hello uh and welcome and thank you for joining us at this Nesta Talks to event these events are put on by Nesta and designed to be conversations with today's most interesting thinkers focused on the big topics that define our future we're really pleased to be welcoming today professor Joan Fitzgerald to discuss the various ways actions by cities and in cities will be essential to tackling the climate crisis and tackling it fairly and what a moment to be having these conversations weaning ourselves of fossil fuels is of course vital to achieve decarbonisation but as we've seen in recent weeks across the world the wholesale price of energy particularly gas has soared in the UK some small energy suppliers have collapsed but for consumers too this is really bad news direct burning of gas is the principal source of home heating in the UK covering around three quarters of properties moreover 40 of our electricity is supplied by burning gas so writing gas prices will directly affect the cost of living hitting the well-off hitting the least well-off the hardest so decarbonization is essential of course for reasons of economics and justice as well as managing climate change and it's these kinds of issues that drive our work in Nesta's sustainable future mission we're mobilizing innovation to help the UK reach its net zero targets faster and to do that we're focusing on decarbonisation of domestic energy use this means we're working on ways to accelerate the electrification of home heating we're also working on ways to help reduce the carbon intensity of the electricity we use by better linking it to the demand by better linking demand and renewable energy supply so this is one of three innovation missions that Nesta will be working on between today and 2030 addressing some of the biggest challenges that we face the others are a healthy life focusing on obesity and loneliness and a fairer star which aims to narrow the outcome gap between children growing up in disadvantage and the national average so there's loads to talk about but before we do that some introductions so my name is Oliver Zanetti and I am a mission manager in Nesta’s sustainable future team and I have the huge pleasure today to be in conversation with Joan Fitzgerald Joan is a professor of urban and public policy at Northeastern university in the united states she focuses on urban climate change 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 what she calls random acts of greenness rather than integrated and aggressive action she's working on a new book at the moment cities and the struggle for climate justice which makes the case that racial equality has to be at the core of urban climate action so before we start I’d like to explain the format of the session Joan will kick things off by sharing a few slides before she and I chat for about 25 minutes or so we want to leave loads of time for your questions so about halfway through the session we'll open up for your question um so I’d really like to encourage you to start typing your questions in from the very beginning please type them into the comment box on YouTube so I’ll pass over now to Joan to share some slides

it's a pleasure to be here

okay so um to talk about green ovation I have to go back to emerald cities and emerald cities was a book that was published in 2010 where I talked about the urgency for cities for everyone to act on climate change and if I had a sense of urgency in 2010 I surely have a sense of urgency in green ovation urban leadership on climate change where I examine north American and European cities and their climate actions and it's written partly in frustration in how little has happened at cities so green ovation is a made-up word um so I think I ought to explain a little bit about what I’m talking about the first aspect of it of course is setting aggressive climate goals but the important part is with the strategy and accountability for achieving them I think in the early 2000s 2010 when a lot of cities were trying to move on climate action the first thing was just to set goals that were unachievable to have actions that were not connected to them and in the second round of climate action we're seeing much more specific strategies related to the goals and then accounting annually for achieving them now that's about uh the goal part the next part is experimenting and um think about it we haven't done climate planning in cities very long so we don't exactly know what we're doing so there's has to be a sense of experimentation both with new technologies and how we even manage climate action at the city level one important aspect of that moving down is breaking down silos we have our department of streets and transportation our department of water and sewer uh you know housing everything is divided up and what we really realize is many of our climate solutions work across those silos and we have to change how we govern cities in order to be more effective and of course that means being a learning organization looking at what worked what didn't and regrouping and trying again that's often difficult because of the political cycle but particularly here in the united states where mayors are afraid to do anything that then will get pounced upon in the next election cycle as a failure um I’ll talk a little more about linking climate action to economic development and social equity which has always been at the core of what I do another part is catching contradictions and I’ll talk about that in the in the sense of London but let me just first talk about anticipating conflicts um a lot of what we do about climate change is really changing