Over the past 25 years, the western edge of Missoula, Montana, has been a hotbed of growth. Thousands of residents have moved into new neighborhoods built on former agricultural land, with big box stores like Costco and Home Depot cropping up nearby. The city and county are now considering multi-use development of the 2,000 or so undeveloped acres remaining in the area—a tract surrounded on two sides by housing and adjacent to a main thoroughfare and the regional airport—and public input is key to shaping the direction of the project. But with the COVID-19 crisis halting all in-person planning meetings and approvals in the region, including a scheduled community charrette, the planning process went online.

During a multi-day virtual charrette in April, participants watched presentations and videos on the current plan, whose elements include affordable housing, community-supported agriculture, walkable urban centers, and the restoration of a local creek. They submitted questions and answered daily online polls, and those who couldn’t attend could access videos and submit comments after the fact. All told, more than 280 people participated in the charrette or later visited the “virtual studio.” The videos—on topics including historical and environmental preservation, traffic planning, and stormwater management—have gotten thousands of views.

“The event was attended by far more people and a wider variety of people than a live event,” said Jason King, a principal at Florida-based project consultant Dover, Kohl & Partners. “Landowners called in from Seattle, and a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation called in from the Flathead Reservation. These are people who it is difficult to get to an on-site charrette but who we talked to specifically because they could call in from their homes and offices.” At this virtual charrette and others the firm has held, King says, “we see more than just ‘the usual suspects’ from city council night.”

Amy Cotter of the Lincoln Institute, who previously directed regional planning initiatives for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Boston, says casting that broader net can make planning processes more representative and more robust. “Using technology could open the doors to people who have barriers to attending public meetings in person,” said Cotter. “Maybe they have to look after kids in the evening, or they don’t feel comfortable entering a public building, or have night class. By giving people more ways to access meetings, you’re going to get more participation and, I’d argue, better decisions.”

But shifting to virtual convenings isn’t always simple. Many localities have had to wait for state leaders to remove legal barriers preventing them from going forward. Florida, Delaware, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, and Utah are among states with executive action seeking to suspend, amend, or clarify open meeting laws to allow for remote meetings. Some legislatures are taking up the issue as well, with states including Oklahoma, Ohio, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania considering legislation that addresses open meeting laws and virtual engagement.

In New York City, the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States, Mayor Bill de Blasio temporarily suspended the city’s land-use decision making processes even as the city received state permission to hold online meetings. Anita Laremont, executive director of the city’s planning department, expects that planning meetings will restart shortly. But she also said that COVID-19, the economic crisis it has created, and its disruption to daily life means that planning departments need to be realistic about what needs to move forward and what can wait.

“We will look at everything we put forward through the lens of whether it helps with the recovery,” Laremont said. “If we have neighborhood rezonings designed to develop additional affordable housing, we might choose to go forward because that remains an issue in the city.”

When it comes to executing the meetings themselves, planners must consider access and equity. How can online meetings conducted in English provide translation for speakers of other languages? How can cities best reach those without internet access or technical know-how?

Many platforms do offer language interpretation services for meetings and webinars, and options such as a call-in number can give attendees without internet access the opportunity to listen and participate in a meaningful way. But whether planners use general videoconferencing tools such as Zoom or GoToMeeting or planning-specific tools such as coUrbanize and Polco, figuring out which platform’s services work best for a city’s needs requires legwork. 

“It means speaking to all of these platforms and trying to understand what they can accommodate,” said Laremont. “That’s the only way we’ve really been able to do it, is to go and talk to them.”

Comparing notes with fellow planners is also vital, said Milwaukee Long Range Planning Manager Sam Leichtling. His department has been exploring the methods peers across the country are employing and collecting examples of approaches that capture different audiences. 

“I applaud the private vendors trying to adapt their technology to COVID-19, and with the right scenario, those tools have amazing uses,” Leichtling said. “But as a profession, we have to acknowledge that’s not going to be the solution to every case. Phone trees, dropping literature off at neighborhood facilities, these analog methods are still vital.”

It may well be that future planning processes use some combination of methods to reach as many people as possible. King confirmed that Dover, Kohl intends to combine virtual and on-site sessions going forward, pointing out that online convenings offer additional benefits including a lower carbon footprint and reduced travel time and costs for consultants and other experts. Cotter also noted that the Lincoln Institute advances more effective and inclusive public engagement strategies through its Consortium for Scenario Planning, which involves stakeholders beyond the planning office by introducing diverse voices into the process.

“Will we return to a situation where we rely only on traditional public meetings?” Cotter asked. “I doubt it. I think this will be a component of the way cities conduct business going forward.”

Liz Farmer is a fiscal policy expert and journalist whose areas of expertise include budgets, fiscal distress, and tax policy. She is currently a research fellow at the Rockefeller Institute’s Future of Labor Research Center.

Photograph: A virtual charrette allowed planners and the public to exchange information and ideas related to a potential development in Missoula, Montana. Credit: Courtesy of Dover, Kohl & Partners.

This article is reprinted with permission from CityLab, where it originally appeared.

As U.S. states move into the next phase of the coronavirus crisis, they may not be getting all the help they want from the federal government, but they won’t be alone. In at least three parts of the country, states have banded together to coordinate changing public health measures and recovery efforts as they consider timelines for lifting lockdowns, knowing that neither the outbreak nor modern-day regional economies adhere to jurisdictional boundaries set long ago.

The foundation of these three multistate compacts—seven Northeast states, from Delaware to Massachusetts; the West Coast including California, Oregon, and Washington; and seven Midwestern states radiating around Chicago—is a once little-known planning framework, known as megaregions, that shows just how much big chunks of the country are interlinked.

The pandemic, it turns out, is exactly the kind of massive but geographically clotted crisis that reveals what Europeans have called “territorial cohesion.” Some parts of the country are taking it slow, while others—such as Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina—are moving faster to reopen.

Most may think of three basic levels of government—federal, state, and local—but planners have long recognized that much activity actually occurs at the regional scale, across geographically proximate clusters of settlement. People live in one state and commute to a city in another, or live in the city and travel to a second home many miles away if they can.

The megaregion framework has been useful for all kinds of initiatives, whether protecting wilderness and watersheds that similarly cross political jurisdictions, designing transportation policy including inter-city high-speed rail networks, agreeing on carbon emissions reductions, or building more affordable housing across a larger catchment of labor markets (though that last one is very much a work in progress).

States have been working together in some modest ways for years, forming some 200 cross-border compacts or alliances covering everything from infrastructure to regulatory regimes, says Jonathan Barnett, author of Designing the Megaregion: Meeting Urban Challenges at a New Scale. The better-together arrangements can be found at the National Center for Interstate Compacts, part of the Council of State Governments, which provides technical assistance to keep them working. New reasons to collaborate have been steadily emerging, such as the Missouri-Kansas pact limiting tax subsidies as incentives for business relocation.

And now, others who have studied megaregions say, the approach will be well-suited to coordinating reopenings, or continuing closures, as states manage the next phases of the Covid-19 pandemic. If that’s successful, states may use megaregions to make future improvements in housing, transportation, and the environment.

“It’s clear that actions to manage and recover from the pandemic will require regional action, since the virus doesn’t respect arbitrary political boundaries,” says Robert Yaro, former head of the Regional Plan Association and now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who is co-authoring a new book on megaregions to be published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (where I am a senior fellow).

“We can only hope this kind of collaboration will extend to the longer-term steps needed to rebuild the economy—and build the mobility systems and settlement patterns needed to mitigate against future events of this kind,” Yaro says.

The first clue that megaregions might be a useful way of confronting the pandemic emerged as early maps chronicling outbreak patterns mirrored the 11 U.S. megaregions outlined in 2008 by the Regional Plan Association initiative America 2050.

Just as the patterns of contagion mapped mostly along the megaregion categorization, fighting the disease intuitively seemed to require action and coordination across a broader geography than individual cities or states. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was among the first to propose working together with other states in the Northeast. In the early days of the crisis, there was inter-state tension, as when Rhode Island stopped New Yorkers traveling to summer communities, near the Connecticut border.

In any gradual reopening, it makes all kinds of sense for neighboring states to acknowledge their interconnectedness, says Frederick “Fritz” Steiner, dean of the UPenn Stuart Weitzman School of Design. The closing and reopening of beaches, for example, would benefit from coordination, so there isn’t a patchwork of policies on either side of any state’s borders. Megaregions, which inherently recognize the interconnections in the movement of people emerging from lockdowns, “provide an ideal scale for cooperation in this crisis,” he says.

