban sustainability should think about this book as a template for the development of a policy report that provides insight into what local actors in their own city think about urban sustainability. Surveying the local political dialogue about urban sustainability and asking local actors to prioritize the policies of greatest importance can help policy-makers better understand the areas of agreement and disagreement that exist on the question of what a city should do in order to pursue sustainability. As described in the pages ahead, Q-methodology provides a useful tool for discerning multiple and distinct local definitions of urban sustainability. The method also provides a tool for policy analysts to identify areas in which broad coalitions might be built around the need for public action.

How a city defines urban sustainability is interesting, but most scholars and policymakers are also concerned with the steps that can be taken to implement sustainability policies. Therefore, this case study of Baltimore explores a second and related research question. Do definitions of urban sustainability help structure the policy networks that implement various aspects of a city’s sustainability vision? Understanding how local actors in both government and civil society define urban sustainability provides a foundation for analyzing policy development and implementation. Within a city, actions to be more sustainable are both influenced by and implemented by a range of actors that includes, but is not limited to government. Nongovernmental organizations, ranging from formally organized non-profits to informal groups of activists in civil society play a role in making urban sustainability work. With declining public sector resources and a reconceptualization of the responsibilities of government, nongovernmental groups may take a leading role in implementing public policy (Peters and Pierre 1998; Rhodes 1997). Local businesses and the mass public may also be engaged in a city’s efforts to become more sustainable. As actors in the community think about their own definitions of what must be done to make the city more sustainable, they enter into discussions with like-minded actors and form interlacing relationships and partnerships to work on programs to implement a shared vision of urban sustainability. This research explores the link between shared understandings of urban sustainability and the working relationships that exist among actors working on sustainability in Baltimore.

The investigation into the working relationships that develop within Baltimore around the goals of urban sustainability will interest those concerned about urban policymaking, but the discussion will also benefit scholars thinking about policy implementation. The network, or the multi-organizational setting in which many public policies are debated and implemented, has become a critical unit of analysis in public administration research (O’Toole 1997). Increasingly, studies give attention to well-established and formalized public management networks in which actors coordinate action to implement public programs (e.g., Agranoff 2007). While formalized networks are important to understand, researchers must also give attention to informal policy networks which tie actors together in ad-hoc patterns of coordination. Indeed, when problem solving is pushed into the realm of networks, the role of government may be more complicated and difficult to understand (e.g., Koontz et al. 2004). This study of urban sustainability in Baltimore shows that formalized networks exist in fields of policy related to urban sustainability, but many urban sustainability initiatives bring together a diverse set of actors for work on occasional or ad-hoc initiatives. Understanding the scope and organization of informal policy networks has important implications for a city’s work in urban sustainability. The mobilization of actors outside of government and the capacity of informal networks to take action may influence the ability of a city to achieve its wide-ranging sustainability goals.

The remainder of this chapter sets the stage for an in-depth study of urban sustainability in Baltimore, Maryland. Before discussing theoretical lenses that help us better understand the two research questions that animate this book, a review of what we already know about cities’ efforts to be more sustainable places will help set the stage for our inquiry. The next section explores reasons why city governments are giving attention to urban sustainability. Then, the scope of activity that cities undertake in the interest of becoming more sustainable is discussed. The chapter also offers a summary of the research that describes which cities are most likely to adopt sustainability policies. Then, several different definitions of urban sustainability are reviewed in order to illustrate the lack of consensus surrounding the concept. Finally, a network theory of urban sustainability is presented as a guiding framework for this investigation of sustainability in Baltimore. The first chapter concludes with a few comments about how this research relates to other important questions in urban politics research and a preview of each chapter. Readers who are most interested in Baltimore’s experience with sustainability and least interested in a review of research on sustainability and urban policy might want to skip ahead to chapter two, which explains how sustainability emerged on the city’s political agenda.

