 Hi everyone and thank you for joining us today for this week's lecture and planning series presentation. Our speaker this week is Joan Fitzgerald, professor of urban and public policy at Northeastern University. My name is Jana Davis and I'm a PhD student here in the planning program and I'll be moderating the session today. So I just want to start with a few kind of technical and logistic announcements and then I'll turn to introducing our speaker and her talk. So during the talk I'd just like to remind everyone to please mute their microphones. We'll be recording today's lecture so anyone in the audience who wishes to not be recorded should please plan on turning off your video input. And then we'll use the chat box only for discussion regarding the session. If you have any technical questions that apply only to you please feel free to message me privately. And then finally we encourage all of you to type questions into the chat box during the presentation. We'll have some time for Q&A at the end of the presentation probably starting around 2.15. And I'll be coordinating today's Q&A with attention to diversity and inclusion. So if you've already had a chance to ask a question just please allow others to do so before asking another. So with those kind of technical comments aside I'd like to now turn to introducing today's speaker Dr. Joan Fitzgerald. Dr. Fitzgerald is a professor of urban and public policy at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on urban climate action and strategies for linking it to equity, economic development and innovation. In her fourth book Green Innovation Urban Leadership on Climate Change she argues that the climate strategies of too many cities represent random acts of greenness rather than integrated and aggressive action. She points to leading cities in North America and Europe and offers strategies for lagging cities to accelerate their action. Her ongoing climate just cities project examined strategies for post COVID urban climate action to please equity at the forefront. She also blogs on inequality and urban climate action on Plattinacin. Today Dr. Fitzgerald's lecture called How to Transition from Climate Action to Climate Justice Planning will draw on some lessons learned from her book to explore how cities can transform climate action into climate justice. So Dr. Fitzgerald if you're ready I'll pass things over to you now. Okay, thanks for the introduction Jenna. Happy to be giving this lecture. I wish I could be doing it on site, but won't be for a while. Anyway, a minute. There we go. Moving forward. So yeah, I'll be starting about Green Innovation, Urban Leadership on Climate Change. Green Innovation came out March 27th and on March 28th Oxford University Press closed down its distribution center. So in many ways it was ill timed for for its landing. But it's been great to be able to reschedule all the talks I had last spring for now. So it's a made up word Green Innovation. I got it from Boston, which calls its outreach on climate Greenovate. And so I decided to use that with permission to characterize what I see is really needed in climate action planning for cities. And these are the elements of what I call Green Innovation. So one is setting aggressive climate goals with a strategy and for achieving them and accountability for achieving them. And it's easy to set aggressive climate goals. But what you'll see in many cities is they don't have interim goals to say that they are on target for getting there or anything that happens if they don't get there. And so that's one of the big problems is city set goals, but seldom reach them. The second thing is experimenting. We haven't been doing climate action planning in cities for very long. The first climate action plan was Portland in 1992. Most cities really started to pick up in say 2008. And so we don't know exactly what we're doing. And I got this idea at first in Malmo, Sweden where the mayor told his sustainability team experiment. If you're not making mistakes, you're not experimenting. If you're not experimenting, you're not learning. And so that is what I find is the leading cities are experimenting at so many levels. Being a learning organization, how do you how do you learn particularly learn across departments? And again, drawing from my experience in Malmo, where they set themselves up for something that Argers and Schoen call called double loop learning, that it goes into the departments, but then is disseminated among the individuals and also at a higher organizational level, learning about what works both technically and as well organizationally works. The fourth one is linking climate action to economic development and social equity goals, the three legged stool of sustainability that we'll talk about in a minute. And then catching contradictions. Even though we often have an office of sustainability in many cities, climate action involves almost every department in a city. And it's often the case that what is happening in one department is running counter to the goals of another department and trying to figure those out so that you're not slowing your progress is really important. So in green innovation, I focus on buildings, energy and transportation. And the reason I do that is if you look at any given city, chances are the two largest sources of its greenhouse gas emissions are buildings and transportation. And of course, the energy used in buildings, different cities count in different ways. So I focus on these three areas. But there are several chapters that relate to energy, several chapters that relate to transportation. And then in each chapter, what I do is look at what are those economic development links? What are those links to equity? So that's kind of a summary of the book. But since green innovation came out, of course, we've had the COVID-19 pandemic. We've had repeated injustices, even murders of black Americans by by police, the rise of Black Lives Matter. And equity has just become a much bigger component of what needs to happen in climate action. And so what I'd like to do is while I'm telling you about the book and what I talk about in the book is to demonstrate how recently equity has even become more to the forefront and even more than just equity as a term, racial equity