States in the newly formed alliances have also been sharing protective equipment and other vital supplies. California plans to distribute protective equipment from a ramped-up manufacturing effort throughout the U.S. West, wherever the need is greatest; Montana got more masks from North Dakota than from the national stockpile. Cuomo has proposed a purchasing consortium to avoid a repeat of the “chaos” of 50 states competing for supplies.

It’s important to note that regional interdependency and cooperation does not mean that cities and states don’t need help from the federal government; they clearly do, on such fronts as massive testing and contact-tracing, procuring medical equipment, providing financial relief to people and businesses, keeping beleaguered transit systems financially solvent, and many more pressing needs.

For many it has been gratifying to see how a planning construct could become so useful in this desperate time of need. Planners have been trying to illustrate the advantages of a regional approach for many years, though it has been an uphill battle. Historically, states have often resisted working together—Yaro quips that coordinating efforts of any kind haven’t really been seen since the days of Alexander Hamilton, and even then it was halting. In the 20th century, landscape architect Ian McHarg demonstrated how energy and ecological systems better function across boundaries. For a while, multistate climate pacts, such as the Northeast Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, were de rigeur.

Researchers at America 2050 showed that rather than thinking about a national high-speed rail network, it made more sense to focus on more self-contained chunks of the country—Florida, the Pacific Northwest (or Cascadia), Northern and Southern California, the Texas Triangle, and the Boston-to-Washington corridor. The Federal Railroad Administration has also proposed similar networks for the Midwest, Southeast, and Southwest states, roughly corresponding to the America 2050 map.

In the near-term response to the Covid-19 crisis, any megaregion-scale coordination will initially have a focus on nuts-and-bolts logistics. But the real challenge is what comes after that. Can multiple states continue to think regionally while socioeconomic structures, with all of the built-in inequities that the pandemic has revealed, are refashioned into something more resilient?

Looking ahead, megaregions could become the policy vessel for new realities, including more people working remotely, allowing them to spread out across agglomerated labor and housing markets. “It might actually help mitigate the overconcentration of jobs and population in our largest urban regions—and alleviate the extreme congestion and run-up in housing prices that has undercut the livability and functionality of America’s densest urban places,” Yaro says.

The key to that transformation, he says, will be regional transportation networks that shorten travel times across larger landscapes. That means going back to the notion of better multistate commuter and high-speed rail, at the megaregional scale, like the Regional Plan Association’s T-REX proposal for the tri-state region around New York, the Transit Matters vision for expanded transit all around metro Boston, and an envisioned North Atlantic rail network, including a rerouted Acela through Hartford, for the six New England states and downstate New York. The U.K. is advancing similar strategies with its decision to build HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail, underpinning a broader economic development initiative for the north of England.

In a post-pandemic world, better rail networks could speed the economic recovery by providing access to major urban centers by residents of even distant, midsize and legacy cities, bringing in areas across a larger landscape that have been left to decline economically in recent decades.

The deadly coronavirus has laid waste to so much and taken tens of thousands of American lives so far. The rebuilding process, which stands to be a national project not seen since the Great Depression or the aftermath of World War II, might well be more effective if it is structured on a more regional basis. A more megaregional future awaits.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and a contributing editor to Land Lines.

Image credit: America 2050/Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

As Greece emerges from a decade-long financial crisis, the city of Athens is grappling with major challenges: E.U.-imposed austerity measures, a real estate collapse, ongoing security and migration issues, climate change, and now COVID-19. Kostas Bakoyannis, 41, was elected mayor in 2019, promising stability and reinvention. The son of two prominent Greek politicians, Bakoyannis is the city’s youngest elected chief executive but has had considerable experience. Holding undergraduate and graduate degrees from Brown University, Harvard University, and the University of Oxford, he was governor of Central Greece, mayor of Karpenissi, and served at the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European Parliament, and the World Bank. He also holds positions with the Hellenic Agency for Local Development and Local Government, European Council on Foreign Relations, and United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. On a recent visit to Cambridge, he spent time with Lincoln Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Flint.

Anthony Flint: You have said that you are focused not on grand projects, but on day-to-day quality of life in a city trying to make a comeback in a more incremental fashion. What are your reflections on your successful campaign and the experience thus far of being at the helm of local government?

Kostas Bakoyannis: I think in any campaign, it’s always about the message and not the messenger. Elections in the past in Greece have been about candidates higher up, talking down to the people. I took a different approach and started walking out in the neighborhoods. I listened with care and found that the people want a city to build its self-confidence and be optimistic again. Now we are reinventing city services and reinventing the city. Athens has three records: the least urban green per capita in Europe, the most asphalt, and our houses have the most square meters. We want to reclaim public space and especially reclaim space from the automobile. We have been studying traffic circulation, and are planning to close parts of the city center to cars. We will also create an archeological walkway around the city.

All in all, I’m living my dream. I’m giving it my all. I’ve been in local government for 10 years; higher office doesn’t compare. One day, when I first began my journey in local government, I was depressed and thinking we are a failure, and then I walked out and saw a playground we had just opened. It’s not about resolving the conflict between North and South Korea. It’s real, tangible, incremental change, improving the quality of life.

AF: Athens has been vexed over the years by the problem of vacant buildings and storefronts, graffiti, homelessness, and a general image of being dark and dirty. Can you tell us about your plans to clean things up?

KB: There was a very good article in an international magazine about the Greek economy, but at the top there was a photo of Athens, with two homeless people sleeping in front of closed stores that were full of graffiti. This is our challenge. Don’t forget that we are in a global race to attract talent, technology, and investment. And Athens is changing day by day. To mention a few examples: We have adopted the “broken windows” theory of social behavior [which suggests that visible signs of crime and decay invite more of the same] and are coordinating with the police. We have special equipment and run campaigns to clean up graffiti. We have a program called Adopt Your City, and public-private partnerships that are already bearing fruit. We are asking people who care and love the city to come help us. Regarding drugs, reforms have been made. The parliament recently passed a measure on supervised spaces for drug use—we haven’t operated one yet, but we are preparing to make it mobile, so it doesn’t stay too long in any one neighborhood. Local government will be able to operate such spaces. We are reclaiming public space, like Omonia Square, a city landmark—I think that’s going to be a symbol. There are elevated expectations about public space . . . it’s not just public works. We are producing more of a product, an experience.

AF: As part of that effort, you attracted controversy for clearing out squatters in the neighborhood of Exarchia, an effort that included dawn raids and relocating refugees and undocumented immigrants. How do you fulfill your campaign promise to restore law and order and curtail illegal immigration, while still being sensitive to the human lives at stake?

KB: Here is an example: An individual calling himself Fidel was running a hostel in a school, occupying it, and charging money. We securely moved the children to take advantage of social service provisions. Greek media have a thing about Exarchia. It becomes a political weapon for one side or the other. I don’t look at it that way. We have 129 neighborhoods, and Exarchia is a neighborhood with its own issues. Much of what we do has to do with persisting and insisting—it’s a question of who will get tired first. We will not get tired first.

On the subject of pluralism, we’re the canary in the coal mine. We survived the economic crisis, and we’re stronger today than in the past 10 years. We have more depth to our democracy, stronger institutions. We isolated extremists. We confronted the Fascist Nazi party Golden Dawn—we went to neighborhoods where they were doing well. We didn’t wag our fingers and tell people they were bad for voting for Golden Dawn. We said: we can provide better solutions to the problems you face.

Athens is a Greek city, a capital city, and a center for Greeks around the world. Having said that, Athens is changing and evolving. I remember seeing a young woman who was black in a parade, and she was proudly holding the flag—I think what she was saying was, ‘I’m as Greek as you are.’ We want to make sure everyone living in the city has the same rights and obligations.

AF: What are the most important elements of your plans to help Athens combat climate change—and prepare for its inevitable impacts in the years ahead?

KB: Think different! It is all about working bottom up. What’s happening that is most interesting in terms of public policy is in the cities, which are true laboratories of innovation. Nation-states are failing—there’s so much partisanship, and a toxic environment, and bureaucracies that cannot handle real problems; cities are closer to the citizen. We are proud to be a part of C40. Athens has developed a policy for sustainability and resilience. Among other things, we are working on ambitious but realistic interventions to liberate public space, multiplying green space, and creating car-free zones. For us, climate change is not a theory or an abstraction. It is a real and present danger that we can’t just sweep under the rug. It demands concrete responses.

AF: You recently had the opportunity to return to Cambridge and Harvard. What level of interest did you find in the future of Athens? Are there things you have learned from American cities, and what can the United States learn from you?

