their ability to source and store water in harsh desert environments. They also held a monopoly on desert trade routes as far southwest as Madain Saleh and north to the Mediterranean port of Gaza. They extracted taxes from camel caravans – laden with frankincense, myrrh, and spices – that stopped at their garrisoned outposts for water and rest. The tomb inscriptions, written in Aramaic, give insight into names, relationships, occupations, laws, and the Gods of the people who lie there. Walking around Madain Saleh (Figure I.2) you can understand how people came together in cities to live in proximity as a community, to do business together, to be safe, to honour those that pass, and to live by a set of rules that make sense to that community.
Figure I.2 Left: Madain Saleh, Saudi Arabia. Right: The Editor in Madain Saleh. (Source of left photograph: amheruko/Adobe Stock.)
In today’s cities nothing has changed, but these basic requirements can be overshadowed by events, obscured by temporary nuances of daily life, which upset the fine balances that keep this ecosystem functioning. We see parts of the city that have been segregated, vulnerable subcommunities that have been distanced, cut off from the collective attributes of the city and so no longer receiving the benefits of city living.
Cities like London, New York, Copenhagen, and Singapore are far from perfect, but they have ensured a governance setup that responds to the needs of their city, the principles and policies of urban living. The rationale for investment is anchored to these principles that ensured a thriving Mesopotamia, Ancient Rome, and Madain Saleh.
The climate crisis will not change these basic requirements. We don’t have to give things up. We will innovate without compromise, but the longer we leave it the more difficult the challenge becomes.
I learned something very powerful in my time in public office – “good ideas are hard to kill”. If we can align the interests of the wide set of stakeholders that need to come together to enact change, with programmes that strike at the core of the problem and offer co-benefits that improve people’s lives, then they will be successful. We can deliver on serious commitments in the timescales required. The mayor’s office is designed to speak and transact with its citizens. People are generally motivated to seek information that validates their world view, and so the city must inform citizens of their place in a status quo in the most highly diverse communities – and in some places highly segregated, with the greatest inequality within the same spaces – that exist anywhere on Earth and in a world where we stream information and news that polarizes our views by the choices we make. If cities can overcome this to keep this delicate ecosystem in balance through communication that helps people have understanding of “why” they must compromise in order to co-exist, then they can communicate the need to tackle climate change even if it means citizens will have to compromise more than they ever had in history.
Acceptance and Reframing
When I was at school, I learned that “air” is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, and the balance of 1% comprises noble gases and 0.03% CO2. My youngest daughter recently asked me if I knew this and I proudly recalled these percentages. She told me I was close – but CO2 was 0.04%. In the 1980s, CO2 molecules were 335 ppm; today that figure is 412 ppm. To me, 0.03% could have been a fundamental constant, and while I recognize that our natural cycles can fluctuate, this is simply climbing.
When I first read about orbital mechanics, it made sense to me why we can expect an ice age every 10,000 years or so. Every book I have read since validates why we have climate change and a balance of global warming, and how this will lead to short-term climate variability that will target vulnerable coastal cities – where 75% of the world’s cities reside. I have been immersed in this topic and no longer need to question the reality of the situation. Well, I will draw a line under this whole discussion, because whether you don’t believe in climate change or you do believe in climate change, this book is for you! Renewable energy is clean, nobody is breathing coal dust into their lungs, electric vehicles are clean, and nobody is putting carcinogenic particulates into their lungs. The ideas we propose here make sense in an awakened world that wants good short-term living and a future for our children. The decoupling of economic progress and environmental dis-benefit is being driven in cities with ideas and innovations that benefit society and mitigate the carbon emissions we can no longer live with. Cities have learned to innovate when we need to and to solve the problems in front of us without the need to compromise and without telling people how to live their lives.
I sat in the Andlinger Centre for Energy and the Environment a couple of years ago waiting to make my presentation and Professor Alain Kornhauser started to talk about how we count passengers on a journey. I was stunned by how he managed to bring to focus a way of looking at some of the biggest problems in urban society in a new way that will ensure we start making better decisions about urban mobility.4 I shall not attempt to mimic his storytelling, but I will give you my own version.
“There are an average of 4 spaces available in the car for passengers, I drop my daughter off in town to meet her friends, leaving 2 vacant spaces on the outbound journey. When she is finished, I come and run her home, leaving 2 vacant spaces on the inbound journey. This would ordinarily equate to 50% occupancy but I have not yet counted my journey back from dropping my daughter off which is 3 vacant spaces and my journey back to collect her which is another 3 vacant spaces. These two trips equate to 25% occupancy. So overall occupancy is 37.5%. Now, my daughter’s journey has a purpose – but I am just a driver, I have no purpose in this scenario! I am not participating in my daughter’s evening entertainment with her friends. So, of the 16 spaces available in this car, the number of purpose-filled seats is just 2. Occupancy is 12.5%.”
If we begin to consider how people move, where they go, and why they are going, we can provide a transportation network that more appropriately meets our purpose to travel.
The late David McKay’s wonderful book Without the Hot Air gave me such inspiration in how to look at a problem from a perspective of factual numbers before looking at practical implementation. He made a lovely statement, “if everybody did a little, we would achieve … just a little!” We often hear, if everyone picked up just one piece of litter, well we would still be creating litter faster than we are getting rid of it. If everyone planted a tree? Well, let’s explore that one ….5
Thirty percent of the planet is covered in trees, and since human civilisation began we have cut down half of those trees. Now, if 7.7 billion people planted a tree, noting there are three trillion trees on the planet, we would add just one-quarter of 1% to the total. Now if we planted 1.2 trillion trees, we would cancel out 10 years of CO2 emissions by the time the forest matured, but now each of us needs to plant 160 trees … all said, this would capture 100 GtCO2 on top of the 400 Gt captured by existing trees.
So, let’s look at the problem from a different perspective: 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions are a result of deforestation, because, of course, they emit carbon instead of absorbing it, and we cut down 15 billion trees per year, that’s 500 per second. My conclusion is of course that we should all plant a tree! But this is not the problem to solve. We should find mechanisms that encourage nations to profit from protecting their forests instead of cutting them down. You will read more about this in Chapter 1.
In the same way, if we come up with ideological solutions based on technological logic, we might try to build giant solar parks across the royal parks to power London, but these would never get approved … so this is less effective than picking up a piece of litter or planting a tree.
We must understand scale, practicality, and cause and effect while forming ideas, even if this means driving policy change or changes to laws and regulations, or we risk trying to solve unsolvable problems because we are constrained by things we consider immovable. Cities have a lot of tame problems to solve, but it is the wicked problems6 that