has become essential to climate action planning. So I'm starting I'll start out with buildings. That's the first chapter. Amory Loven's long ago coined the term negawatts, and that's a unit of energy you don't use. And so we've always known that energy efficiency in buildings is the first step of a city's climate action. What I argue in green innovation as a city, if you aren't doing passive house as your standard, or net zero emissions, then you're behind the curve. And so the question is, how do you get there? And what I do is offer different strategies for cities at different places for moving to this standard. But it's very difficult. Some cities are in states that don't allow a city to have a higher building code or stricter energy code than the state does. And if the states is low, cities have to resort to more voluntary means. But anyway, the idea of passive house is that passive solar orientation, of course, very secure building envelope, high levels of insulation, windows, and so forth. And typically, the idea is that a passive house requires no external sources for heating and cooling. What we're finding is that most of the buildings built to that standard use about 70 to 80% less energy than others, they do require external energy. Zero emissions is often the same in the code. But in addition, it mandates that the building meet its energy needs with onsite renewable energy and or off site renewable energy. And that's the difference between zero net energy and zero net emissions. So with this, who are the leaders on this? Well, you're living there. The York is one of the leaders. And one of the things when passive house first came to be was that it was thought you couldn't do it in high rise buildings. And we are now this is one of the I think it might still be one of the world's tallest passive house building. This is at Cornell on Roosevelt Island. And demonstrating that in fact, you can do I think it's 26 floors, pretty high buildings with the passive house standard. So here's a few more that are in New York. There's a map of all of the passive house buildings that are in New York. And the city is promoting it with a lot of help from the state, which is also working on passive house. So keeping with our equity focus here. The question is, can you build ultra low income housing with passive standard? And the answer to that question is yes. And in the book, I tell the story of Tim McDonald, a Philadelphia architect, who was just curious about passive house, and was building this this low income development and decided to go for it. So you see he has solar on top in the design of this. But he did it. And what was amazing about it, it only cost him about 2% more than how he otherwise would have built the building. So Tim kind of got religion around passive house, went to the state and said, look it, if you put something in the development requirements for low income housing that the developer would get a certain amount of points for considering or for attempting passive house, we would really promote this standard in Pennsylvania did it. And it is still one of the leaders in passive house construction, and particularly low income. Tim has since gone around to, I think he's got 17 states now that have included passive house points in low income housing development. And it's really spurring that movement to build it. This obviously has a racial equity component in that the air inside the building is cleaner. And it also reduces energy burden because so much of the energy in this case comes from from solar that's produced right on the building. So here you can you can find a link to his global passive house happy hour. So where I did Massachusetts is also quite a leader. And our clean energy center, which is is funded through utility surcharge is also looking into multifamily passive house. And has just conducted a feasibility study with about eight units where they were paying $5,000 a unit. And the reason they did this is because developers are convinced architects are convinced that they can't do this reasonably. And so by providing this, they are then demonstrating to them that they can do it. And it's been a very successful project. And Massachusetts expects to become one of the top five states that are promoting passive house in low income, as well as generally. So New York is doing very similar things on low income passive house. Here we have one one development. And they have a certification system. They've produced guidebooks like the one you see here for developers to produce more multifamily passive house. And the strategy in New York at the state level is convince the construction companies and developers, they can do it for low income housing, you can come in and subsidize that, then they're going to want to do it for everything else they build because it commands higher rents, higher sales prices. So it's an interesting strategy to bleed with low income in New York. But what about retrofits? So new construction, that's great. Can you retrofit to passive house standard? That's something New York state NYSERDA is looking at as well. And in fact, where they got the idea was German or the Netherlands with this program called energy sprung. And as you can see what energy sprung does is it's works in social housing in the Netherlands. And they had design contest of how you could do it. And this is what they came up with. The idea is you create this external ectoskeleton. And that way you can build the whole thing off site. And then you can come back in less than a week and fit it to the building. And this has been very successful. And with each round of the design challenge, they have found it that costs are reduced, increasingly as well. So here's some photos of the buildings with their new shells. The solar panels are right on the roof, they just pop them, the whole roof with the panels already right on it. And again, New York is looking to replicate that kind of model. And again, the equity component of this is that this says 10 US cities, but I'm sure it's more than that. A quarter of low income households spend about 15% more of their income on energy, which is more than twice as much as the average household spends on energy. So by making these efficient buildings much more efficient, it's saving