Local Government and Sustainable Development

Sustainable development has become a topic du jour among city officials and in urban policy circles. “Sustainable development,” writes sociologist Benigno Aguirre (2002, 106), “is an umbrella concept, a flag around which different constituencies can rally.” Aguirre reviewed work on sustainable development in several academic disciplines and found a surge of work on the topic during the late 1980s and 1990s. In part, discussions about urban sustainability stem from international policy debates about climate change, globalization, and economic growth. Attention was focused on sustainable development by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (also known as the Brundtland Commission). Our Common Future, the Commission’s report released in 1987, defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, 43). Later, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, meeting in Rio de Janeiro Brazil in 1992, released Agenda 21, a set of recommendations to guide countries and local governments in their sustainable development efforts. Since these global events in the early 1990s focused attention on the environment and local development, cities around the globe have engaged in new planning and policy development, reconsidering the links between physical growth, the local economy, social conditions, and environmental quality (Betsill and Bulkeley 2007; Dale and Robinson 1996; Garcia-Sanchez and Prado-Lorenzo 2008; Mazmanian and Kraft 2009). As local governments learned more about their potential policy contributions to global environmental and climate change efforts, international policy networks developed to diffuse best practice advice to cities around the globe (Bulkeley 2005; Bulkeley and Betsill 2003).

Cities undertake urban sustainability initiatives for several reasons. First, cities face risks from global climate change. Some city governments have voluntarily committed to the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHG) and other environmental pollutants. Over one thousand mayors in U.S. cities have signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, an initiative spearheaded by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels to reduce greenhouse gas emissions starting in 2005. Studies show that cities with higher risks from extreme weather events, higher projected temperatures, and in closer proximity to coastal areas are more likely to sign voluntary climate agreements (Zahran, Brody, et al. 2008; Zahran, Grover, et al. 2008). Some cities, including Portland, Oregon, stand out as leaders in climate policy. Boasting the nation’s first climate action plan in 1993, Portland reported CO ₂ emissions below 1990 levels in 2007 despite population growth, and set the ambitious goal of an 80 percent reduction by 2050 (Slavin and Snyder 2011). Yet, in his recent book Hot: Living through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, journalist Mark Hertsgaard (2011) explains adapting to climate change will be a major challenge for the world population in the foreseeable future, even if radical action is taken to curb any human contributions to the process of global warming. Baltimore and other cities will have to cope with the consequences of rising sea levels, higher temperatures, and changing weather patterns. Some cities proactively seek out information about the consequences of climate change for their localities in order to chart out plans to adapt infrastructure, land use, and city operations to future climate conditions (e.g., Bulkeley and Tuts 2013; Dannevig, Hovelsrud, and Husabø 2013; Zimmerman and Faris 2011). Discussions about climate change, mitigation, and adaption may also heighten the awareness of city officials and the public to the relationship between the environment and urban living conditions.

Baltimore conducted a greenhouse gas emissions inventory in 2010, reporting 7,579,144 metric tons of CO ₂ emissions per year, the majority of which come from buildings and facilities. The city’s 2012 Climate Action Plan included thirty-seven action items to enhance climate quality in Baltimore and the 2009 Baltimore Sustainability Plan set a target of a 15 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2015 (City of Baltimore 2009; 2012, 41). Even with mitigation goals in place, city policymakers and community activists are thinking about how the climate poses challenges for those living in the city, including urban heat island effects. Urban heat islands can be understood as areas of higher air temperature within urbanized areas compared to nearby non-urban areas, which occur due to differences in land use and surface ground cover (Oke 1982). Stated through a simple example, on a hot July day, one can experience higher temperatures standing in an asphalt parking lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Acronyms
• Preface
• Series Editor Foreword
• 1 Being a Sustainable City
• 2 Sustainability in Baltimore
• 3 Defining Sustainability in the City
• 4 Policy Networks and Sustainability Implementation
• 5 Collaborative Strategies for Baltimore and Beyond
• Appendix: Methods of Investigation
• References
• Index