Meeting of the Minds Redux

At the Urban Age Institute’s’s Meeting of the Minds conference in Oakland this past fall, the urban planners and transportation innovators who came together to think about smart transportation and smart cities in the 21st century had one big question: If we build it, will they come?

There were some big names presenting solutions that ranged from community shuttles, rapid transit lanes and social-networked ride-share boards to biofuels and electric cars; but amidst the high-profile speakers, planners and auto execs alike worried that without public buy-in to approve the funds or purchase the energy-efficient vehicles, any innovation would fall flat.

Voters tend to pass bond measures for change that happens fast, explained Los Angeles city planner Gail Goldberg in one of the conference’s fervent break-out discussion sessions. How can we get them to understand that real change isn’t always dramatic, and can take years?

One answer might be to look at sustainable cities as a product, akin to a new perfume or iPhone, and market a desire to reduce greenhouse gas emissions into being. Robin Chase, founder of one of the first successful car-sharing enterprises, ZipCar, was there, talking about her new venture, GoLoco.org. An online ridesharing board that depends on social networking to bring together strangers with a common destination, it’s a logical offshoot of ZipCar. In 2004 Chase told the Harvard Gazette, “I’m looking for a clever, subversive way to make people fall in love with cities again.” Companies like ZipCar, with its fleet of Minis and Prius’, are headed in the right direction.

Another might be to legislate both public and private entities into submission. The inimitable Jerry Brown, Governor of California and Mayor of Oakland, and current Attorney General of California, gave a raucous speech at the closing night dinner. Brown declared his support of the effort and half-jokingly offered to sue anyone that wasn’t falling in line. Though the EPA just shot down California’s request to enact its own emissions standards, Brown has had considerable success with suits against the Port of Los Angeles, ConocoPhillips, and San Bernardino County, who have all agreed to offset carbon emissions in new development projects.

For Dr. Steven Chu, the solution is a private-public- academic partnership. Of course, it helps when you’re a Nobel Laureate and the head of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories. Chu, who is focused on developing carbon-neutral energy sources in an effort to combat climate change, led the lab in pursuing a $500 million contract with energy giant British Petroleum. This sort of partnership, at varying scales, is what Urban Age organizers had in mind when they put together the conference, bringing together groups that share goals but rarely meet.

Another possibility—maybe the public is already sold on the necessity of making smarter decisions, and the time has come to simply make more of them. This was a year of environmental awareness: primed by a perfect storm of environmental documentaries and real-life environmental crises, 2007 was the year that ordinary citizens were increasingly willing to consider changing their lives to change the world. It was a year of ‘green’ issues of magazines, endless ’10 Things You Can Do’ lists, and flaunting of LEED certifications.

To those, we will add one more. Education is an effective call to action, and the speakers who detailed successes in other countries seemed to raise a sense of determination in the local attendees. Harrison Fraker, the Dean of the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, is working on a whole systems design approach, which is currently being applied to new, self-sufficient cities in China. Aaron Golub, an Asst. Professor at the new School of Planning and Sustainability at Arizona State, was a consultant on Mexico City’s revolutionary Metrobus BRT system, which brings light rail speed and convenience at the cost of a local bus system.

The Urban Age Institute recently released a video of interviewswith some of the speakers from the Meeting of the Minds Conference. Watch that, and then seek out some more of your favorites here: http://Fora.tv/partner/MoM