people money and it's improving the indoor air quality. Here's just some other, obviously not low income, but passive house retrofits in New York. So building is our first line of action. And we demonstrated that we can do a passive house, we can do it in high rise, we can do it in retrofits, and we can do it in low income housing and low income retrofits. So let's move on to energy and look at cities. I mean, cities can't in many ways control energy supply. What are the mechanisms that cities can use? One is community choice aggregation. And so how that works is rather than the utility sourcing, the city sets up a CCA that buys and builds electricity. It's still delivered through the utility. And then you are billed typically by the utility. I think about 17 maybe 18 states allow community choice aggregation. As a way many cities do it just to lower the cost for their residents of energy. But in fact, many other cities are doing it primarily as a way of increasing renewable purchasing. And some CCAs have been set up just to purchase renewable energy. California like so many things, climate leads the way. Not only here in renewables in the number of community choice aggregations, but also really being able to connect that to jobs. So one of the cities that I looked at in Greenovation is Lancaster in the Los Angeles area, they created Lancaster Choice Energy as a CCA. We often think of these things in our politically divided era as Republican or Democratic initiatives. This is a Republican mayor who just saw CCA as a way to provide lower cost energy, but also as an economic development magnet for the city. And in implementation, what they're what they're doing in Lancaster is they've created one choice entity for the city, one for the surrounding communities in the county, but they're also putting it in low income housing and connecting that to micro grids. So they're covering all the basis in terms of equity, sustainability and economic development that they've been able to attract. And part of that is connecting the electricity to electrification of vehicles. And I'll talk about that a little bit more. Another way to do that cities can promote a solar is community solar. So one of the things we know is that about half of the people, either because they're renters or because they can't afford it, can't take advantage of all the subsidies states and some cities offer for putting solar panels up. So typically how it goes, you get the panels, have them installed, there's some kind of discount there. And then through net metering, you get to sell back to the grid, oftentimes making money. If you're able to make that an initial investment. So the utilities have argued against net metering saying it's it's unfair, because so many people can't afford it. And I think they have other reasons, but that certainly is the case. So community solar allows for community group purchasing. Sometimes it could be panels that are right on the houses. Sometimes it's off site. But the idea is you become a subscriber to say a solar farm like you see here, and then you get a credit on your bill for the energy that's produced by that. Sometimes you actually get the energy, but it's more often the case that you get the credit. How do you make that more of an equity thing? Because subscribers, you know, it's often you have to make an initial investment. So there's a great story in Austin, Texas, where Austin is utility is a municipal utility. And the City Council has asked the utility or required their utility to buy increasing percentages of its power from renewable sources. And running out of space in the city. So Austin Energy decided to invest in a number of community solar projects. And one they were they went out to investigate was an area of the city called the Loma. And as they were there, Pete Rivera, a longtime community organizer in this community said, wait a minute, if you're going to put those solar panels here, shouldn't we in the neighborhood have some access to that? And wait a minute, while you're putting these up, we have this, what used to be a park that's now essentially a dump, maybe you could invest in that. And he became he really negotiated this. And was successful, as you can see, there he is at the opening of the solar farm. And how it works is subscribers agree to pay a set price. But then using the utilities fund for low income, they are subsidizing so that half of the energy produced from the solar farm goes to the Loma community. And in conjunction with that, they're doing a lot of energy retrofitting of those of those houses as well. And it will dramatically decrease the energy burden of people living in the Loma. And they got the park out of the deep deal too. And so we're seeing this pop up all over the country, these community solar packages often in low income communities, often driven by developers that are nonprofit developers. So another aspect of this is, if all these cities and states are going to meet these goals that they've set around net carbon emissions, 100% renewable energy, one of the things that has to happen is we have to electrify everything. So one of the cities I've been watching since green innovation is Oakland, California, and a project going on in West Oakland that involved fuel switching and renewables. So West Oakland is an area that has just about every environmental harm you could want, a couple of highways, a waste treatment plant, a peaker plant that runs on jet fuel, port facility. So a lot of pollution in this community, as you can imagine high rates of asthma and other kinds of diseases caused by air pollution. So they decided the city with using state funds as well as city funds to go into West Oakland, and do major energy retrofits. But what they recently added on to it was fuel switching, that is getting fossil fuels out of the house or buildings. And it's interesting, at the time they were doing this Rocky Mountain Institute just published a paper that showed the harm that fossil fuels inside buildings, things like pointing out that if you have a gas fired hot water tank, that has to be vented. What about the stove? In the best cases, it's vented, but not always. And so the natural gas is creating pollution inside the building. So the idea by fuel switching, you would be able