KB: I was enthused and heartened by the level of interest and am thankful for the engagement. I must admit that I was very proud to represent a city with a long and glorious past and a promising, bright future. We may live on different sides of the Atlantic, and in very different cities, but it is interesting that we face similar challenges as urban centers evolve and are transformed. And it is always great to share experiences and learning moments. Policies to further resilience are the most obvious example. And of course, battling social inequalities is at the top of all of our agendas. I am glad to have begun promising and fruitful conversations which will continue in the months and years to come.

Photograph: Athens Mayor Kostas Bakoyannis. Credit: City of Athens.

With the interstate highway system in its seventh decade, the condition of many urban highways in the United States has deteriorated. Crumbling viaducts and other unsafe conditions call for an urgent fix. But rebuilding is complicated by rising construction costs, higher engineering and safety standards, scant funding, and other factors. While the federal government underwrote most of the cost of building the interstate system in the 1950s and 1960s, state and local governments now provide about 80 percent of public infrastructure funding. With perspectives on land use, transit, and equity also evolving, many cities are finding themselves at a crossroads when it comes to highways: remove or rebuild?

Some cities are opting for reconstruction. In Orlando, Florida, a 21-mile stretch of interstate jammed with 200,000 vehicles a day is being upgraded in the $2.3 billion “I-4 Ultimate” project, which includes building or rebuilding 140 bridges, redesigning 15 interchanges, moving exits, and adding toll lanes. But other cities have removed their highways entirely or relocated them underground, which repairs divided neighborhoods and opens new vistas. San Francisco’s Octavia Boulevard, completed in 2003, replaced the former Central Freeway, damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Boston’s “Big Dig” moved an elevated section of the Central Artery underground, making way for the Rose Kennedy Greenway and reconnecting downtown districts to the harborfront.

Following these and other successful projects in places from Portland to Chattanooga, some of the biggest urban highway infrastructure efforts now involve deconstruction. Cities and states are trading highways for boulevards and connected streets that create space for public transit, walking, and cycling.

The Michigan Department of Transportation is planning to convert a one-mile stretch of I-375 in Detroit into a surface street; its construction in the 1960s paved over black neighborhoods in the city’s core. The Texas DOT is exploring ways to remove or reduce the footprint of the two major interstates that cut through Dallas, I-345 and I-30.

While government plays a key role, the highway removal movement often is built “from a grassroots base, by people in the neighborhood who have a vision for what it could be without the highway,” says Ben Crowther, manager of the Highways to Boulevards program of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). The organization advocates for replacing freeways with streets networks that can contribute to urban vitality and livability. But this is no high-speed process, Crowther says. These efforts “don’t take years—they take decades.”

An Accelerating Trend

“Urban highway removal has been happening in the United States for the last 30 years,” says Ian Lockwood, a livable transportation engineer with Toole Design Group in Orlando. “During the past few years, interest has accelerated.”

Lockwood has served multiple times on the National Advisory Committee for CNU’s Freeways Without Futures report, which identifies and studies roadways that are ripe for removal (see sidebar). Since 1987, more than 20 highway segments have been removed from downtowns and urban neighborhoods and waterfronts, mostly in North America, says CNU. Lockwood says the movement has gained a national focus as more cities recognize “how costly and incompatible building highways was in cities.”

According to federal lore, President Eisenhower didn’t intend for interstates to blast through cities when he signed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956. But during previous congressional hearings, mayors and municipal associations had testified in favor of the interstate system because of the benefits cities expected to receive from urban highway segments, and the idea soon became unstoppable. The interstate system would eventually span 47,000 miles, many of them routed through cities experiencing what would turn out to be peak mid-century population growth.

Lockwood, who has worked on many highway removal projects, says bringing highways up to code can heavily impact neighborhoods, due to requirements such as adding lanes or bridges and realigning ramps. Removal, however, has positive impacts. “As we slow things down, value gets added” to cities through more mobility choices, better urban design, and greater investments, which draw new people and businesses, he says.

“This trend is part of an evolution in how we think about who cities are designed to serve,” says Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Associate Program Director Jessie Grogan, who leads the organization’s work in the area of reducing poverty and spatial inequality. “No longer are cities being planned for cars and commuters from the suburbs; instead, their multiple roles as commerce centers, homes, and places of recreation and tourism are being acknowledged and encouraged.”

This trend also has economic benefits. Milwaukee replaced the 0.8-mile elevated Park East Freeway spur with McKinley Boulevard and restored the street grid to enhance access to downtown, surrounding neighborhoods, and the Milwaukee Riverwalk. A master urban design plan and form-based code were prepared to shape pedestrian-scaled development and reinforce the area’s original form and character. Removing the spur cost $25 million in federal and state funds, as well as local tax increment financing (TIF) funds, says Peter Park, former Milwaukee planning director. The project transformed 24 underutilized acres into prime downtown real estate. Ongoing development in the area has helped generate more than $1 billion in new downtown investments, Park says. Between 2001 and 2006, the average assessed land values per acre in the freeway footprint grew by over 180 percent, and the average assessed land values in the TIF district grew by 45 percent, compared to a citywide increase of 25 percent.

Freeways Without Futures

For over a decade, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) has campaigned for removing highways to improve cities. CNU published its first biannual Freeways Without Futures report in 2008, charting the benefits of highway removal, including knitting neighborhoods and communities together; revitalizing downtown cores; supporting active transportation; freeing up land for redevelopment for affordable housing, new businesses, and open space; and increasing tax revenues. The latest Freeways Without Futures report (CNU 2019) provides highway removal case studies for: I-10 (Claiborne Expressway, New Orleans, LA); I-275 (Tampa, FL); I-345 (Dallas, TX); I-35 (Austin, TX); I-5 (Portland, OR); I-64 (Louisville, KY); I-70 (Denver, CO); I-81 (Syracuse, NY); I-980 (Oakland, CA); and Kensington and Scajaquada Expressways (Buffalo, NY).

“We’ve shown that when you take the highway out of the city, it gets better,” says Park. “It’s that simple.” The most valuable real estate in any city is downtown, adds Park, who is a consultant to cities, a repeat member of CNU’s National Advisory Committee for the Freeways Without Futures report, and a former Lincoln/Loeb Fellow. By removing a highway, a city can develop more valuable assets, he says. An aging highway might attract matching dollars from the federal government for repairs, but if the city removes it and frees up land for redevelopment, that’s a much better long-term option for producing jobs, housing, tax revenues, and other benefits: “Building a city is the long play. There are no examples of a neighborhood that improved when a highway was cut through or over it. But every in-city highway removal has improved economic, environmental, and social opportunities for the local community.”

Overcoming a Dubious Legacy

While Eisenhower-era advocates promoted urban highways as expedient for shipping companies and suburban commuters, time has revealed a different story. Demographic and health data, photos, and maps confirm a fact known all too well by those living adjacent to highways: these roads cause serious health, economic, social, and environmental damage. Inserting highways often occurred in conjunction with “urban renewal” efforts, which targeted predominantly low-income and black communities with the least political purchase and least likelihood of resistance. Freeway construction in many U.S. cities caused homes and businesses to be demolished; limited access to housing, services, jobs, and open space; and polluted air, soil, and water.

Research on the short- and long-term impacts of living, working, and attending school near highways has documented many environmental and health risks, including elevated rates of asthma, cardiovascular disease, preterm birth, immune damage, and cancer. Tailpipe exhaust contains particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene. VOCs can react with nitrogen oxides to produce ozone, the most widespread outdoor air pollutant. Children, older adults, and people with preexisting conditions, especially in low-income urban areas, are at greater risk for air pollution-related health impacts, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). These environmental and health risks persist despite today’s more stringent emission and fuel standards, which have reduced harmful emissions by 90 percent compared to 30 years ago (EPA 2014).

“It’s important to understand the impact of the highway on the local community,” says Chris Schildt, senior associate at Oakland-based PolicyLink, a national research and action institute for advancing economic and social equity. Schildt managed the All-In Cities Anti-Displacement Policy Network in 2018 and 2019, which was composed of elected officials, senior staff, and representatives of local organizations in 11 cities impacted by displacement. The network focused on antidisplacement strategies cities can use when planning new public infrastructure investments.

“This is a chance for cities to start to repair the harm they created by bringing highways” through neighborhoods, Schildt says. One way to do that is for cities to secure land produced by highway removals for the community through land trusts or nonprofit organizations. If the city gains ownership of the land with the intent to redevelop, Schildt says, it should make sure that what gets built reflects actual needs expressed by the community.