um ways of living and there's always going to be people organizations businesses who maybe don't like the changes and to try to anticipate those conflicts is an important step so catching contradictions what am I talking about well one of the things I write about in green ovation is London's extraordinary effort to electrify transportation and so electrifying buses even using hydrogen buses has been a priority but a very rapid uh changeover of taxis to electric um so the idea of course is to reduce uh mitigation to reduce uh carbon emissions but like most cities um London got caught off guard with uber and Lyft and other platforms for transportation and we know now that those clog up our streets increase the number of cars so what you're doing on one hand to electrify you're taking away with the other hand by allowing uber now of course London has dealt with that um other cities less so but that's just one example of many of cities with contradictory policies so why green ovation again this idea of random acts of greenness rather than integrating strategies we see uh cities just doing oh a green roof here um an electric charging station there nothing really integrated and so looking at north America, Vancouver is our leading green city they're not coming close to meeting their goals and I think if we look at most cities it's because of state action that their greenhouse gas emissions are reducing so in the book the chapters look at the role of buildings transportation energy storm water management sea level rise and again I connected to economic development and equity um I think in covid this has become even more urgent during the summer of 2020 and during the entire year we had a racial reckoning in this country um things that had always been going on came to the forefront with the murder of George Floyd black lives matter movement emerging and a sense of urgency as a nation that it's time that we finally address this issue and then we saw a very um varied impact of covet in low-income communities where people had no choice to work at home then going home to crowded living conditions where they couldn't isolate so the caseload was higher but it goes way back to our history in the united states it's rooted in redlining and this was a practice that occurred in the in 20s and 30s in the united states where neighbourhoods both through federal government policy deliberate federal government policy as well as the real estate industry identified neighbourhoods that essentially black residents could not buy into and those residents over time became poorer and if that wasn't enough we built highways to isolate those neighbourhoods which also created a lot of pollution in those neighbourhoods and then zoned some of them for industrial uses so these are our neighbourhoods that have the wastewater treatment plants that have the incinerators that have the manufacturing facilities in them so there's high levels of pollution which of course lead to high levels of things like asthma heart conditions other things that set people up for not doing well with covet and so if we look at these neighbourhoods we find higher rates of asthma cancer and because they tend to have less green space susceptible to the urban heat island effect a study was just released that looked in neighbourhoods in New York in Brooklyn and Bronx and found temperatures 30 degrees higher on a hot day than in central park and so very susceptible to a number of things so because of that um my work is even more focused on how we achieve climate goals aggressive climate goals but also achieve equity in what we're doing um so I will stop sharing now

and we'll go back fabulous thanks very much indeed Joan that was a really useful and interesting introduction to the work that you've uh you've been doing so far and that the way that your work is developing as well and I think you know really important those kind of interlinks it's really is impossible to disentangle the social and the environmental and I think that's some of the things that we will be exploring in this conversation um I wanted to start with uh this kind of idea of cities so your work looks really in particular at cities um and I wondered if you could talk through a little bit more what's particular about cities and makes them the right place to focus our decarbonisation efforts okay well it's where the people are you know about 60 of the world's population live in cities and it's where the emissions are um and so obviously this part a big part of the solution has to be solved in in cities that doesn't necessarily mean that cities have the powers needed to address climate so it really depends on the area of so for example storm water management sea level rise those are things that storm water management in particular that can be addressed at the urban level and cities can decide we need to put more parks more green space in these poorer areas of the city that are under greened so to speak um cities can do that they can link that then storm water management green space increases property values okay sea level rise gets a little more difficult because it's really expensive to protect against sea level rise so there has to be some support from higher levels of government um buildings we know you talked earlier about natural gas one of the things that cities can influence is building codes both for energy codes for new construction as well as for retrofitting and that's the biggest thing we can do to get emissions down is to reduce the load in buildings but that varies too some cities like in the united states the state where I live Massachusetts cities