to get rid of indoor sources of pollution. But what about the outdoor? So one of the things they wanted to do was get rid of that peaker plant. And what they did was start installing renewables plus storage to the extent that they could actually get rid of the peaker plant. So it's a great story because it's cleaning up indoor and external outdoor air pollution by electrifying everything. So those are a couple of examples of how cities can have an impact on energy in that transition to renewable sources. Let's look a little bit at transportation. One of my favorite cities on this front is Los Angeles. Los Angeles has been trying to build out a subway has had a very integrated transportation policy for some time, definitely focused on equity, this idea that low income neighborhoods have not had the access to public transit to transportation in general, and bear the brunt of much of the pollution of the area, particularly from the port of LA. And the transportation policy would be focused on doing that. The port of LA is a great story. It's in the book. I'm not going to talk about it today. But one of the things that they're doing, speaking of experimenting, is they think of the first city in the country to commit to transition transitioning their entire bus fleet to electric. And that's an experiment because Los Angeles is a is a spread out city. The bus routes are off and long. They really have to be able to go on a charge for say 300 350 miles. So Los Angeles as part of this strategy attracted companies, but in particular one called BYD build your dreams the Chinese company to come in and produce them here. It's in Lancaster. But working with an organization called Lane, a community organization in Los Angeles that eventually split off this group called jobs to move America, negotiated a deal where BYD would come in, they would preferentially hire from low income communities and build the buses. Well, it all sounds like a great story. But then they started trying the buses. They didn't produce to the to the mileage that they were promised. And there were problems with them, all kinds of mechanical and other problems. And of course, one of the things that electric buses, what makes them attractive to cities is because there's lower maintenance. And so here you've got maintenance problems. So here's one of the dangers of experimenting. But they went back to the company. And one of the things build your dreams did not do was agree to unionization. There was a big campaign. They tried to squash it. Jobs to move America came in. They negotiated a union contract. They negotiated a lot of training. And things seem to be going right very well right now. And the buses have improved pro Terra and other electric bus company that was started in Silicon Valley. And then moved its production to South Carolina is now bringing production to California. And so we get a great economic development with equity story out of the way Los Angeles is expanding its its electric buses and jobs to move America is a nonprofit that's working in Chicago, New York, other places, not just on buses, but if you're expanding subways to get more of the construction to happen locally and to to have union unions and obviously well paying jobs and preferential hiring for people in low income communities. So Los Angeles is also investing as is the state of California in a considerable amount of electric electric car infrastructure charging infrastructure. And one of the things that that leading cities are doing is also building out car share programs that are all electric cars. And this is the one for Los Angeles. And in keeping with their with their equitable transportation strategy started it out in a low income community, highly subsidized so that everyone would have access to the to this car service. So not everything is equity focused. Some of it is just focused on how do you make that transition to electric vehicles? The quickest and I think Oslo is the world's leader. And I talk about Oslo in the book, I don't talk about Oslo when I give talks so much because it's such a unique environment. So Oslo had or Norway has a lot of money from oil, they're taking their money from their oil and investing it in electrification in the charging infrastructure. So you have a unique environment in the amount of money they're able to throw at it. I think London is is a better example of how you build layers of policy, which is my argument for how you get to green innovation, building layers of policy. So many of you probably already know that London was one of the first cities in the world, one of the few cities still in the world that has a congestion charging area. And so you see that marked by the red dotted line there. And they put this in and it decreased the idea is you come in during rush hour, you pay a higher fee, always pay a fee to go in this area. The idea is to reduce the amount of traffic and then to take the funds generated and use those to invest in the public transit system. And highly effective in terms of reducing the crashes that occurred, reducing air pollution, reducing the number of cars, making it quicker to to to get around. So then London has been investing considerably in charging infrastructure. And what they did here was then overlay you less an ultra low emission zone, the blue area, you can see it corresponds to the congestion charging boundary. And what they're doing is over time, it over time, cars and our electric are not going to be allowed to go into this area. What it is now is you have to have a certain level of emissions, low emissions, and that will just get stricter and stricter and stricter over time, until only electric vehicles will be allowed in that zone. What they're doing as part of that is requiring the London taxis to all go electric as well. And so here you can see one of the electric taxis. And they are also a Chinese company, Geely bought United Taxi from London, and then refurbished a plant outside of London. And that's where they are producing or retrofitting taxis to make them hybrid or producing the actual electric taxis. So what's the contradictory policy? That just seems like layers and layers of good policy. Well, what happened was at the same time they were reducing traffic through the congestion pricing, Uber