In Minneapolis, the city’s newly adopted comprehensive plan includes a Freeway Remediation Recovery policy, which states the city will “repurpose space taken by construction of the interstate highway system and use it to reconnect neighborhoods and provide needed housing, employment, green space, clean energy, and other amenities consistent with city goals.” The city estimates the impacts on land value and tax revenue for property taken for freeway construction at $655 million.

Reclaiming a Roadway in Rochester

On a one-mile stretch of road in Rochester, New York, a neighborhood is growing, with new housing, restaurants, and retail. It’s the kind of development that might seem promising in any rebounding legacy city—but it’s especially remarkable for its location atop a former section of highway.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, a growing population of 332,000 and an increasingly traffic-clogged downtown led Rochester to construct the Inner Loop, a sunken beltway around the city core that spanned up to 12 lanes with travel lanes, ramps, and frontage roads. Officials demolished nearly 1,300 homes and businesses to make way for the 2.7-mile expressway, which connects to I-490. At least two similar projects didn’t get built because of local opposition. Before the loop’s eastern segment was built, the corridor was home to a working-class neighborhood with dense, tenement-style apartment buildings that was connected to more affluent East End neighborhoods. In the five decades that followed, as population declined by a third, many sites adjacent to the loop remained or became vacant.

The idea of eliminating the loop’s eastern segment and replacing it with a boulevard first appeared in 1990 in the city’s Vision 2000 plan, says Erik Frisch, a transportation planner and manager of special projects for the Rochester Department of Environmental Services: “From that point forward, every city plan created by or on behalf of the city contained the idea of removing this section, saying it had been overbuilt and created a moat-like barrier to downtown.” Traffic on this section of highway, which Frisch said never met its potential, had declined to only 7,000 vehicles per day, a volume that could be accommodated by a boulevard.

Federally funded planning and scoping began in 2008, says Frisch, but it wasn’t until 2013, when the city secured a TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) grant, that the project began to take shape. The city adjusted its plans, mobilized public engagement, and moved quickly to complete design and begin construction. The $22 million planning and construction costs were covered with $17.7 million in federal TIGER funds, $3.8 million in state matching funds, and $414,000 in city matching funds.

“It took so long to go from idea to reality that we had many planning layers,” notes Frisch. The city worked with small businesses, developers, and property owners in the corridor and on adjacent streets. “The goal of this effort was consistent: to serve transportation needs and encourage investment in a walkable and bikeable neighborhood.”

In 2014, the city began the work of burying the segment and building an at-grade, two-way street with cross-street connections to downtown. It demolished retaining walls and three bridges that had spanned the expressway and filled the roadbed with 120,000 cubic yards of earth. Stantec engineers and urban designers helped plan the streets, addressing challenges such as design for the north and south ends of the boulevard to ensure safe transitions from expressway to city streets. Getting land uses and character right was a big part of the redevelopment success, says Frisch. The city extended the existing center-city zoning, which is a form-based code, to these properties.

Completed in 2017, the new Union Street features two to four vehicle lanes, parking lanes, sidewalks, two-way protected bike lanes, signaled crosswalks, bike racks, benches, trees, and landscaping. The city maintains the new street infrastructure. Between 2014 and 2019, walking increased 50 percent and biking 60 percent in the project area, and the city anticipates more pedestrian and bike traffic as development around Union Street increases, says Frisch.

Charlotte Square on the Loop, with 50 affordable apartments, eight of which are reserved for ex-offenders reentering the workforce, was the first development in Rochester’s Inner Loop East Transformation Project. In the fast-growing area, Rochester-based Home Leasing also developed 10 market-rate townhomes and recently began construction on Union Square at the East End for Trillium Health, with 66 affordable apartments, including homes for people living with HIV and seniors requiring assistance. The project also will have a pharmacy, a service that downtown had lacked.

In all, the new neighborhood on and around the former expressway will include 534 housing units, more than half subsidized or below market rate, and 152,000 square feet of new commercial space, including services and amenities such as a day care center and restaurants, reflecting the city’s priority for an inclusive neighborhood with affordable homes and needed services. The largest project located on the new parcels will be the Neighborhood of Play, an expansion of the city’s popular Strong National Museum of Play that will include 236 apartments, a 120-suite hotel, retail, and a parking garage.

Seeing “$229 million in economic development from $22 million in public investment is a real coup,” said Anne DaSilva Tella, Rochester’s assistant commissioner of the Department of Neighborhood and Business Development, in a CNU webinar (CNU 2020). She noted that the project had also created 170 permanent jobs and over 2,000 construction jobs.

“The value created on the 6.5 acres is an incredible return on investment,” says Frisch. With only one project so far completed within the seven parcels created by burying the expressway, the city doesn’t have property tax revenues yet. But Frisch says private investment that otherwise would not have happened has extended beyond the site to increase property values and tax revenues and encourage new development, including residential and mixed-use structures on both sides of the boulevard, and redevelopment of nearby brownfield sites. Within blocks, a former hospital campus and an underused office building are being redeveloped, and a brewpub is expanding.

Removing the highway segment “has lifted the whole downtown area,” says Frisch. “We’ve seen it come back strong, because we’re making places of value where people want to invest.” The city also saved taxpayers $34 million by avoiding the future costs of federally required highway lifecycle repairs and maintenance. “That alone was greater than the project cost,” he says. The city recently began a Phase 2 planning study for the potential removal of the northern segment of the Inner Loop, which could help an area with more concentrated poverty connect to economic opportunities downtown.

“When federal or state funds are available for this kind of major investment in infrastructure, examples like Rochester show how these investments are repaid in multiples,” says Grogan of the Lincoln Institute. “Not only is this good for the short-term bottom line of cities, it can also increase access to opportunity for residents, which can lead to an improvement in their long-term financial and other life outcomes.”

I-10 in New Orleans

“My early memories of Claiborne Avenue were of being able to walk to the butcher, the grocery store, the dance supply shop,” says Amy Stelly, an urban planner and designer. “Those kinds of businesses don’t exist now. Some people lost land, some lost their businesses. We had a median with grass and trees and a grand traffic circle. Everyone misses that, because it made the area beautiful.”

Stelly is cofounder and creative director of the Claiborne Avenue Alliance, a coalition of local residents and property and business owners lobbying to “reclaim, restore, and rebuild” the Claiborne Corridor in New Orleans, which for over half a century has existed in the shadows of the elevated I-10 expressway. As a kid, she says, “I knew intuitively this was not right, and promised myself to work to change this situation.”

One of CNU’s Freeways Without Futures, the I-10 Claiborne Expressway slices through the neighborhood of Tremé (tre-MAY). Located next to the French Quarter, Tremé historically was the city’s main community of free people of color, and is renowned for its African-American and Creole-influenced food, music, and culture. Claiborne Avenue, which stretches for seven blocks through Tremé, was its main boulevard and commercial corridor, distinguished by a wide, tree-lined median park that served as the community’s main gathering place, including for Mardi Gras parades. Today, Mardi Gras revelers gather within sight of looming overpasses.

Construction on the Claiborne Expressway finished in 1968, around the time that a decades-long preservation battle resulted in the defeat of a proposed expressway along the Mississippi River in the French Quarter. The Claiborne Avenue community had little political clout. Hundreds of businesses, homes, and trees in the thriving corridor had been destroyed.

In 2012, Stelly returned to Tremé and her childhood home less than two blocks from the interstate after working for years in other cities, including with New Urbanist planners Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. She began researching the history of the I-10 and became an advocate, like others before her, for taking down what many call “the monster.” Few thriving businesses line the corridor now, and the paving beneath the expressway is used as “a two-mile free parking lot,” Stelly says, with some areas occupied with drug sales, prostitution, and encampments for homeless people.

Demographic data point to impacts on the area’s population, racial composition, and economic level at least partially due to the arrival of the interstate. Over the past few decades, Tremé’s population has declined along with that of the city at large; the population of New Orleans shrank from 628,000 in 1960 to an estimated 391,000 by 2018. Between 2000 and 2017, the population of Tremé declined from 8,853 to 4,682, according to the Data Center, an independent nonprofit data analysis resource for Southeast Louisiana (The Data Center 2019). Both declines were partly the result of Hurricane Katrina, which caused significant flooding and damage in 2005. Tremé saw a post-Katrina influx of more affluent white residents, amplified by outside investors who renovated or built homes for short-term rentals, displacing long-term residents. In 2000, over 92 percent of households were black, and 57 percent lived below the poverty line; by 2017, 63 percent of households were black, 28 percent were white, and 39 percent of residents were living in poverty, compared to a citywide rate of 25 percent.