aren't allowed to have a higher energy code than the state so you better live in a state that you know has a high energy code um and um there's certain powers that say north European cities own almost all the land so if a developer wants to build they have a lot of leverage to say this is how this is the you know energy code that you're going to build to so um it you know if you if you look at transportation most of them are regional transportation agencies cities don't have a lot of influence um the 15 minute communities you talked about cities have a lot of influence so it's just a matter of figuring out where your points of impact are and making sure you get the resources you need at a higher level in areas that a city can't address so cities are the place to work in but don't necessarily have the resources to do that work that's required I think that's a really interesting observation one of the things that I was going to kind of follow on from that because the one of the areas where you do think cities have a potential to um you know they have those kind of like ability to act is around as a site for innovation and one of the models that you're that you talk about in your book is this idea of an eco-innovation district um I mean I’ve got a few questions about Taniko innovation district but it might be worth starting at the beginning um so what is an eco-innovation district okay that's another term I’ve made up um so um mostly they're referred to as eco districts and um my first introduction to the to those was in 2004 so um in Stockholm hammer b sholstad and so this was a 340 hector area an old industrial area that um they wanted to redevelop they actually wanted to redevelop it to be an Olympic village they ended up cleaning it out the whole site first thing they did was build a transit spur so from the subway a tram that went to the neighbourhood and then integrated all aspects so they figured out the spacing of the buildings in a way that there could be green space and canals to locally address storm water rather than putting it through the sewer system then they had very strict building codes for energy efficiency and also used renewable energy on all on all the buildings streets are made to accommodate bicycles um free ferry service to the other parts of Stockholm so this designed integration now it's a great thing but one of the things that people worry about is something called eco-gentrification and that is you build these great communities and rich people go move there and you know live happily ever after and so another interesting city is Melmo that did a very similar thing in its western harbour which was an old shipbuilding area but they said if we can't do this as a way to revitalize neighbourhoods then you know this strategy isn't going to succeed so they went to Augusteburg which was um a poor uh immigrant neighbourhood and they went to the people and said what do you want because what they wanted to do was take the old buildings make them more energy efficient and help with stormwater and they said well we want renewable energy we want community gardens we want to integrate this into the curriculum of the school we want um you know the stormwater management and so working with the people they did create this kind of eco district and I call it eco innovation because it's often a test ground for new technologies so all of these areas used a system called Nv from a company called Nvac in Sweden where rather than having the garbage trucks come and get your garbage there are these three tubes one for organics one for everything else one for recyclables and it's collected in these tubes underground goes to a central processing plant you know the organics turn into biogas that fuels the buses or into compost the recyclables are recycled and the rest is incinerated and goes to the district heating system so going back to Augusteburg one of the things that they tried was they started a green roof institute it's the largest one in Europe people come from all over the world to see the innovations that they're trying to develop with different types of green roofs so I think that you know it illustrates many of the points I talked about with green ovation it's experimentation it's learning it's figuring out how to manage it it's working with people to bring them up so my idea is let's take this idea and rather than having it be an instrument of gentrification have it be an instrument of revitalization of low-income communities and particularly in the US context communities that the government you know helped create the poverty conditions that live that exists in them so uh eco innovation districts can be kind of pilots or test beds for things which might spread out to the city at large yeah really interesting um and I wonder just I think you sort of touched on this a little in your introduction but to kind of go on a little bit more on this point um it'd be good to hear a little bit about I guess the difference you identified between uh green ovation in an eco-innovation district and um these things that you describe as random acts of greenness

