Rebuilding
New York:
The Environmental Imperative
By Elliott Sclar
The process
of planning for the rebuilding of the WTC site is, not surprisingly, proving
to be something akin to pulling on a loose thread and learning that the
whole fabric is connected. If the rebuilding effort is to be another New
York success story, it will only be a result of understanding that what
we are doing is weaving a new urban garment for New York, and the stricken
downtown site is but a single, albeit important, strand.
A success
in this context means that we get the physical design, the memorial, the
economic development, and the social equity all correct. I want to
focus here on the environmental aspects of the rebuilding effort.
It is
important to recognize that, regardless of how well or how poorly the planning
process fares, the rebuilding of lower Manhattan will get done, and it
will turn out to be the largest rebuilding effort in New York since the
days of Robert Moses. The reason is precisely because lower Manhattan is
so powerfully connected by history and contemporary activity to the ups
and downs of our entire metropolitan region. A successful rebuilding effort
there will create a domino effect, touching upon everything in, not just
the City, but across the entire region. It will impact physical design,
transportation infrastructure, and economic development. To mangle one
final analogy, Lower Manhattan is the “upper tip of the iceberg.”
Facing
Environmental Limits One important factor that differentiates our current
rebuilding challenge from the one Robert Moses undertook in the middle
of the last century is the environmental limits that we now face. For Moses,
the environment was, relatively speaking, a free good. He did not
have to account for the environmental impacts of his actions. Furthermore,
he was doing his work at a time when the public treasury was a boundless
cornucopia of public works goodies. Neither is any longer the case. We
can no longer build highways and cram buildings into urban neighborhoods
without thinking about the short- and long-term environmental impacts and
infrastructure costs. Now, as then, we operate on the presumption that
the benefits of our actions will exceed the costs. But we need to add a
few new costs into the calculation.
We need
to be cognizant of the increases in air pollution, water usage, electricity
usage, and waste generation from our proposed projects. All of these entail
significant money and health costs that will be borne in the coming decades.
Some will be borne directly by the people who will live and work in this
region -- or choose not to, if the costs are too high. Others will be borne
by all the inhabitants, human and otherwise, of Spaceship Earth via global
climate change and other impacts. The one thing we can do, in our efforts
to rebuild our beloved city and region, is to be as efficient and equitable
as possible in our use of natural and human resources. It is our duty to
insure that we produce as little in the way of harmful and difficult-to-recycle
waste products as possible.
This
will not be easy. There is a dominant conventional wisdom afoot in the
land that treats environmental concerns as a secondary luxury. It runs
across the entire political spectrum. On the right, the Bush Administration
withdraws its pledge to reduce carbon emissions, the principal cause of
global warming. On the left, the liberal-leaning New York Times, in the
name of an expeditious rebuild of lower Manhattan, calls for suspension
of land use and environmental regulation. If land use regulation and environmental
planning don’t add anything to the development process, why just abandon
it for Lower Manhattan? Why not let it go as a general proposition?
Essentially,
a significant segment of the opinion leaders in this nation and this city
seem to share a conventional wisdom that views environmental concerns as
a luxury. They are seen as a costly frill to be borne whenever it is convenient,
and a constraint to be abandoned when they hinder development.
Added
Value Through Smart Building I take exception to this conventional
wisdom. I want to argue that environmental regulation not only does not
necessarily mean higher costs, well-done regulation at times even adds
value in the present, adds even more in the short-term future, and yet
more in the long-term. By making environmental concerns central to the
rebuilding of lower Manhattan, not only will we not increase the costs
of development, but we can lower the costs of operation of whatever facilities
we build and make the City and region even more economically and socially
attractive. Indeed, we can, through this high-profile project, help ensure
that environmental concerns become embedded in all building efforts in
the region as we move forward – a positive domino effect, if you will.
To make my point more concretely, consider what would happen if we insisted
that every building going forward be an environmentally “smart” building.
Summer temperatures in cities are typically 2 to 10 degrees higher than
in the surrounding suburbs, because of the heat-absorbing capacities of
the urban built environment. This, in turn, makes the operating costs
of urban buildings higher because of the energy usage required to cool
their interiors. It impairs the population health of city residents, especially
older people who lose their lives and become sicker in higher numbers during
heat waves.
We know
a great deal about how to reduce these heat absorption impacts by building,
rebuilding, and retrofitting our infrastructure and individual buildings
with more heat-reflective materials. We can lower building operating costs
by putting gardens on rooftops to use that otherwise-wasted solar energy
and create pleasant vegetated respites in an otherwise-concrete context.
But that means doing things in ways that are different from the way we
do them now. It is not necessarily more expensive, just different. The
inconvenience of change often leads to claims that it is too expensive.
However, typically the people that make such claims have never actually
run the numbers. We at Columbia University are examining the costs based
on actual experience. Our preliminary data suggests that environmentally
“smart” construction will not only lead to lower operating costs but also,
with the addition of rooftop gardens, as well as more environmentally friendly
materials, will make New York a much more pleasant, environmentally sensitive,
and economically efficient place.
Along
the way it will contribute, as well, to instilling a new sensibility into
the consciousness of those opinion leaders who shape our policies. It will
help make environmental conservation as prized a development objective
as job creation and enhanced real estate values. Let’s begin downtown and
take this message everywhere.
Elliott Sclar teaches
urban planning at Columbia University.
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