ABSTRACT
This chapter examines climate protection in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city of 600,000 people located in the upper Midwest region of the US on the shores of Lake Michigan, approximately 90 miles north of Chicago. Although the City was one of the first communities to join the CCP-US campaign, we find that a meaningful connection has never been established between the local authority and the CCP network and that concern for controlling greenhouse gas emissions largely remains external to policy development. While Milwaukee has not explicitly developed a strategy for addressing climate change, it has embraced the principles of ‘new urbanism’, a planning strategy that seeks to promote sustainable urban development. In the second section, we consider the evolution of new urbanism and its relationship to sustainable development and climate protection. Specifically, we consider whether the planning principles that are central to new urbanist thinking can contribute to the goal of controlling greenhouse gas emissions in Milwaukee, or elsewhere. While new urbanism implicitly includes policy principles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they are based largely on the assumption that planning for compact forms of development and alternative forms of transport can reduce energy use (see also Chapters 5 and 10). In practice, we find that the relationship between planning, urban energy use and sustainability is not clear. Rather than serving as a simple means of implementing sustainable development, Milwaukee’s efforts to apply new urbanist principles have brought to light the tensions between economic, environmental and social objectives.
Milwaukee’s interest in climate protection stems from the personal interest and contacts of Mayor John Norquist, a Democrat elected in 1988, who reportedly knew the head of ICLEI and encouraged one of his staff members to get involved with the CCP campaign.1
Norquist has a general interest in environmental issues and his wife has been active with Citizens for a Better Environment, one of the state’s largest environmental organizations. The Mayor is also an advocate of new urbanism and has a coherent philosophy regarding the role of planning in making the city more liveable (Box 9.1).
