Alex Steffen: The shareable future of cities

Climate change is already a heavy topic,

and it's getting heavier

because we're understanding

that we need to do more than we are.

We're understanding, in fact,

that those of us who live in the developed world

need to be really pushing towards eliminating our emissions.

That's, to put it mildly, not what's on the table now.

And it tends to feel a little overwhelming

when we look at what is there in reality today

and the magnitude of the problem that we face.

And when we have overwhelming problems in front of us,

we tend to seek simple answers.

And I think this is what we've done with climate change.

We look at where the emissions are coming from --

they're coming out of our tailpipes and smokestacks and so forth,

and we say, okay, well the problem is

that they're coming out of fossil fuels that we're burning,

so therefore, the answer must be

to replace those fossil fuels with clean sources of energy.

And while, of course, we do need clean energy,

I would put to you that it's possible

that by looking at climate change

as a clean energy generation problem,

we're in fact setting ourselves up

not to solve it.

And the reason why

is that we live on a planet

that is rapidly urbanizing.

That shouldn't be news to any of us.

However, it's hard sometimes

to remember the extent of that urbanization.

By mid-century,

we're going to have about eight billion -- perhaps more -- people

living in cities or within a day's travel of one.

We will be an overwhelmingly urban species.

In order to provide

the kind of energy that it would take

for eight billion people living in cities

that are even somewhat like the cities

that those of us in the global North live in today,

we would have to generate

an absolutely astonishing amount of energy.

It may be possible

that we are not even able

to build that much clean energy.

So if we're seriously talking about tackling climate change

on an urbanizing planet,

we need to look somewhere else for the solution.

The solution, in fact, may be closer to hand than we think,

because all of those cities we're building

are opportunities.

Every city determines to a very large extent

the amount of energy used by its inhabitants.

We tend to think of energy use as a behavioral thing --

I choose to turn this light switch on --

but really, enormous amounts of our energy use

are predestined

by the kinds of communities and cities that we live in.

I won't show you very many graphs today,

but if I can just focus on this one for a moment,

it really tells us a lot of what we need to know --

which is, quite simply,

that if you look, for example, at transportation,

a major category of climate emissions,

there is a direct relationship

between how dense a city is

and the amount of climate emissions

that its residents spew out into the air.

And the correlation, of course,

is that denser places tend to have lower emissions --

which isn't really all that difficult to figure out, if you think about it.

Basically,

we substitute, in our lives,

access to the things we want.

We go out there and we hop in our cars

and we drive from place to place.

And we're basically using mobility to get the access we need.

But when we live in a denser community,

suddenly what we find, of course,

is that the things we need are close by.

And since the most sustainable trip

is the one that you never had to make in the first place,

suddenly our lives become instantly more sustainable.

And it is possible, of course,

to increase the density of the communities around us.

Some places are doing this with new eco districts,

developing whole new sustainable neighborhoods,

which is nice work if you can get it,

but most of the time, what we're talking about is, in fact,

reweaving the urban fabric that we already have.

So we're talking about things like infill development:

really sharp little changes

to where we have buildings, where we're developing.

Urban retrofitting:

creating different sorts of spaces and uses

out of places that are already there.

Increasingly, we're realizing

that we don't even need to densify an entire city.

What we need instead is an average density

that rises to a level

where we don't drive as much and so on.

And that can be done

by raising the density in very specific spots a whole lot.

So you can think of it as tent poles

that actually raise the density of the entire city.

And we find that when we do that,

we can, in fact, have a few places that are really hyper-dense

within a wider fabric of places

that are perhaps a little more comfortable

and achieve the same results.

Now we may find that there are places that are really, really dense

and still hold onto their cars,

but the reality is that, by and large,

what we see when we get a lot of people together with the right conditions

is a threshold effect,

where people simply stop driving as much,

and increasingly, more and more people,

if they're surrounded by places that make them feel at home,

give up their cars altogether.

And this is a huge, huge energy savings,

because what comes out of our tailpipe

is really just the beginning of the story

with climate emissions from cars.

We have the manufacture of the car, the disposal of the car,

all of the parking and freeways and so on.