The notion of removing I-10 has been the subject of multiple studies, the first dating to the 1970s. In 2010, CNU’s Highways to Boulevards program brought planners to Tremé to create a vision for restoring the commercial corridor. A subsequent report and preliminary design advocated for the restoration of North Claiborne Avenue as a vibrant boulevard, with new street connections and multimodal infrastructure, a landscaped median park and grand traffic circle, and new homes and businesses (Smart Mobility and Waggonner & Ball 2010).

These planning efforts helped the city obtain a $2 million federal TIGER planning grant, which funded the Livable Claiborne Communities Study (Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy 2014). That study presented three options: maintain the expressway ($300 million for repair and maintenance over 20 years), remove ramps and develop street infrastructure in residential areas ($100 million to $452 million over the same time period), or remove the expressway entirely and develop a street-level urban boulevard, new street connections, and alternative transportation infrastructure ($1 billion to $4 billion). The third option would reclaim nearly 50 acres of land for open space and redevelopment.

While CNU’s vision of removing the highway and restoring the corridor “really resonates with people,” says Stelly, the city pursued another path. In 2017, city leaders partnered with the Foundation for Louisiana to launch an effort to develop the Claiborne Cultural Innovation District (CID) under I-10. With support from city, state, and regional agencies and the Greater New Orleans Funders Network, composed of 10 national and local foundations, a master plan for a 19-block innovation district was developed that would include micro-businesses, a marketplace, a youth activity area, performance space, and green infrastructure elements including bioswales, trees, and freeway drainage systems. The district would be phased in over 15 years, at a cost of $10 million to $45 million. Though some areas beneath the expressway have drawn artists, pop-up retail, and food vendors, revitalization has not been widespread or consistent, says Stelly, illustrating her point with a photo of an abandoned shipping-container kiosk that now provides a place for homeless people to gather.

The Alliance has objected to the plan and called for freeway removal, as well as for funds to improve the avenue’s existing building stock, for infill development on vacant land, and for restoration of the median as public open space. The group faces political opposition, however, from heavyhitters including the Port of New Orleans, which generates $100 million in revenue annually. In 2013, Port officials publicly supported the retention of I-10 as an important corridor between industrial real estate properties on the Inner Harbor and its riverfront facilities. The irony, says Stelly, is that “the avenue beneath the interstate is often empty while the interstate is backed up. People don’t think of other options.”

The Alliance has been gathering data to convince the community and city officials that the CNU vision will provide economic, social, and health benefits. The group commissioned a study by the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center School of Public Health, located just south of Tremé, that analyzed decibel levels, air quality, and other indicators. The study found concerns including traffic-related air contaminants, lead in the soil, noise pollution, and fine-particulate emissions. It said vulnerable populations included children, seniors, pregnant women, those with compromised immune systems, and homeless populations living under I-10, and that policies encouraging use of the land beneath the interstate posed additional threats to health. The study also noted “the removal and paving over of historic green spaces along the corridor have exacerbated the impacts of local flooding, with consequences for water quality, ease of local transportation, [and] use of outdoor spaces.”

In summary, the LSU researchers noted that the interstate’s “physical division of previously connected neighborhoods and the removal of businesses along what used to be a commercial artery have fragmented the community socially, culturally, and economically. Today, poverty and crime are disproportionately experienced by residents of the Claiborne Corridor, and reliable access to jobs, housing, and transportation remains a challenge” (LSU 2019).

In January 2020, the Alliance launched a data-gathering “tactical urbanism” project on I-10 structural columns called “Paradise Lost, Paradise Found” to seek community responses to its vision for a restored Claiborne Avenue. It also presented its vision to the New Orleans City Council’s Transportation Committee.

“Very clear environmental racism led to the destruction of businesses and homes along that corridor,” notes Kristin Gisleson Palmer, the city council member who represents Tremé and chairs the Transportation Committee. As a city council member in 2010, Palmer advocated for taking down the expressway and wrote a grant that led to the Livable Claiborne Communities Study.

Given the increasing impacts of climate change, including storms that repeatedly flood Tremé and other parts of the city, she says, the city council has priorities other than removing the viaduct. Short-term, the city’s focus in the Claiborne Corridor should be on an incremental plan for new green infrastructure and housing, Palmer suggests. Bike and walking paths, alternative transportation, and flexible open space with trees and other stormwater management elements under and adjacent to the expressway would mitigate flood risks, enhance the corridor’s business environment, and still be useful if the expressway eventually were taken down.

Palmer still advocates for removal, as do most people in the community, she says, though some fear that taking it down will lead to further gentrification and displacement.

The Way Forward

In July 2019, the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee advanced the America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act of 2019, which includes funding for the study and removal of highways in cities. The five-year program would allocate grants of up to $2 million for planning, $15 million for technical assistance, and $5 million up to half the total cost of capital construction, with total federal assistance capped at 80 percent. Priority would be given to disadvantaged communities whose highway removal projects could be covered completely. Unlike past federal block grants, this funding is targeted specifically for removing highways, and focuses on economic development. Grants would be available to cities, states, metropolitan planning organizations, and, for the first time, community and nonprofit organizations.

To prepare for a potential infusion of federal highway removal funds, CNU is assembling a best practices manual and tool kit that could be adopted by municipalities. “Cities have been working from scratch,” says Larry Gould, a principal and transit planner with NelsonNygaard in New York City and a CNU board member. Decisions about highway removals are “context-sensitive,” he says, and determining factors include physical and policy contexts, as well as funding and community vision. The manual will likely include design standards, transportation network concepts, engineering specifications, and metrics to measure success.

Some planners have already been sharing lessons learned. In a webinar for the global Institute for Transportation and Development Policy on the unintended consequences and solutions for urban highways, Peter Park outlined several requirements for successful highway removal and redevelopment (ITDP 2019):

1. strong community support, leadership, and political will;
2. an urban vision for the city that is not dominated by automobiles and favors short trips by different modes, such as walking and biking, along routes that are part of the city fabric, like well-connected streets and multiuse path networks;
3. decisions driven by a long-term community investment strategy rather than by the short-term pressure of spending federal allocations;
4. control of land by local government and clear regulations, such as form-based codes that create walkable urban places and shape new development that supports priorities like affordable housing and job creation.

PolicyLink’s Schildt says public officials and staff should consider key questions: Has the city discussed highway removal with the neighborhoods affected before seeking funding or beginning planning? How will the city reduce the impacts of deconstruction? How will the city ensure that investments don’t signal to the private market that this is an up-and-coming neighborhood, which could catalyze higher land costs, rent increases, and destabilization? What kinds of affordable housing, tenant protections, and job-generation policies and programs are in place? Be transparent about the realities on the ground and present them to the community early in the planning process, says Schildt. “If you receive a $2 million grant for planning a highway teardown that took 10 years to get, but the community doesn’t want to remove the highway, are you willing to reject it and start over with a planning process that identifies and responds to what the community wants?”

As urban highway removal becomes a viable option, the costs and benefits are increasingly clear. New Orleans City Council member Palmer notes the city now has “concrete examples of other cities that have taken down expressways” resulting in success and economic development. “The reality is that something has to be done with the expressway, and at some point the feds are going to have to reconstruct it or take it down,” she says. “Taking it down is expensive, but reconstructing it could cost even more.”

Kathleen McCormick, principal of Fountainhead Communications in Boulder, Colorado, writes frequently about healthy, sustainable, and resilient communities. As a board member for CNU Colorado in 2012–2014, she advocated for removing I-70 through Denver.

Photograph: Milwaukee tore down the 0.8-mile Park East Freeway spur, replacing it with McKinley Boulevard and freeing up 24 acres of land for redevelopment. Credit: Courtesy of Congress for the New Urbanism.

References

City of Minneapolis. 2019. “Freeway Remediation Policy.” Minneapolis 2040 (website). https://minneapolis2040.com/policies/freeway-remediation.

CNU (Congress for the New Urbanism). 2019. Freeways Without Futures. Washington, DC: CNU. https://www.cnu.org/highways-boulevards/freeways-without-futures/2019.

CNU (Congress for the New Urbanism), Maryland Department of Planning, and Smart Growth Network. 2020. “American Highways Are Being Removed. What’s Next?” Webinar. February 4. https://smartgrowth.org/american-highways-are-being-removed-whats-next.

ITDP (Institute for Transportation and Development Policy). 2019. “Urban Highways: Unintended Consequences and Possible Solutions.” Webinar. December 16. https://www.itdp.org/event/urban-highways/.

ITDP (Institute of Transportation and Development Policy) and EMBARQ. 2012. The Life and Death of Urban Highways. New York, NY: ITDP (March). https://www.itdp.org/2012/03/13/the-life-and-death-of-urban-highways/.