came along. And there were no restrictions on Uber. So everything they gained from the congestion zone, they lost and then some with the amount of Uber cars that were traveling in London. And they finally did ban or limit dramatically Uber in London. But I just point that out as just one of the examples of contradictory policies and not only limited success but almost did in the success of London's policies. One other kind of contradictory policy that just popped up on the screen one they're very proud of in Boston is apps people can use to find empty parking spaces. Because a good part of the traffic circulating is in a city is people looking for parking spaces. And so the idea is you find you find the space, you're circling less. But if your idea is to have fewer people driving into the city that you don't really need to drive into, because it's compact and has public transit and has plenty of bicycles for rent, do you want to promote apps that actually make it easier to drive in the city because it's easier to park? So in transportation in particular, we see a lot of contradictory policies that limit the ability of cities to reach their emissions goals. So where I'd like to go with this now is to move from an article I just submitted to the Journal of the American Planning Association is how do we move from climate action to climate justice? And this is an investigation of five cities that are doing that. Austin, Baltimore, Cleveland, Portland and Providence. And Providence has gone so far as to rename it the climate justice plan. Austin's plan is about to be released as a climate equity plan. And a big part of that was generating participation from people in frontline communities and having them determine the goals, having the focus of the climate action actually be on frontline communities. And I'll talk about that a little more in a minute. So moving from climate action to climate justice, I would argue is the next wave of climate action planning. So backing up a little bit, one of the things I've talked about in my articles as well as both of my books on this topic is eco districts. And they're in many ways big experiments. A city takes a whole district of a city and applies everything it knows on mitigation as well as adaptation. So here's one of the first ones, Wobahn in Freiberg, Germany, an area that as you can see, all of its energy is produced from renewable sources. Part of that is a combined heat system that runs on woodchips. Part of it is renewable. Green stormwater management, 15 minute community, public transit, everything linked to really experiment and determine what works and what kind of value to you get from integrating all aspects of sustainability. Another one that I follow is in Stockholm, Sweden, Hammurby, Shostad. This was an old industrial area of the city about 340 hectares. You can see there the city cleaned it up and turned it into a green community following this Hammurby model that as you can see is essentially a closed loop system. And in that closed loop system, what you see is just about everything going out of the district comes back in. So waste is either recycled, burned in the and then returned back into the combined heat and power system. Or organic waste is composted and then comes back and is used as compost throughout the city. Then the biogas produced from compost runs the hybrid buses. So this closed loop model really became one that many places tried to replicate. And with any kind of experiment like this, you know, there were a lot of reasons buildings didn't perform to the standards. They were supposed to transit had to be rerouted, all kinds of things to learn from doing this kind of experimentation. Stockholm has taken what it learned from Hammurby Shostad and is still in the process of developing its Royal Seaport. And here was another brownfield development. And the idea was that it would be all all powered by renewable energy as well. Green stormwater management integration of all aspects. And you really see the experimentation and learning going on in Stockholm. But one of the critiques of eco districts is do they just produce eco gentrification, create these areas where upper middle class people can live and feel they're doing the green thing. And Melmo started out that way with the redevelopment of the Western Harbor, which was a shipbuilding area in decline and produced. This was developed in three different stages. And again, experimentation and learning in each stage. But what Melmo got right was that, well, it's pretty easy to take a brownfield site, clean it up, combine every aspect of sustainability and build homes for relatively rich people. Can you go into an existing neighborhood and an existing poor neighborhood and apply the same principles and make it work? And that's what they did in Augustenburg. And it's been a highly successful project that they came in as a city and said, we want to retrofit for stormwater management and we want to retrofit for building efficiency. And the people in the community said, wait, wait a minute, and told their priorities. And they ended up doing a very nice job of redeveloping this area. So to me, this is the move from climate action to climate justice. So if we look now, I think what we're seeing is a transition from what we had been calling eco districts to green justice zones. And this idea is, again, that the first line of climate action has to be to undo, to remedy the harms, environmental harms that have been done to low income communities, often black and Latino communities that we've seen through COVID 19 are bearing the brunt of the illness due to due to the high levels of pollution in those neighborhoods. And so Providence is using green justice zones. You can see it's actually this one is California. It's actually become the new approach to integrating all aspects of sustainability and climate action planning and really focusing it first on frontline communities. So this is a trend I'm sure if you haven't heard of it before now you'll see green zones coming up all the time. And then the other aspect in conclusion that I'll say here is that talking about cities in a green new deal, as you know, last August or I guess a year ago, August, New York released its green new deal Seattle, a number of other