yeah I think um let's just take waste reduction so even though um waste is only you know six seven percent of a city's carbon emissions um it's often a big focus of climate action plans and recycling so it's hard to get people to recycle our rate in Boston has never exceeded 40 um but there's a lot of focus on it and we use single stream we know that about only nine percent of what we recycle um gets recycled so how much emphasis should we put on that or um a lot of cities have adopted I’m sure you see them over there too they're called big belly trash cans and they're in parks and the idea is there's a solar signal that says when they're full and they um you know it eliminates people driving around to empty them I it's the biggest hoax I walk my dog in the park every morning and you know the little carts drive around because not all of them are big bellies but yet it's a very visible symbol it's an excellent example of a random act of greenness um but so what I would argue is what's wrong systemically that it's up to cities to have to deal with the waste problem and so I think that's another part of you know the random acts what we should be doing is saying we need more producer responsibility in the products that are produced to have those be um made in a way that they can be recycled and so if we put that responsibility on producers I think we would see a lot of innovation in packaging in in how products are made rather than putting it all on cities thanks no that's really interesting um I’d like to remind the audience um do feel free to put your questions in the comments we're really uh interested and we'll leave lots of time to ask those questions um so with I’d like to move on now to think about uh good practice I guess having just had a sort of an example of perhaps less good practice or sort of I don't know unconnected good practice um so in the sustainable future mission at Nesta one of our key interests is in decarbonisation of home heating um one of the things I really loved about your book is the kind of richness of the case studies that you have within it which demonstrate sometimes good practice and sometimes not so good practice um I wondered if you could give us some examples of kind of really successful city-wide strategies that you've seen for home heating decarbonisation and maybe reflect as well on what other cities around the world might learn from these okay um I can give you some successful examples but let me just start by saying I think nobody wants to be the bad example but I think it's really important that we study what didn't work and understand why and I do a lot of that in the book of looking at failure and how that can be fixed but yeah there's um so the idea is to make that transition away from fossil fuels though um you know we've talked before about heat pumps and the importance of making that transition so one of our states that's the most effective in doing that is Maine which is largely a rural state but because of that many homes are heated with heating oil instead of natural gas so it's even dirtier so they've just set up a program where they subsidize people to make that fuel switch to a heat pump which is of course electric that does both air conditioning and heating much more efficiently and um so they're doing it they're creating lots of jobs in heat pump insulation installation let me give you an example of doing it in a coordinated way in a neighbourhood that illustrates the equity aspect as well so um Oakland California an area west Oakland is one of these red line communities that I talked about surrounded by highways a lot of pollution um low income and using funds from California’s cap and trade system they're going in and doing not just energy efficiency but fuel switching because when we talk about one's health as a result of living in these neighbourhoods um there's health effects of burning natural gas in homes and so it's not just energy efficiency it's combined with fuel switching and then what they did um was add renewable energy with storage so it makes the area more resilient and as you've probably heard about the fires in California and the utility turning off electric and so it's taking this low-income neighbourhood integrating all these aspects of it and really making a difference another one of the first cities in the united states that tried to do kind of big scale fuel switching in houses um started you know a program that you know with heat pumps and so forth but one of the things they realized they wanted to be able to put in stations for electric vehicle charging is that many homes don't have an electric service that will accommodate all the electric that would be needed to completely electrify and it cost about fifteen thousand dollars a house to do that so there's cost associated with that and you know you have to think of what are the creative models that would happen and one of the things that they've devised is um to have the utilities do it where they actually purchase and own the appliances and then people pay for those over time as part of their utility bill so a lot of that innovation has to be in how we implement and finance those kind of those kind of switches um and then let me give you one more example that's at a neighbourhood level is um in fort Collins Korea in a neighbourhood they called fort zed for zero energy district and so again layering on the energy efficiency and so forth but what they did in this neighbourhood in addition to renewables was looked at demand management so we know that you know anywhere a utility is required to be able to produce all the energy that is needed on any given day typically their peak days are in summer when it's really hot everyone turns on the air conditioning and so in order to prevent having to build another plant the idea is how can you get that load down on those peak days and so there's experiments with different types of technology for example that would uh automatically shut off hot water tanks you know in the middle of the day when no one's using them anyway or kind of powering down or a little bit the air conditioning so there's all kinds of methods that can be used to get that peak demand down and thus the need for building more utility plants and experimentation at the neighbourhood level allows them to understand you know how and look how effective those programs are