When you can get rid of all of those

because somebody doesn't use any of them really,

you find that you can actually cut transportation emissions

as much as 90 percent.

And people are embracing this.

All around the world, we're seeing more and more people embrace this walkshed life.

People are saying that it's moving from the idea of the dream home

to the dream neighborhood.

And when you layer that over

with the kind of ubiquitous communications that we're starting to see,

what you find is, in fact,

even more access suffused into spaces.

Some of it's transportation access.

This is a Mapnificent map that shows me, in this case,

how far I can get from my home in 30 minutes

using public transportation.

Some of it is about walking. It's not all perfect yet.

This is Google Walking Maps.

I asked how to do the greater Ridgeway,

and it told me to go via Guernsey.

It did tell me that this route

maybe missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths, though.

(Laughter)

But the technologies are getting better,

and we're starting to really kind of crowdsource this navigation.

And as we just heard earlier,

of course, we're also learning how to put information on dumb objects.

Things that don't have any wiring in them at all,

we're learning how to include

in these systems of notation and navigation.

Part of what we're finding with this

is that what we thought

was the major point

of manufacturing and consumption,

which is to get a bunch of stuff,

is not, in fact,

how we really live best in dense environments.

What we're finding is that what we want

is access to the capacities of things.

My favorite example is a drill. Who here owns a drill, a home power drill?

Okay. I do too.

The average home power drill is used somewhere between six and 20 minutes

in its entire lifetime,

depending on who you ask.

And so what we do is we buy these drills

that have a potential capacity of thousands of hours of drill time,

use them once or twice to put a hole in the wall and let them sit.

Our cities, I would put to you,

are stockpiles of these surplus capacities.

And while we could try and figure out

new ways to use those capacities --

such as cooking or making ice sculptures

or even a mafia hit --

what we probably will find

is that, in fact, turning those products into services

that we have access to when we want them,

is a far smarter way to go.

And in fact, even space itself is turning into a service.

We're finding that people can share the same spaces,

do stuff with vacant space.

Buildings are becoming bundles of services.

So we have new designs

that are helping us take mechanical things that we used to spend energy on --

like heating, cooling etc. --

and turn them into things that we avoid spending energy on.

So we light our buildings with daylight.

We cool them with breezes. We heat them with sunshine.

In fact, when we use all these things,

what we've found is that, in some cases,

energy use in a building can drop as much as 90 percent.

Which brings on another threshold effect

I like to call furnace dumping,

which is, quite simply,

if you have a building that doesn't need to be heated with a furnace,

you save a whole bunch of money up front.

These things actually become cheaper to build

than the alternatives.

Now when we look at being able

to slash our product use, slash our transportation use,

slash our building energy use,

all of that is great, but it still leaves something behind.

And if we're going to really, truly become sustainable cities,

we need to think a little differently.

This is one way to do it.

This is Vancouver's propaganda about how green a city they are.

And certainly lots of people have taken to heart

this idea that a sustainable city is covered in greenery.

So we have visions like this.

We have visions like this. We have visions like this.

Now all of these are fine projects,

but they really have missed an essential point,

which is it's not about the leaves above,

it's about the systems below.

Do they, for instance, capture rainwater

so that we can reduce water use?

Water is energy intensive.

Do they, perhaps, include green infrastructure,

so that we can take runoff

and water that's going out of our houses

and clean it and filter it

and grow urban street trees?

Do they connect us back to the ecosystems around us

by, for example, connecting us to rivers

and allowing for restoration?

Do they allow for pollination,

pollinator pathways

that bees and butterflies and such can come back into our cities?

Do they even take the very waste matter

that we have from food and fiber and so forth,

and turn it back into soil

and sequester carbon --

take carbon out of the air

in the process of using our cities?

I would submit to you that all of these things are not only possible,

they're being done right now,

and that it's a darn good thing.

Because right now, our economy by and large

operates as Paul Hawken said,

"by stealing the future, selling it in the present

and calling it GDP."

And if we have another eight billion

or seven billion,

or six billion, even, people,

living on a planet where their cities also steal the future,

we're going to run out of future really fast.

But if we think differently,

I think that, in fact, we can have cities

that are not only zero emissions,

but have unlimited possibilities as well.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)