Kittelson & Associates and Goody Clancy. 2014. “Livable Claiborne Communities Final Report.” https://s3.amazonaws.com/networkneworleans/9-LCC-Study-Final-Report-web.pdf.

LSU (Louisiana State University Health-New Orleans School of Public Health). 2019. “Traffic-Related Pollutants and Human Health Within the I-10 Claiborne Corridor, New Orleans, LA: Land Use Implications.” April 4. https://www.cnu.org/sites/default/files/Claiborne%20Corridor%20Report_KATNER_05042019.pdf.

Plyer, Allison, and Lamar Gardere. 2018. “The New Orleans Prosperity Index: Tricentennial Edition: Measuring New Orleans’ Progress toward Prosperity.” New Orleans, LA: The Data Center (April). https://s3.amazonaws.com/gnocdc/reports/ProsperityIndex.pdf.

Smart Mobility and Waggonner & Ball. 2010. “Restoring Claiborne Avenue: Alternatives for the Future of Claiborne Avenue.” July. https://www.cnu.org/sites/default/files/Claiborne_Alternatives_071510.pdf.

The Data Center. 2019. “Tremé/Lafitte Statistical Area.” Data Resources (website). Last updated April 19, 2019. https://www.datacenterresearch.org/data-resources/neighborhood-data/district-4/treme-lafitte/.

EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency). 2014. “Near Roadway Air Pollution and Health: Frequently Asked Questions.” Washington, DC: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Transportation and Air Quality (August). https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-11/documents/420f14044_0.pdf.

In the face of rapid changes to technology, the climate, and the global economy, a growing number of cities and regions use scenario planning to prepare for an uncertain future. The new book Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions: Managing and Envisioning Uncertain Futures, by Robert Goodspeed, explores this growing and evolving practice and offers the first in-depth examination of how urban planners and the communities they serve can make better decisions about the future.

A procedural tool originally developed for military and corporate strategic planning, scenario planning enables communities to create and analyze multiple plausible versions of the future. Unlike traditional approaches that begin with forecasting, scenario planning starts with a consideration of multiple plausible futures based on the different ways that major uncertainties could evolve. 

Historically, the planning field has largely ignored uncertainty, resulting in plans that perpetuated the status quo rather than preparing residents for the future. Inflexible plans can lead to disaster, however: homes flooded because they were built in areas thought to be safe from storms, public funds wasted on infrastructure to accommodate overestimated growth, or expensive mismatches between affordable housing types and residents’ needs.

By contrast, scenario planning puts uncertainties at the heart of the process, prompting practitioners to examine key variables like changing climate and weather patterns, uncertain growth trends, and evolving housing preferences. With this focal shift, a city might implement strategies that contend directly with unknown levels of sea-level rise, that direct efforts to maximize housing affordability, or that use critical natural resources more equitably and sustainably.

When this analysis focuses on forces within the city itself, planners can explore not only what may change but also what could change to advance community goals—or as the result of other interventions. When participants focus on external uncertainties, they can better prepare for changes in the broader environment, improving resilience to uncertain but foreseeable events. Taken together, these investigations help cities pursue practical transformation.

Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions examines how this tool can be adapted to a range of urban and regional planning contexts—and how it can empower practitioners and citizens alike to better address the unprecedented challenges that lie ahead for cities and regions. Intended for urban planners, students, and researchers, the book features practical guidance on scenario planning methods, modeling and simulation tools, and detailed case studies.

University of Southern California Professor Dowell Myers notes, “This masterwork on scenario planning is wonderfully accessible and deeply grounded in planning theory and systems thinking about interconnections and uncertainties. Robert Goodspeed has created the best explanation I’ve ever seen for understanding this planning strategy that is so urgently needed for guiding our cities through the turbulent 21st century.”

The book brings scenario planning to life with in-depth explorations of how planners and citizens have used the tool in their communities. Cases explored in the book include the Austin Sustainable Places Project, which used normative scenarios for low-budget, neighborhood-level land use planning in Texas, and the Sahuarita Exploratory Scenario Project, which employed exploratory scenarios to analyze an Arizona town’s general plan applied to possible futures. Although it focuses on U.S. cases, the book also describes international applications of scenario planning, including an ambitious Queensland, Australia, regional planning project, and covers foundational work by the Royal Dutch Shell company, which developed scenario creation methodology in the 1980s to analyze the global business environment.

Goodspeed also examines the history of both scenario and urban planning, showing how once-distinct fields can combine to create comprehensive long-range plans that account for a wide range of potential futures and build consensus among diverse stakeholders. He further demonstrates how scenario planning is uniquely suited to contemporary planning challenges and concludes, “Cities exist as they are, not as we wish they were, and scenario planning offers a good way to comprehend and plan them well.” 

“This book is an essential resource for anyone interested in using scenario planning to inform and improve planning and policy making,” University of Akron Emeritus Professor of Geography, Planning, and Urban Studies Richard E. Klosterman said. “It combines an instructive history of scenario planning, illustrative case studies, an overview of digital tools for creating and evaluating scenarios, a careful review of empirical studies, and a useful framework for evaluating urban scenario outcomes.”

Allison Ehrich Bernstein is principal at Allative Communications.

Photograph: Dripping Springs, Texas, was one of four towns outside of Austin that completed a scenario planning process to inform its local land use plan. Credit: Robert Goodspeed. 

At the heart of Shenzhen, China, the city’s massive, wavelike Civic Center stands surrounded by a mind-boggling panoply of futuristic skyscrapers. Forty years ago, this area was home to just a few scattered fishing villages on the Pearl River Delta. Today, approximately 24 million people live within Shenzhen’s greater urban area.

In China, Shenzhen has come to stand for something much bigger than itself. On a hill downtown, a statue of revered former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping striding purposefully toward the Civic Center helps explain why. Deng took control of China in 1978, after the death of Mao Zedong. The transition marked an end to decades of isolation from the outside world that had been dominated by command-and-control planning. Deng turned the country in a radically new direction, launching the Reform and Opening program to loosen the strictures that had bound the country for so long. And Shenzhen led the way into the future.

Deng granted the newly created city a license to operate as an economic superlaboratory, a place to explore the promise of the free-market economy. It was a sink-or-swim proposition, and in the years since, Shenzhen has succeeded wildly. Yet Shenzhen’s spectacular growth has come at a cost. As the area transcended its naturally marshy environment and turned from literal backwater into economic powerhouse, much of its land cover succumbed to blacktop and concrete. During storms, the abundance of paved-over land caused widespread flooding, as well as large-scale releases of urban pollution into nearby Shenzhen Bay and the Pearl River Delta.

Shenzhen is hardly alone in facing these problems. But continuing in its role as a national hotspot of innovation, it has become a unique laboratory for thinking about how to build livable cities throughout China and beyond.

Six miles northeast of Deng’s statue, Professor Huapeng Qin stands on a rooftop, surrounded by sensors measuring wind speed, temperature, and evaporation. He is looking for solutions.

Based at the local satellite campus of Peking University, Qin is at the forefront of an effort to turn Shenzhen into a “sponge city.” Using techniques that mimic nature, sponge cities can catch, clean, and store rain, which reduces the risk of flooding and keeps local drainage and water treatment systems from being overwhelmed.

Although it takes its cue from centuries-old thinking, the modern concept of the sponge city began forming in Europe, Australia, and the United States in the early to mid-1990s. The movement was a reaction to two common phenomena in urban development. First, just as happened in Shenzhen, most rapidly developing cities pave over huge amounts of land, eliminating a significant amount of natural forest cover, filling in lakes and wetlands, and severely disrupting the natural water cycle. Second, the traditional approach to urban stormwater management has focused on moving as much rain as possible off the land as quickly as possible, not capturing it for reuse.

Sponge city thinking marks a significant shift away from traditional “gray infrastructure”—think concrete pipes and dams—to “green,” or natural, infrastructure such as rain gardens and forests. The sponge city approach aims to restore some of those natural functions by allowing urban areas to transform the menace of stormwater into a boon: extra water for dry times.

Sponge city techniques therefore have multiple benefits. They can help soften the impact of flooding, improve both water quality and water supply, and help fix environmental problems. The sponge city concept is a relatively new arrival in China, but it has gained traction here fast. That’s partly due to the country’s tremendous growth over the past several decades, which has drastically altered the landscape. It’s also due to a new mindset about the risks of pursuing prosperity at all costs. In July 2012, a huge rainstorm in Beijing led to flooding that caused 79 deaths and an estimated $1.7 billion in damage. The incident galvanized national leaders.