cities. Boston, we have a mayoral candidate to Michelle Wu who just released a green new deal for Boston, where cities take that economic development focus integrated into their climate action plan along with the equity focus. So I would say where greenovation is going now is with green justice zones, green zones and green new deals at the level of the city. And I find it really exciting, exciting action and the way we should be going. So I will stop there and take any questions. Well John, thank you so much for your talk. So I guess we'll transition into the Q&A portion of the talk. And just as a reminder, anyone can feel free to please just type your questions into the chat box and we'll go through them accordingly. So I think the first question that we have is from Stefan who asked, do you find or think that passive house is most persuasive on economic grounds like a cost-benefit analysis or utility expenditures, moral persuasion or both? Does your example from Lancaster California represent a more conservative city adopting CCA on strictly economic grounds? I think it's both, it's always both. But I think the remarkable thing that Tim MacDonald was able to do was to get the points built into the funding stream for affordable housing. And so that motivated the market to move in that direction. And then people found out, oh, we can do it competitively cost-wise. And that's why I think New York's approach is so important, demonstrating that you can make it work cost financially in low income housing, then you get a premium for doing it in regular housing stock. So yeah, I think it has to be both things. And so Massachusetts is adopting the same points in its system but also the state Colleen Energy Center decided, okay, if we really want people to see it, we're going to have to pay them to do it. And then once we've done that and they see they can do it cost-effectively, they're hoping it will take off by using the points. So I think the cost, there really were differentials, but as we saw with the energy sprung and retrofitting, as builders get more used to doing it, architects get more used to doing it, those costs go down over time. Community choice is almost always a lower price and that's what motivates it. But as I said during the talk, there are many places that are using community choice aggregation and totally focusing it on renewable energy. Thank you. We have another question from Sophia who asked, I totally agree with the gentrification problem that comes with eco districts. I know that Malnö, if I said that correctly, used to have a refugee camp where, which was the biggest slum in Sweden and when I visited last year, there were still huge problems with housing supply. Do you have any thoughts on how you can make sure that housing demand is met equitably in an eco district and avoid gentrification as much as possible? I won't claim to have the tried and true answer that will work everywhere on that. Yeah, they did have a refugee camp and I'll add one of the other cities I follow is Hamburg, Germany, that has built out, they don't call it an eco district, but a whole new area of the city built along these principles and you can look and see a refugee camp, you know, right from this. So it is a problem. Rosengard is probably the fiercest neighborhood in Malmö. A lot of refugees, Sweden has taken in a lot of refugees and they have been applying the eco district principles there and one of the basic things that they do first thing is accessibility so that people can come in and out. But another approach they're taking in Malmö to try to prevent that from happening is for many of us, you know, you live where you live, you shop, you go to work and you don't go to other neighborhoods, certainly other poor neighborhoods and Malmö realized that one thing they needed to do was integrate all the neighborhoods into the life of the city. So for example in Augustenburg what they did was they built a lot of green roofs. They also created an international green roof institute. It's the largest green roof research center in Europe and it's right in the heart of Augustenburg. And so when I toured that I was with a group of Japanese landscape architects, people from all over the world come to this place. Similarly in Rosengard they're trying to build facilities there that will bring people there to try to integrate it better. So that's one thing that can be done. But obviously there's a bigger problem, there's problems with language, there's problems with employment, and you can't cure all that with an eco district. And so that's where I think this idea of the green zone comes in that looks more comprehensively at how you approach it. And there's one, an eco innovation district in Boston where a new commuter rail put a stop in this neighborhood. And so what the CDCs and that group started doing is building green affordable housing near the stops to try to prevent that pathway to gentrification. A lot of the eco districts are doing park development and green stormwater management and doing it in a way that to use a phrase is just green enough so it was not to trip off that gentrification. But you're right that's the problem and it's really, really hard to stop. Let's see, I'm not seeing any more questions in the chat box so I think maybe I'll ask one of my questions. So one question that I had for you Joan was that it seemed like some of the projects that you mentioned potentially have the potential to potentially remake neighborhoods like the eco districts in ways that could be potentially contentious. So I was wondering are there specific ways of framing green innovation projects that you think have allowed some cities to get buy-in from multiple stakeholders? Yeah, I'd point to San Francisco and Portland that have consistently were some of the innovators in eco districts as an approach and in fact the organization eco districts that comes in and helps cities across the country develop these areas emerged out of that. Washington DC has a number of these areas as well and so you know it's a tough balance Seattle is doing them around new transportation links and it does take a great amount of intervention not to to actually map out how much affordable and market rate housing is going to be in an area and mandate that from the