thanks that's really interesting um I did actually have a kind of a reflection on one of the points you made at the very beginning of that um so no city would like to be uh the uh example of failure um but learning from failure is incredibly important um are there any ways in which uh that you've seen in which people are kind of sharing things that have gone wrong in a way that that kind of feels productive and it's allowing people to learn yeah there's various network organizations that cities belong to um you know in Europe in in most continents uh here it's an urban sustainability developers network and it is a network that's private just for those people and that's where kind of here's the problems how do we solve it I think we need more of that that you know ability to say this isn't working what did you do but a lot of it is in different political contexts and so when I look at European cities and US cities I mean you've got the EU mandates uh and there's money associated with those to nations and then that goes into cities to implement the various mandates around climate I mean here we still have people who are debating um you know whether humans have caused climate change and so there's many cities that really want to take action and I call them green cities in red states and what's happening in those is they're getting pre-empted that is the legislatures are stopping their powers to do things one is natural gas so um Berkeley California was the first one that said okay new construction no more fossil fuel lines going into it um well many fossil fuel-based lobbying organizations saw that and said uh-oh and went to state legislatures in red states and gave them model legislation to pre-empt cities from being able to do that so you know in many cases there's kind of struggles between cities that want to do things and states supported by fossil fuel interests that don't that's fascinating yeah I guess one's capacity to act is also limited by the discourse around which or within which one acts um I’d like to talk a little bit about fairness and social justice because you argue that um that should be at the heart of every city's decarbonization strategy I mean I guess it's a straw man argument but um one could argue that perhaps the climate doesn't care where the decarbonization takes place and who is participating in it as long as the carbon doesn't get released um so I wondered whether you could talk a little bit about uh maybe deconstruct a little bit that that straw man argument um and give some examples of cities that have mesh decarbonization and social justice together effectively yeah

let's look at renewable energy as one example so rooftop solar obviously the way you get people to adopt it uh is you offer a subsidy and they put the system up on their roof then you have net metering and so all their excess energy they can sell back and be very effective well you even with subsidies you have to have a certain amount of available income to put those up and so it's tend to be tended to be subsidizing people who are relatively well off to install solar on their rooftops so one mechanism to make it a little more distributed is something called community solar and that is people in about half of the homes in the US aren't um you know you can't put salt rooftop solar either they're multi you're living in a multi-unit building um or you can't afford it for whatever reason and so the idea behind community solar is you buy into a utility scale or community scale solar array and then you get credits on your bill for the energy that is produced and typically what happens then is that there's some kind of subsidy that higher income people uh buy in and lower income people get subsidized let me give you a quick example in Austin Texas they have a municipal utility and they were building a huge solar array in a poor community and some of the activists in the community said hey wait a minute um why aren't we getting any of that solar and they worked a program where they could buy in at about half the rate and be part of that so that's one way another area is electric vehicles how do you get people to buy electric vehicles you give them a subsidy and you know everywhere you look whether it's Norway the UK um that's the key mechanism and again it's people who could afford to buy a relatively expensive electric vehicle and so some cities Los Angeles is one are looking at ways to create shared electric vehicles subsidize putting those in low-income communities so there you can still move forward with that solar agenda you can still move forward with the EV agenda maybe it's saying we're going to convert all our buses to electric and the first places we're going to put them are the most polluted which are usually the poorest neighbourhoods um so there's ways you can integrate both of those goals