In late 2013, President Xi Jinping officially endorsed the sponge city concept, and the following year the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued a set of technical guidelines aimed at ensuring that 70 percent of surface runoff be captured in place. The central government also launched what would ultimately become a 30-city pilot program to prove out the concept. Shenzhen is one of the pilot cities, and it’s no coincidence that the sponge city concept has gotten more traction here than anywhere else in China. From financial policy to the tech sector, “Shenzhen has always been very willing to borrow ideas from outside China and try them out,” says Qin. The sponge city idea is no different. “First it was just scattered pilot projects, but now the concept is being incorporated into Shenzhen’s master plan.”

In this case, Qin and his students are trying to learn more about techniques for creating green roofs, using plants grown in a medium of lightweight engineered soil to catch rain where it falls, slowly meting it out afterward. Such techniques are “very similar to natural systems,” Qin says. “Natural systems look very simple, but the processes are very complex. So we’re trying to understand those processes.”

A sponge city has several interchangeable building blocks. At a large scale, protecting or restoring forests and natural ground cover helps give water a chance to sink in. At smaller scales, there are several options. Permeable pavement can be used on roadways, sidewalks, and pathways to allow water to infiltrate the ground, rather than wash off into the local stormwater system. Retention ponds and constructed wetlands help catch and filter water, allowing it to slowly percolate into the local water table. So-called rain gardens perform a similar function at a smaller scale, and can easily be incorporated into neighborhood green space or even homes. Green roofs catch and filter rain, along the way watering plants that, Qin says, can help reduce surface temperature by up to nine degrees Celsius.

Shenzhen’s embrace of the sponge city concept has been driven by its spirit of innovation, but also by the fact that the effects of an unbalanced water cycle are often plain to see here. Heavy rains can overwhelm local water treatment plants, sending nutrient-laden wastewater directly into Shenzhen Bay and the Pearl River Delta, causing large algae blooms. People are also worried about the impacts of climate change. In what may have been a taste of what’s to come, Super Typhoon Mangkhut, which hit in 2018, blew down half the trees in the city.

Qin says computer models predict that with climate change, total annual rainfall will be comparable with current levels, but that precipitation will be much “flashier”: extreme events like short-duration, high-intensity rainstorms will become more common. This area has absorbed an influx of millions of people over the past few decades, largely by turning its back on the water that was once its defining characteristic. Now, Qin and others across the city are committed to finding new ways forward. The lessons they are learning and applying here are the first steps in what may soon be a sweeping transformation—not only in the city around them, but also throughout China.

“Sponge cities are just one example of how China is taking up the sustainability agenda,” says Zhi Liu, director of the Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy. Acknowledging the urgency of building climate resilience in the face of extreme weather and other challenges, he says, “This is not something China wants to do in order to look good. It comes out of necessity.”

Until two years ago, the 105-acre patch of green space now known as Honey Lake Park was an abandoned agricultural experiment station. The dominant features of the park, which sits not far from downtown Shenzhen, were a neglected grove of lychee trees and two fish ponds. Today, walking into the park feels like walking into an architectural rendering. Yet in the company of an expert, it quickly becomes clear that the park is not only aesthetically pleasing but also eminently functional.

Yaqi Shi, a technical director with the Shenzhen-based Techand Ecology & Environment company, helped design the park. The paths that we are walking on, she explains, are constructed of permeable pavement, and the park’s rolling contours are hugged by small swales that help slow and catch runoff. A series of ponds in the middle of the park is sown with native rushes that Techand raised in its own nursery. Signs throughout the park point out the various sponge city elements and explain how they work.

Shi, whose professional focus is ecological restoration, speaks with the brisk economy of an engineer. But the delight in her voice is evident when she speaks of the evolution of this project. “The park turned out to have a really user-friendly feeling,” she says. As we walk, Shi points out a library, a children’s play center, and the local wedding registration office, all within the boundaries of the park. A pavilion at the edge of a pond provides an ideal backdrop for cooing newlyweds to pose for portraits.

A walk with Shi also makes it clear that much of the technology underlying sponge cities is, in fact, surprisingly low-tech. The real art of the approach lies not so much in being technically clever, but simply in being thoughtful. Shi explains, for example, that much of Shenzhen is underlain by a layer of clay, which prevents water from infiltrating very far into the ground. To make permeable pavements work means hiring contractors to dig out the clay, sometimes to a depth of six feet, and replace it with gravel and more permeable soil.

Nonetheless, once you get a sense of what to look for, Shenzhen suddenly starts to seem like an entirely different city. On the northwest side, a relatively new suburb called Guangming has wholeheartedly embraced the sponge city concept. The suburb’s recently built New City Park is a model of retaining stormwater in place, from a water-absorbing latticework in the parking lot to permeable pavement on the paths, to swales and miniature, artificial wetlands designed to slow and soak up water. The massive adjacent public sports center has a green roof and a vast expanse of permeable bricks and pavement. The anaerobic digesters at the Guangming water treatment plant are covered by an enormous green roof; there’s another at the foreign languages school. Over at the high-speed rail station, where bullet trains thunder in from Hong Kong, the streets out front are made of permeable pavement.

After a while here, it’s hard to resist the temptation to, little by little, empty your water bottle onto Shenzhen’s sidewalks and streets, simply for the novel sensation of watching the water disappear into what otherwise appears to be regular blacktop and concrete.

Back downtown, the Nature Conservancy’s Xin Yu shows me another side of the sponge city revolution. We meet in the lobby of a Hilton hotel just a mile from the Civic Center and the nearby hilltop statue of Deng Xiaoping. After quick pleasantries, Yu takes me out a back service door. Compared to the airy elegance of the hotel lobby, it feels as if we’ve passed through a portal into another dimension.

We find ourselves in the narrow alleyways of an area known as Gangxia, a former farming village that Shenzhen gradually engulfed, and that subsequently metamorphosed into a crowded warren of five- and six-story apartment buildings. Gangxia and other so-called urban villages are a phenomenon found in practically every Chinese city, and are testament to the frenetic pace at which the country has urbanized over the past 40 years. They are often gritty, but they’re an important haven for low-income migrants who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford the high rents of most urban areas. They typically come to form largely self-contained communities with small businesses that cater to all the needs of their residents, from vegetable sellers to modest karaoke parlors.

Yu nimbly leads me through the narrow back alleys, and it quickly becomes clear that “village” is a misnomer. The densely packed buildings here are known as “handshake apartments,” built so close together that residents of neighboring buildings can reach through their windows to shake each other’s hands. Restaurants are preparing for the lunchtime rush, and the air is filled with the staccato rhythm of vegetables being chopped. Business here, Yu says, is vibrant and extremely competitive: “These alleyways really are alive.”

Gangxia’s original residents didn’t technically own the land upon which their houses were built, but they did have rights to use that land. As Shenzhen grew during the 1980s and 1990s, they replaced their own houses with apartment buildings, often keeping one floor for themselves and renting out the rest, to take advantage of rising rents.

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has played an important role in showing that it’s possible to incorporate sponge thinking even in the heart of the urban jungle. “There are a lot of ideas, but the government or companies can’t necessarily try things out,” Yu says. “NGOs can. We can figure out what ideas work and take them back to the government to promote more broadly.” (Due to the current political climate in China, Shenzhen municipal officials were not in a position to meet for this story.)

Yu opens a gate to an otherwise nondescript apartment building and climbs several flights of stairs to the roof—and an improbable flourish of lush greenery. A multilevel lattice framework groans with plants of every description. This green roof, Yu says, catches over 65 percent of the rain that lands on it.

Showing what’s possible hasn’t always been easy. When TNC first started this green roof project, Yu and his colleagues had to contend with angry neighbors who thought they were illegally adding another story to the building. “People kept calling different government departments: the police, or the construction bureau, or the city administration bureau,” Yu says. That led to several visits from local code enforcement teams, who used ladders to gain access to the building and a cutting torch to try to dismantle the garden’s supporting framework. “They kept asking for approval documents,” Yu says, and laughs. “But those don’t really exist. We had nowhere to go to get them.”

With time, however, efforts like this have spread broader awareness of the sponge city concept. “Public consultation—how you get the public to understand what this is about—is very important,” says Liu of the Lincoln Institute. “I think NGOs can play a big role in this area, and TNC is a trusted international NGO in China.”

TNC’s work has also gained the backing of officials and business leaders. Yu was invited to be a member of the technical committee for Shenzhen’s municipal sponge city program. When corporate tech giant Tencent decided to incorporate sponge city techniques in its iconic new headquarters in Shenzhen, the company turned to TNC for ideas. And Tencent’s founder, chairman, and CEO, Pony Ma, is not only a member of TNC’s board of directors for China, but also a delegate to the powerful National People’s Congress. There, he has made sponge cities part of a broader personal platform of advocating for nature-based solutions. Ma has also inspired fellow business leaders to commit to—and invest in—ensuring that their businesses meet sponge city standards in Shenzhen.