beginning to prevent or slow down that gentrification process. So remind me of the the second part of that question or did I? Oh I was muted sorry. Yeah I was just curious from your own research if there was anything that that you think has allowed cities to kind of get buy-in from different kinds of stakeholders. Okay buy-in from different stakeholders. Yeah I mean I think I think the stakeholders though have to be it has to be you know from the developers as well that they have to be able to make a profit building you know the low-income housing and I think we've seen that that happening but I think private investors in areas such as park development and so forth have been happening in some areas but it's going to be a difficult process and rather than giving you a good example I'll let you know how hard it's become. When when Providence did its green plan it really did put the community first in the planning process to the point they were one of equals with the city in in developing the plan and they didn't invite the business community they didn't invite the traditional environmental organizations that are predominantly white that usually are a big part of this and so there was a lot of resentment and so rather than giving you a good example you know the business community was up in arms and it remains to be seen whether they're going to buy into the idea that these are our priority areas the the environmental organizations are very concerned that you're not going to be able to meet your environmental goals if you're focusing on improving frontline communities first and then there was a liquid natural gas facility that was going in the mayor opposed it a number of people because it would be one more polluting thing for for these neighborhoods in in Providence and the governor came in and said we need this for economic development this is going to happen so I'm just reinforcing your point and just saying I I'm not going to offer silver bullets on here's how you prevent gentrification it's it's very hard to do and you know I think it's it's more process of probably slowing it down got it thank you I think Wei Ping might have have a question that she'd like to ask next hey Joan thank you for sharing your work one full book my question has relates to a little bit more at the city scale right so the examples if you look at our cities pretty much all in very good or decent fiscal health right because you know we already know infrastructure updating requires a lot of upfront investment so in your case studies are you seeing cities using even different kinds of financing mechanisms to start on these both you know justice and echo kind of fronts or are you also seeing private sector buy-ins in terms of building these you know either large-scale solar capacity you know also because you know part of the reason we all went to the big grid was to cut costs right there's a scale effect and now if you have a municipal utility companies like Massachusetts does it might actually increase costs for per resident so so come back to the central question has to do is our cities also innovate on how they finance these you know new forward thinking kinds of infrastructure and if they do you know who are the players and especially in terms of from private sector to some extent so for example Oakland in in the West Oakland work that they're doing with the renewables they they are using bond funds they are floating bonds in order in order to finance it but they're also subsidized by the state and of course California is using its you know its cap and trade program to finance it and I think there's the advantage we have here in the northeast as well is being able to use those funds to finance some of the renewable projects and so forth it's it's interesting you're right in terms of you know when you look at the usual suspects they tend to be pretty well off communities in this this last article I did it'll be interesting to see how the Providence Clevelands and Baltimore's of the world are able to finance that and right now these are plans that are relatively new and so I think part of what they're trying to do is establish green banks at the state level so Connecticut for example has a thriving green bank program and hopefully if all these green national if the national one of these national green new deals ever gets passed after after the next election you know we'll have federal money to go into projects as well but I think one of the most hopeful things that really is getting private sector investment are are the green banks and I think about six or seven states have established those right now as as a way to finance projects but in terms of the community solar those are just doing well just on market principles there are lots of developers very eager to move on this because the price of solar has gone down so much and investing in it similarly if we look at the the wind projects that are in you know in play in the northeast corridor there are some financing and and tax credits going on but those are moving on market principles as well so luckily the renewable costs have gone down and the efficiency of offshore energy has has risen dramatically Maine for example has one of the best programs in the country for fuel switching moving people to electric heat pumps and part of the reason is it also has the highest concentration of oil heat in in the country and there again they're getting private financing into that because it's creating all kinds of jobs it's a real engine of economic development in Maine but you're right there has to be you know this is not something cities can do on their own there has to be you know market penetration but there have to be these banks green banks that are going to to help finance some of the projects thank you I'm seeing another question from Brenna who asked Joan to the issue that you mentioned with buy-in from business entities do you find that the push for climate action is more effective when it comes from the community side the government side or the private side well the easy answer is you need it all and one of the things that I think we're seeing is a big switch from the private sector side I mean obviously not the fossil fuel industry but there have been several recent reports that have come out