thanks yeah very very interesting let me add though to that there's a lot of controversy around that because the statement you made about you know the earth doesn't care it just wants to get those emissions down and there's a lot of environmental organizations that are saying that right now we have to focus on the quickest way and that if we have these equity goals it'll slow us down and so there is a tension uh ongoing about that issue thanks yeah no I think that's really important so we've got about um just over 20 minutes left so I’m going to ask you one more question Joan and then um pass over to questions that we have from the audience so if anyone's got some questions um I guess burning on their lips or perhaps on the tips of their fingers um please do type them into the comment box we would like to pose those to Joan um so as a kind of uh at the sort of end point we often ask speakers to uh sort of a call to action basically to reflect on what we might do as individuals or communities to bring about change but I think you know the point that you made at the very beginning and which has been imbued in a lot of what you've said if not all um the kind of change that we need here is much more systemic um so then to frame that kind of call to action question slightly differently what should we be asking or demanding of our elected representatives that's both locally and nationally

well I think you know at different layers of this one would be carbon tax um so that we do have incentives in place to just not produce uh fossil fuels I think investment in green infrastructure is essential and um you know we in the united states have a 3.5 trillion 10-year bill that does that that has equity incorporated into it you know repairing infrastructure and building infrastructure it looks like much of it will be negotiated away but you have to keep the pressure on for that I think um one thing that we really have to push and I don't know exactly how to do it at the national level but it's integration of the mitigation and the adaptation side and um a lot of reason we get more public support of the adaptation side is because people are experiencing you know floods look at the floods in Germany um uh hurricanes fires you know and um I think one of the things I think elected officials need to start anticipating is we're not going to be able to save every city what you know it's kind of the big elephant in the room how do we make those decisions of when to retreat and I would like to see that being discussed now um but it's you know a real political hot potato but um I think the big areas where we need our elective officials to focus is on making that transition away from fossil fuels and making the research investments um but I also think every country has to think of this as an industrial policy for creating jobs so we know there's a lot of jobs in energy efficiency in installing heat pumps but we need to consider that as manufacturing jobs so for example in the united states we're completely not completely but about 72 percent of our solar panels come from china um that's not a good position to be in for a number of reasons and so to combine these green strategies with an industrial policy where a lot of the green technologies are being developed and produced in countries I think is a really important uh factor that often gets overlooked we're just looking at city cities but we have to think of creating job opportunities for people um particularly in places you know where there's a big urban rural divide

that's yeah very interesting and the I guess some level of optimism required therefore for the kind of political the political structures we have at the moment to deal with some of those big questions I think some of the sort of you know things which are already considered quite large for instance you know huge scale transition is almost too much for the political cycles we have so yeah the idea of city or the politics being able to grapple with which cities we abandoned for instance seems you know a huge step from where we are at the moment um but thanks for that response extremely interesting so there's a few questions actually that come in some that were um have been posed in the chat and a couple that um have come in beforehand which talk around that kind of issue of governance so I think we should turn to them first so first of all we have one from Sally Nisha who asks do you think uh sustainable development goal localization is accelerating a more integrated approach that connects climate actions with economic development and equity if so where and how okay when you say what is meant by SDG localization I think SDG stands for sustainable development goals for the UN goals yeah localizing those um absolutely I mean that's what I kind of was getting at in the in the last comment in that um I think the public perception is that um acting on climate is going to reduce my lifestyle it's going to make things I like more expensive and so if you can't respond to that then you don't have much to sell and so you started this by saying you know it's going to be a hard winter in the UK this uh because gas prices are up natural gas prices are up and it's going people are going to attribute that oh we're moving on this renewable path and look what's happening and so the public perception is something that you know we have to be really aware of and um I see it I see it in the united states all the time in terms of you know all these heat pumps aren't as efficient and in fact the first ones didn't work and so there's always this process of showing yes your life gets better um with this with what you see and so you've talked a little bit about um low traffic neighbourhoods and um you know you think of things cities do such as taking tr taking lanes away or whole streets away from cars and putting uh bus rapid transit there or bike lanes there's always attention right between the drivers of cars and so those are the things that have to be managed and over time you know people better see that their quality of life is improved so the economic development and equity is what I was talking about earlier with the industrial policy create jobs that people you know