Some 1,200 miles north of Shenzhen, in Beijing, Kongjian Yu’s office seems to sprout a plant from every spot where he hasn’t managed to stuff a book. The Where the Wild Things Are feel is entirely consistent with Yu’s personality, which is driven by a kind of restless energy. It’s hard to imagine him sitting in one spot for five minutes.

Yu, who was born in a small farming village in coastal Zhejiang Province, went abroad and earned a Doctor of Design degree at Harvard, in 1995. Upon returning to China, he was deeply disheartened by the direction that development had taken. “When I came back, I was shocked by the scale of urbanization,” he says. “I was amazed by how this process ignored all our natural and cultural heritage, filling in wetlands, destroying the rivers, cutting down the trees, and wiping out all these old buildings.”

Yu was hired as an urban planning and landscape architecture professor at Peking University. In the staid world of Chinese development theory, he has made his name as something of a flower child—and a gadfly. Yu became a prodigious author and tireless lecturer, and turned out a series of open letters to China’s top leaders. He called for China to abandon its mania for building monumental public squares; advocated for a revival of the traditional Chinese approaches to farming, water management, and settlement; and suggested that the money allocated for annual National Day parades be better spent building good parks.

Above all else, Yu railed against China’s obsession with concrete, a repudiation of decades of thinking here. “The philosophy in China, in Mao’s era, was that humans can beat nature,” Yu says. “And that caused a lot of disasters for us.”

That attitude only accelerated in the years after Mao’s death, and by the early 21st century, China was setting records for the amount of concrete it was pouring each year. Global systems demystification guru Vaclav Smil has estimated that China used more cement in just three years, 2011 to 2013, than the United States did in the entire 20th century.

While Yu has encountered opposition to his outspokenness, he has also tapped into a growing demand for this new kind of systems thinking. Today, in addition to serving as dean of Peking University’s College of Architecture and Landscape, he heads a 600-person landscape architecture and urbanism consultancy called Turenscape. Municipal governments across China routinely seek the company out for help. He wrote the definitive two-volume practitioners’ guidebook on sponge cities in China, and contributed to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy book Nature and Cities. His work is also featured in Design with Nature Now.

A core tenet of Yu’s overall approach is a concept he calls fan guihua. The concept is frequently translated as “negative planning,” but might be more accurately rendered as “inverse planning.” It’s essentially a counter to the type of development that has shaped China’s growth for so long. “You plan what’s not built,” Yu explains. “You plan what should be protected.”

This, obviously, is a fairly radical idea in contemporary China. Yet in the course of his work, Yu came to a surprising realization: the idea of living with water, rather than battling it, was a concept that had historically been very familiar. In central and southern coastal China, including the area where Shenzhen now stands, a distinctive method had evolved over centuries to catch rainfall and carefully manage it with earthen dikes to raise mulberries, silkworms, and fish, a sort of landscape-scale aquaponics system. And when Yu and his students looked deeper, they realized that sponge city-like concepts had been a fundamental principle of Chinese city planning for centuries. Traditionally, he says, many Chinese cities had the capacity to absorb two-thirds of local rainfall within their boundaries.

With this discovery, the idea of a different way of managing water—and the perils of a drastically altered hydrologic cycle—became a major theme of Yu’s work. Nature, for its part, began putting an increasingly fine point on the issue. During the 2012 flood in Beijing, “seventy-nine people were killed. Drowned. On the street,” Yu says. “In the capital, we drowned 79 people. How is that possible? We lost face. That immediately became a political issue.”

Yu wrote another letter to high-level leaders saying that adopting the sponge city approach and creating a resilient landscape might offer hope. As it happens, Xi Jinping had recently become the secretary general of the Communist Party and president of China. After decades of the country struggling with notorious pollution and other environmental problems, Xi has staked his reputation on creating an “ecological civilization” in China.

The exact contours of that concept are sometimes difficult to discern, but in broad outline it encompasses both a nationwide push for ecological sustainability and the creation of a green, uniquely Chinese alternative development model for the rest of the world. Both sponge city thinking and a more expansive embrace of low-impact development fall squarely within Xi’s larger aspirations.

“China’s in an environmental crisis. We have to do this,” Yu says. “When people can’t breathe, when the water is polluted—I think he’s very sensitive to those issues. I think he really wants to build his legacy on doing this.”

The biggest challenge to making sponge cities work on a broad scale has nothing to do with building rain gardens, installing permeable pavement, or placating neighbors. “Finance is a major issue,” says Liu.

Liu, who came to the Lincoln Institute after 18 years with the World Bank, is largely focused on governance and financing issues associated with land use in China. Taking the sponge city concept to scale won’t be easy, and he cites the challenges in Shenzhen as an example. Sponge city improvements in Shenzhen, which officially began in 2017, now cover 24 percent of the city’s total surface area. The government has a goal of increasing that to 80 percent by 2030. But hitting that target will be a significant challenge.

The central government has pledged a total of $5.8 billion (40 billion Chinese yuan) to incentivize Shenzhen and the 29 other pilot cities to invest in and carry out sponge city work. But it wants each of those places to bring at least 20 percent of its developed area up to the sponge city standard by the end of this year.

Liu says that bringing a square kilometer of already developed urban land up to the standard typically costs $22 million to $29 million (150 to 200 million CNY). The 30 pilot cities are each eligible for 400 to 600 million Chinese yuan per year from the central government for three years. That’s enough to upgrade, at most, four square kilometers per year. To meet—and actually exceed—the central government’s 20 percent by 2020 target, Shenzhen brought about 235 square kilometers up to standard, at a cost that likely ran anywhere from $5 billion to $7 billion.

“Asking the municipal government to come up with that kind of money is not easy,” Liu says. Shenzhen was able to pull it off because of its strong municipal budget and private commitments from the city’s tech and manufacturing giants. But, he adds, “if you go to the interior cities where the municipal finance is very weak, it’s very difficult.”

Liu points out that in the case of new development, cities can implement standards that will require developers to pay for improvements, a cost typically passed on to residents and firms. “If you look at the upfront costs for development, sponge cities are not a very expensive thing to do,” Liu says. Retrofitting existing development, however, is a much bigger challenge.

“The toughest issue is that public finance is used to finance the public good, with very little opportunity for cost recovery,” he continues. “That’s really the toughest story about China. It’s a matter of priority. The cities just have too much on their plate. So by the end of the day, very few cities can find enough money.”

Sponge city infrastructure is “just like a streetlight,” Liu says. “It’s a shared public good, but nobody wants to pay for it.”

In truth, the biggest challenge of turning the sponge city into reality may well be unraveling the financing mechanics. Yet the cost of not rising to the challenge may be higher than anyone fully appreciates.

“It’s really like thinking about buying insurance,” Liu says. “We are all facing uncertainties, but the trend of more intense storms is quite clear . . . The cost of inaction might not look that high today, but when we’re faced with a catastrophic outcome in 10 or 20 years, we’ll regret that we didn’t spend the money earlier.”

Even given those high stakes, the sponge city idea could ultimately be about even more. Back in Shenzhen, standing on the roof of the apartment building in Gangxia, TNC’s Yu says sponge cities do a lot more than tame floods and save water for dry seasons. 

“If you only talk about stormwater management or runoff control, the average person won’t necessarily buy in, because they’ll feel like it doesn’t have any connection to them,” he says. “But features like green rooftops are different. They can have a synergistic effect. They help absorb rainfall, but they also improve the neighborhood view, contribute to urban biodiversity, and create a green space that everybody can use.”

Matt Jenkins, who has previously worked as an editor for Nature Conservancy magazine, is a freelance writer who has contributed to The New York Times, Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, and numerous other publications.

Photographs (in order of appearance):

Shenzhen, China, is one of 30 pilot “sponge cities” in China that are investing in nature-based stormwater management solutions. Credit: Wang Jian Xiong via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

Xiangmi Park, also known as Honey Lake Park, is a former agricultural research area in Shenzhen that was redesigned for community use. Bioswales, permeable pavement, and other elements allow it to double as a stormwater management tool. Credit: Vlad Feoktistov.

Rooftop garden on the Tencent Binhai towers in Shenzhen. Tencent founder and CEO Pony Ma is an advocate of sponge cities who has inspired fellow business leaders to invest in nature-based solutions in Shenzhen. Credit: The Nature Conservancy/Theodore Kaye.