from series E2 these are leading business organizations that that are motivated to invest in green technologies another leading report insurance industry so there are a number of industries from the private sector investment banks that are really getting it on climate change there's a number that are getting it in terms of buildings that we talked about realizing that you can command higher rents higher prices for green buildings because that's what that's what people want to live in so I think the more you have it be part of the private sector investment the better one strategy that I talk about in the book are a number of 2030 districts and Ed Masry of architecture 2030 started this program with Seattle and it now probably has about 18 cities involved where a whole area of a city the business community commits to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions reduction in its transportation footprint and in reductions in water use and again it's just because this is where the market is moving these are the kind of buildings people want this is what's in demand so it's kind of public demand something and the business community sees it's in its interest and it responds and so I think we're at a really good moment there of course the fossil fuel industry isn't going to give up easily and we see if the regulatory environment say on fuel efficiency standards isn't good it's going to set us back the way it has already on electric vehicles and energy or auto efficiency but it's moving in a good direction in terms of from the community we'll see I mean we're at a moment where I think the American public at least for a while was really supportive of Black Lives Matter of supportive of equity and justice what that will turn into post-pandemic remains to be seen about do we prioritize remedies for these communities do we put our investment in that in the realization that you know we need a more egalitarian society that's good for the economy thank you we have another question from Tiago who asked how can we adapt green solutions in cities with great social inequality and poverty would the Malmo experience with refugees be a good example to be replicated in poorer cities and countries and then they added I usually see that solutions are thought from cities that have a stronger economic capacity which makes it difficult to approach green theme in some cities yeah no it's absolutely right I think the Malmo experience it's definitely something that cities could try to replicate in terms of its orientation of how it works with the community it's driven from the city but you have to look at differences so for example in Swedish cities and many northern European cities the cities are the major landowners so they have a lot of leverage with developers on what they want and how to how to build it that you know that doesn't exist in a lot of other places so you can take the ideas the participatory planning the building the community in a way that integrates it with the rest of the city but the leverage and the financing you know is different in every place um again this green zone movement I think we're at the very beginning of this to see how far both private investment and city commitment is going to go to prioritize cleaning up frontline communities first and of course the poorer the city the harder the harder it is and so that's why there has to be some level of national financing you know going into this in terms of urban redevelopment and hopefully we don't bungle it as badly as we did in previous rounds another student had had a question about the the green zones you were just mentioning they said one concert about both eco districts and green justice zones might be the bound in nature of these concepts for instance what about the areas just outside of these bounded zones are they excluded from participation and publicity and some of those associated benefits what alternative approaches might exist and perhaps the hamburger approach does do that um the hamburger approach is really creating a very you know there's social housing in there but it's it's a very you know well to do it's more along the hammer v show start lines of that um yeah how do you draw the line at in some communities like the west oakland surrounded by highway so that kind of creates the barrier but that's always the case when you when you focus on space place someone's getting excluded right and someone very much in need so I think there has to be a prioritization process and there has to be a participatory process on how to prioritize who's getting investment but the other side of that question is it's a people versus place investment so um in in of course I teach 21st century city we read Richard Rothstein's the color of law that looks at deliberate government policy to create segregation in housing and um of course what that meant is that blacks who were who were not allowed in neighborhoods didn't have the housing appreciation so they didn't have the wealth accumulation so what's the remedy to that? Rothstein would argue the remedy is to maybe government buy back some of that housing and sell it at much reduced rates to blacks who were excluded or you know who knows what the criteria are for that so that's very much an individual solution trying to deal with individuals and the idea to kind of integrate people into neighborhoods as opposed to a place-based solution where you're focusing those efforts and so I think the way to to prevent those kind of resentments is is to have you know a sequencing of what are the priority zones and um so that people can see that all areas will eventually be part of it but going with the greatest need first and that's what that's what Providence has done it's it's identified three green justice zones and it's in its climate action plan and it may create resentments we're we're about to see this play out thank you so I'm not seeing any more questions in the chat box so I think we'll unless anyone would like to have the the last word here I think we'll wrap things up but I wanted to thank you Dr. Fitzgeralds for taking the time to present today we really appreciate it and uh definitely wish you the best of luck with uh your recently published book great thank you it's a pleasure to be here okay thank you uh-huh bye-bye