see we're getting better jobs um create neighbourhoods that people see hey I don't need to have my car when I live here and so on yeah that's interesting and kind of managing those tensions is a, I guess a huge challenge for um for those who are in in the political space um we've got another question from Richie Somerville which was submitted in advance so he's at the university of Edinburgh works in data driven innovation and he also asks about governance his question is do you see the form of civic governance so for instance mayors versus cabinets versus administration stroke opposition councils so the form of civic governance is that a determinant as to how effective this form of urban renewable can be executed over an urban renewal excuse me yeah um that's in that's an interesting question I think um I would say different types of cities and different parts of the world have very different powers and so I don't think it's a matter of city manager versus mayor strong mayor strong city council although it can be and so as I was mentioning earlier in many of the northern European cities being you know the main Landover owner gives the cities a lot of authority in Swedish cities you know federal taxes are collected at the local level so there's more control over resources um and it plays out different so example I live in Boston and our mayor our last mayor who um is now the secretary of labour he came in he was a labour guy not so much a climate guy but there's a very progressive city council and the city council being progressive was able to push the mayor to be more of a climate a climate guy so there's a lot of you know individual uh events in cities and circumstances in cities that determine their ability to act um you know the thing I talked about earlier is red states trying to limit the powers of cities that want to do green things so that's another element of it so I think there's a lot of things going on that you know limit the ability of a city to govern its climate uh agenda thanks um and another question from Chris tUKe who's from the democratic society who asks simply how can the governance of cities be more fair and ensure more fairness

yeah there's different levels of ways cities can do that so if we look at you know the highly segregated by both income race ethnicity neighbourhoods that exist in the united states and I’m sure throughout you know many of the large European cities as well a lot of that is driven by income inequality which is not something that a city can address directly and so cities are often left with trying to do things like living wage amendments and but those are just smaller solutions to a much larger problem so how can they be fair well by let's look at housing one of the key areas of inequality in cities can require for example that a development that comes in has to have a certain percentage of affordable housing in it and many cities do that but do it half-heartedly and so the developer can buy into a fund and it ends up that the housing is built is you know segregated anyway um zoning is another mechanism that cities have that they can be more fair so this idea that you take you know a neighbourhood that's mainly residential but allow industrial uses um we have a lot of places that zone for lot large lots or single family only so you can change zoning to make a more equitable distribution of types of housing and mix incomes I think another area where cities it doesn't have to do with climate but education and um there's huge disparities in inner city schools and the schools of the suburbs so making that kind of investment but I think you know you bake it in and so what we're seeing in the united states now is an equity officer being appointed in almost every division of government to look at what are the impacts of our policies where are they inequitable and how do we change that so it has to be something that city government embraces and then creates the mechanisms to check themselves uh when policies aren't fair thanks Joan lots of interesting stuff in there I think um just uh one of the words that kind of sprung as you were talking about um the housing and that term affordable you know there's been a huge debate in London with you know affordable housing and it's like it's a nice adjective but it doesn't you know where what is affordable and affordable to who you know so these debates kind of continue I think they're really interesting um we have a question from Andrew sissonnes who says what do you think are the most effective arguments to get people interested in greening their neighbourhoods

um I don't know that it's arguments but actually doing it and people can then see what that that brings so for example during coven one of the things that many cities did was close off streets so that there could be more biking more recreation and people began to see hey this is really nice no traffic coming by and some of the city’s New York city Oakland are trying to make that permanent now and so um cities going through and saying okay we're just going to change this to a bus lane people would say wait a minute wait a minute you're giving up parking we can't do that but then when they see oh my goodness I can get downtown on this fast bus lane um much faster they become supporters of it so I think uh in some places they call it um planning by stealth where you just start to introduce these things and then people see oh what was I so upset about this this really works um and so I think these kind of low traffic neighbourhoods that you're that you've talked about are another example of people seeing yeah this is nice um and so