My friend Jade is an urban planner. This got me thinking about how urban planning intersects with environmental awareness, sustainable development, and community. Several organizations track which are the “greenest cities,” based on various criteria. Let’s explore what that means.
What Is a “Green City” Anyway?
Popular Science scored cities with a point-based rubric covering electricity, transportation, green living, and recycling. The top three cities (from a list of 50) were Portland, OR; San Francisco, CA; and Boston, MA.
SustainLane rated cities based on 16 criteria, including the newly added “water supply.” Portland, OR topped the list; Atlanta, GA showed the most improvement. The project was extensively covered in the book How Green Is Your City? The SustainLane U.S. City Rankings
Sperling’s BestPlaces cited a list compiled by Country Home, based on five categories spanning air/watershed quality, mass transit usage, power usage, farmers markets & organic producers, and number of green-certified buildings. The top three were Burlington, VT; Ithaca, NY; and Corvallis, OR.
2Solitudes listed the 10 greenest cities worldwide, although sadly it did not provide much detail regarding criteria. The top three were Reykjavik, Iceland; Portland, Oregon, U.S.; and Curitiba, Brazil.
TreeHugger looked at ways in which cities lead by example: banning plastic bags, compost pickup, paying for xericulture, green infrastructure, and smart growth. Cities mentioned include San Francisco, CA; Ottawa, Canada; and Las Vegas, NV.
Some individual cities, such as Philadelphia, PN and Delhi, India are deliberately working to raise their green quotient through such things as recycling programs and park expansions.
How Green Is Your City?
Those of you living in a city or town should consider how green it is, and how it facilitates green living for residents. Those of you living in rural areas may want to analyze the nearest city or large town.
Sustainable Measures offers various materials for assessing a city’s sustainability level. Community Indicators also discusses sustainable indicators.
Individual trackers are also available. WalkScore lets you check any address for its walkability score, useful if you enjoy walking. Green Living Tips explains how to identify whether your electricity comes from renewable or nonrenewable sources.
Where you find weaknesses, work on making your city more sustainable. eCoTimes offers tips on greening your city. WorldChanging proposes building more compact cities. Evo-Karma suggests ways of making United Kingdom flats more sustainable. My First Apartment gives similar tips for American apartments. For more details, consult a book such as Growing Greener Cities: Urban Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century 
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Jade 02.17.09 at 8:36 am
My field is transportation planning. From our pointview, the measures are to plan efficient land use, to use green energy, to decrease vehicle miles traveled, to consume less fuel, and so on. As mentioned in your essay, walkability is a good index. We can walk more and use mass transit instead to reduce gas consumption and air pollution.
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Elizabeth Barrette 02.17.09 at 7:47 pm
Mass transit is a vital part of making a city green. It’s especially effective if the city has sections where people can walk or bike to services inside that section, and only need transport to other sections. A university campus is a good example of that style of design.
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Sam 03.17.09 at 1:26 am
I live in jakarta, and I it’s sad to say that the pollution here is very bad.
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Elizabeth Barrette Reply:
March 17th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Alas! Cities like that need a lot of help from their residents and local government to become greener.
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First Apartment 09.20.09 at 10:08 pm
Shouldn’t New York City be the most green city in the U.S.? Per capita there is no comparison really. If there wasn’t such a stereotype about how dirty NYC is there’d be no reason it wouldn’t top the list. IMO, being green really isn’t so much about trees and CO2 as it is about efficient. Green space may look nice, but thats just more land to contaminated by city life.
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Elizabeth Barrette Reply:
September 20th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Well, “greenest city” depends on the parameters chosen. Some things that people count include park space, number of trees, water quality, walking access, availability of public transportation, all kinds of different things. There might well be a list where New York is considered green; if so, feel free to list it.
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