1 Creating, developing, and protecting green spaces.
2 Guaranteeing green spaces are within walking distance of all residents.
3 Developing outdoor programming and outdoor recreation.
4 Turning the city into a resilient and sustainable place.
5 Developing a safe human-powered mobility network.
6 Fostering Outdoor Citizenship and engagement with the natural world.
The OO’s initiatives will need to include ones that immediately benefit residents, as well as long-term sustainable action plans. A dynamic and healthier Outdoor Citizenry will be an important byproduct of the OO’s longer-term impact, as will turning the city into a full Outdoor City. The results will improve residents’ health and quality of life, and the environment will be protected. There will also be a ripple effect in things like voter participation, philanthropy, and volunteer service. As the effectiveness of the OO’s work becomes increasingly noticeable, I expect the person’s department will grow in size and other cities will appoint their own OOs.
Restoring Green Spaces
We should look for ways to green our cities, to make them more sustainable, and to create stronger natural ecosystems. One way to do this is by cleaning and replenishing spaces that were formerly green spaces, but today house abandoned buildings or landfills, the results of urban sprawl. Over the years, developers have cleared land of stone, soil, and trash to build warehouses, offices, and housing, moving the stone, soil, and trash to create landfills on coastlines, wetlands, forests, and marshes. Tragically, the landfills often contaminate water supplies and aquifers, and the tremendous latent power the land had for disaster reduction and recovery is depleted.
It’s time to recalibrate our development goals and restore natural areas to their full potential. Historic maps and photographs can provide a starting step, showing us what natural areas used to look like; what once existed. We should also look at neglected spaces with a fresh eye, considering which could be transitioned into green spaces. Imagine changing the spaces beneath highways and bridges or above rail yards and rail lines into lush green spaces. We could also transition highway median strips and unused roadways, and do away with disruptive and unused electricity and telecom infrastructure, including grids, poles, and wires tarnishing what could be an attractive and thriving green space. The changes would improve the aesthetics of a city and the addition of trees would clean the air.
Emergency Preparation
It’s critical that cities have plans to prepare for natural disasters, particularly as global warming causes increasingly devastating ones. The disaster response plan New York City had in place when Hurricane Sandy hit in October 2012 was critical. The storm left many residents without food, electricity, and clean water and caused billions of dollars in damage, but the devastation would have been far worse without the advance planning the plan implemented.
One example is the work done by the leaders of the city’s public transit, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). In advance of Hurricane Irene a year prior, the MTA developed a “storm prep mode,” which it used to prepare for Hurricane Sandy. The evening before Sandy hit, the MTA ordered a system-wide shutdown of the subway system, and subway trains and buses were moved to higher ground to avoid damage from floodwater. Reflecting on this later, MTA chairman Joseph Lhota said:
We sealed as much as we could, and at the same time we wanted to get the rolling stock up to higher ground in the event of a surge of water. . . . At the LIRR [the Long Island Railroad] there were all kinds of preparations. The wind was projected to be 70 miles per hour and at 70 mph those wooden crossing gates will snap. So we took them off or tied them down.47
After the storm passed, the floodwater was pumped out of the subway and all public transportations vehicles were returned to where they belonged and reconnected to their power sources. By November 3, six days after the storm, 80 percent of the subway system was operating again. Without proper planning, the storm could have been a catastrophe for the city’s public transportation, which New Yorkers rely on. As a comparison, Lhota said, “New Jersey lost a lot of locomotives because they didn’t put their rolling stock onto high ground.”48 According to a statement from the New Jersey Transit Corporation after the storm:
Hurricane Sandy caused major damage throughout the state, leaving behind long-term mechanical and operational challenges that NJ Transit is working tirelessly to overcome. This will take time, and the blow delivered by Hurricane Sandy will continue to impact customers for days to come.49
New York City’s boroughs also take disaster precautions. The city has 578 miles of coastline, which includes fourteen miles of beaches,50 and beachfront neighborhoods need to be on special alert when a hurricane is approaching. Hurricane Sandy took an especially hard hit on the northern part of the Rockaways neighborhood, located in the city’s Queens borough, so with the support of federal and local government, the coastal neighborhood planted six miles of sand dunes and built a five-and-a-half-mile boardwalk. The community is also raising money to fund an Army Corps of Engineers project that would include floodwalls, levees, jetties, dunes, and a larger sand barrier to defend against rising sea levels.51
Residents of the Rockaways are also developing new infrastructure projects to strengthen the neighborhood. The Rockaways Courthouse, for example, was built in 1932 and is a twenty-four-thousand-foot building that has been vacant for thirty years. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York City Economic Development Corporation selected a developer to renovate the building into a medical center. It will house doctors providing medical and outpatient surgical services in specialties including ophthalmology, urology, obstetrics, gynecology, and orthopedics. It will be open all year and will also be an active medical center helping residents in the event of another natural disaster. Representative Gregory Meeks said, “Hurricane Sandy underscored the importance of having storm-secured, flood-protected, state-of-the-art medical facilities readily accessible to Rockaway neighborhoods and communities.”52
Another good example to look to is the Netherlands, where sustainable development makes optimal use of geography and existing structures. The Netherlands has a very low elevation, with about one third of the country below sea level—the lowest point being twenty-two feet below sea level. By necessity, the country had to develop creative solutions to avoid flooding from nearby rivers after storms; this was tantamount to its survival and prosperity. To do this, the country developed an extensive system of dikes (natural and man-made drainage ditches), sand dunes, water pumps, and floodgates.
The Netherlands’s port city of Rotterdam has implemented innovations worthy of the aspirations of the fourth industrial revolution. Its lakes, roadways, garages, and city parks can double as emergency reservoirs when seas and rivers spill over, preventing flooding that could otherwise cause human tragedy and billions of dollars in damage. New York Times writer Michael Kimmelman wrote about this in his article titled, “The Dutch Have Solutions to Rising Seas. The World is Watching”:
Lately the city, accustomed to starting over, has reinvented itself as a capital of enterprise and environmental ingenuity. It has pioneered the construction of facilities like those parking garages that become emergency reservoirs, ensuring that the city can prevent sewage overflow from storms now predicted to happen every five or 10 years. It has installed plazas with fountains, gardens and basketball courts in underserved neighborhoods that can act as retention ponds. It has reimagined its harbors and stretches of its formerly industrial waterfront as incubators for new businesses, schools, housing and parks.53
Another city working on plans to prevent destruction in the wake of natural disasters is Mexico City. Mexico City was one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative, which opened in 2013 and helped eighty cities around the world implement “comprehensive resilience strategies . . . projects that will make cities more livable, sustainable, and resilient.54 Michael Berkowitz, the president of 100 Resilient Cities, described the mission by saying, “It is about building better infrastructure, community cohesion, and taking advantage of the natural environment.”55
Mexico City has more than eight million residents,