I think the more people see that but I also think another aspect of it is if people get to participate and so it's not just going in and by stealth but also saying all right what is it that you need in your neighbourhood and so maybe it's community gardens not just a park for recreation but from the example to melmo to you know Oakland I think that's one common area is that people need to be part of the decision making of what happens it can't just be that greening is something that's done to them I think that's really interesting so in some respects it's about showing people what's possible but also ensuring that they are participating as well in the changes that they want to see in their city or the changes that could happen yeah and establishing their own priorities and you know they're again their priorities this was interesting it came up in Cleveland is one of the cities I study and so their priorities may not be exactly what the city wanted but by doing things that they've prioritized they feel listened to and then become more supportive of other kinds of changes that you might want to introduce I think that's right I mean engaging people has to be you know has to be at the heart of this um we have a question from someone called Richard Dawson from an organization called wild awake that he posed before this session and he says how can learning from the way nature has evolved as a sustainable system help us design greener and fairer cities ah um I think we are going to see a big emergence of what are called nature-based solutions uh in in cities and so rather than trying to fight and prevent um to work with nature in developing solutions and so you know in many in many of these solutions for example it's not about how can we get rid of the water but how do we let the water in in a controlled way realizing it so these uh parks that are that are floodable um in ins are being developed in a lot of areas so um whether it's you know greening buildings with actual exteriors that are our plants and so forth that um from what I’m seeing just in terms of what planners are talking about uh nature-based solutions are really um starting to take off and I think we're going to see more and more of that fantastic yeah really interesting I mean we hear a lot about uh yeah like you say trees as a kind of a tool to manage groundwater and runoff and the tool to manage cooling within cities as well I think that's really interesting so we've got a question uh from Julia who asks are there examples of green ovation ideas that sounded reasonable on paper but when put into action didn't work out at all or indeed the opposite of that and how or how easily can we estimate the impact or success of renovation ideas

yeah well let's look at building efficiency so um we might want to impose a standard of uh how much energy is used per square meter per year and then we find when the developer comes in says okay say hammer b showstad say the with the western harbour those first um those first rounds the first areas where they built they didn't come close to meeting um I think it was something like they wanted to do 85 kilowatt hours per square meter per year and why didn't they meet it well people wanted big windows they wanted views so they went back in melmo and created this building living dialogue where they got all the developers together and say okay what worked what didn't and you know it goes against what private sector would do like I’m not telling you my successes um but that was a precondition for being a developer in the second phase of this of this western harbour and it was just amazing how they learned from each other and you know the leading develop developers then were working all over Europe because they really knew how to build to a standard so that's a very um good example of you know learning in um in cities and taking that beyond I’m just trying to think of some other that seem reasonable on paper that don't work out recycling is a very good one um you know the idea that okay we'll do single stream recycling and it will make it easier for people to recycle but it also polluted this recycling to the point that china said we don't want your recycling anymore so again I think the way we've gone about thinking about reducing waste um was focused way too much on recycling um trying to think of some other examples we're actually kind of coming to the end of our time now so if there's if there's one more example that's very brief then uh go for it but otherwise we could uh um drawing a blank right now no that's great um so of course the first thing to say or the last thing to say is thank you very much indeed to Joan for a fantastic uh and really engaging session it's been a huge pleasure to talk to you over the past hour to see your slides to learn more about your work um thanks to for the questions from the audience and to you for having fielded those questions um so those of you in the audience will see that um a link has been posted for a short survey um so we'd really appreciate it if you took the time to fill out that survey um the link is also available in the event description as well so please do like that survey it's really helpful to us to help us work on these events um and a quick preview so the next Nesta talk to events will be on Thursday the 28th of October and uh Nesta will be talking to Daisy Narayanan um about how we build another urban one how we build cities of the future uh so please do look out for that do sign up um we'd love to see you there uh so finally yep thanks again to Joan it's been a huge pleasure to speak with you thanks very much Oliver goodbye.