Building Well-being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change

Praise for The Agile City:

"The Agile City is a particularly astute summary and prescription for practical and nuanced organizational and economic strategies."
—Landscape Architecture

"Russell’s thesis is powerful, his reasoning tight, and his evidence persuasive. All told, The Agile City is one of the most compelling environmental treatises to appear in recent decades."
—Issues in Science and Technology

With their concrete, steel, and glass, the urban places we live in look immutable. But over millennium the most successful cities have adapted to changing economies, technological transformation, and political turmoil. Climate change uniquely challenges our society, but we can rapidly retrofit our buildings, our neighborhoods, and our cities to reduce greenhouse gasses and cope with climate-change effects already set in motion.

We can do it while addressing dysfunctional drivers of growth and reweaving damaged landscapes. That, Bloomberg News columnist and urban analyst James S. Russell argues, defines urban agility. While nations dither, cities worldwide see the era’s challenges and are moving quickly to address them.

Why Buildings?  Buildings account for at least 39 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions nationally. Rapidly improving building techniques can readily cut carbon emissions by half, and some can get to zero.  

Why Communities? Transportation accounts for 33 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Intelligently designing our towns could reduce marathon commutes and child chauffeuring to a few miles or eliminate it entirely.

Why Buildings and Communities? Buildings and cities together make up almost 75% of our carbon emissions. Environment-enhancing investments pay back more quickly when building strategies are coordinated with neighborhood layouts and urban networks. Many also advance economic development (like putting rails where they’re needed) and improve our quality of life (like using sunlight and natural breezes in offices and homes).

Agile cities will dismantle dysfunctional forces of growth. Brain-dead real-estate finance and wasteful transportation investments create megaburbs—places that promised the American Dream but delivered energy-intensive, traffic-clogged landscapes of warehouses and malls.

Agile cities no longer pretend that natural resources (like clean water) are cheap, but thrive by adapting to a world of spiking commodity prices and declining, increasingly precious natural systems. In short, agile cities don’t wait for the future to happen, they take it in hand by pursuing emerging markets (like transit-oriented communities) and developing flood-resistant yet amenable waterfronts.

James S. Russell is the architecture columnist for Bloomberg News. He has written about cities, architecture, and environmental design for more than 20 years. As a long-time editor, he helped Architectural Record magazine win a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. He has written for numerous newspapers, magazines and books and consulted to environmental organizations, cities, and architects. He teaches at the City College of New York and is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.