ABSTRACT

The four strategies to address UHIs – especially enhancing albedo and reducing waste heat – also help mitigate CC. Cities are estimated to account for more than 70 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. They are already taking an aggressive lead in reducing carbon footprints. Networks also facilitate cities’ entrepreneurialism, as mayors and city officials learn about practical, low-cost solutions to their own problems. The judicious balancing of CC mitigation and adaptation needs to take into account local and regional differences. The U.N.’s new Sustainable Development Goals have changed their lens and focus from rural to urban, with slums, squatter settlements, favela and barrios seen as fully worthy investment, no longer considering them non-permanent, illegitimate or hopeless. Suburban development should be stubbornly resisted in developing countries. Coping with climate will continue to escalate as a geopolitical problem. Among these political and cultural challenges, it’s time that the related professions of architecture, engineering, urban design and planning, ecology and surveying work together more closely. New Urbanism has been a major player in the debate about sprawl over the last quarter century, and a strong voice for livable and sustainable urban design and planning. Of the many virtues of cities, a number are particularly relevant to CC: economic productivity, social opportunity, creativity, commerce, community, arts and culture.