Challenges of Urban Sustainability and Changes

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to explain why cities change over time and how those changes affect people and existing neighborhoods, and describe how different solutions work to make cities more sustainable and livable.

The Daily Grind

Think about your daily life - getting to school, finding affordable places to live, staying safe, or having clean parks to hang out in.

Cities make these things convenient, but they also come with big challenges like traffic, rising housing costs, pollution, and unequal access to jobs and services.

At the same time, cities are trying to fix these problems with solutions like public transportation, green spaces, mixed-use neighborhoods, and sustainable building design.

Urban areas aren’t just places on a map; they are living systems that directly shape how people, including you, experience everyday life.

Did Somebody Say Blockbuster?

United States cities and urban areas have many challenges, many of which are rooted in discriminatory practices of the 20^th century.

Redlining and blockbusting resulted in urban segregation in cities today and caused many social and economic issues.

Even though redlining and blockbusting were declared illegal in the late 1960’s, geographers can still trace the impact of segregation in Cleveland, OH, neighborhoods.

Many neighborhoods that were redlined almost 100 years ago have some of the highest poverty and crime rates today.
This has created zones of abandonment in areas of Cleveland, pushing out jobs and affordable, fair housing opportunities for residents.
These abandonment zones lower tax revenues in the city because of low property values, further complicating the issue.
When jobs, housing, and necessary services are not available in communities, people leave and migrate to other parts of the country.
In the latest census, the areas surrounding Cleveland had the 9^th highest population loss in the United States.

Urban Changes

Urban change looks different depending on a country’s level of development.

In more developed countries, gentrification, the process of converting low-income, renter-occupied neighborhoods into wealthier, owner-occupied areas, and urban renewal, improving urban areas that have experienced decline, are prevalent.

Pros: Increased tax revenue, new investment, and improved infrastructure.
Cons: Displacement of original low-income residents who can no longer afford rising rents and taxes; loss of a neighborhood's unique sense of place.

Geographers study gentrification in great detail, especially its social and environmental impacts on neighborhoods.

Accessible Version: Gentrification Video

Social Impacts of Gentrification

Displacement of Residents: As property values, rents, and taxes rise, long-time low-income residents and minority groups are often pushed out because they can no longer afford to live in the neighborhood.
Loss of Cultural Identity: Gentrification can destroy a neighborhood’s unique sense of place and historical cultural landscape, replacing it with aesthetics that appeal to newer, more affluent residents.
Economic and Racial Segregation: The process often leads to increased separation based on socioeconomic status and race, as seen in case studies like Cincinnati, Portland, and Cleveland, where minority populations declined in the urban area as wealthier residents moved in.
Community Improvements: On a positive note, gentrified areas often see a decrease in crime rates, new private investment, and increased tax revenue that can fund public services.
New Amenities: These neighborhoods frequently gain "trendy" amenities such as coffee shops, art districts, dog parks, and high-end restaurants.

Environmental Impacts of Gentrification

Infrastructure Revitalization: Gentrification involves the renovation of aging housing stock and the development of new, quality infrastructure, such as improved roads and public spaces.
Urban Infill: The process often utilizes urban infill, which involves building on underused or vacant land within existing city limits. This is considered a "smart growth" practice because it reduces the need for suburban sprawl and preserves farmland on the urban periphery.
Mixed-Use and Walkability: Gentrification frequently incorporates mixed land use, combining residential and commercial spaces. This promotes walkable cities, which decrease driving time and encourage residents to bike or walk, thereby reducing a city's overall ecological footprint.
Brownfield Redevelopment: Reinvestment sometimes involves cleaning up brownfields—abandoned industrial sites that may be contaminated. Repurposing these sites "recycles" land and mitigates environmental hazards in the urban core.
Sustainable Practices: Cities may use revitalization as an opportunity to implement new sustainable initiatives, such as renewable energy integration and more efficient resource management.

Squatters

In less developed countries, squatter or informal settlements form.

Common in periphery countries, these are densely populated areas built without legal claim to the land or coordinated planning.

Key Issues:

A lack of land tenure (legal ownership) prevents residents from getting loans or improving their infrastructure.
These areas often lack the most basic of services, such as running water, electricity, or access to public transportation.
Finally, the neglected spaces in urban areas create a unique set of issues.
- Disamenity Zones / Zones of Abandonment:
  - Areas neglected by governments and businesses are often characterized by high crime, vacant buildings, and a lack of services.

- Food Deserts:
  - Urban zones that lack access to fresh, healthy food often contribute to health issues like obesity and diabetes.
- Environmental Injustice:
  - The disproportionate exposure of minorities and the poor to pollution and hazardous waste sites due to a lack of political power.

Solving these issues is complicated by political fragmentation in urban areas. Metropolitan areas are often a collection of many small, adjacent municipalities. This fragmented governance makes it hard to coordinate large-scale solutions for issues like homelessness or mass transit, as funding and authority are split across boundaries.

Are Large Cities Sustainable?

In order to answer this question, we need to evaluate how effective different initiatives are at reducing a city's ecological footprint—the total land and resources required to sustain it.

There are several environmental stressors that impact cities:

Accessible Version: Environmental or Social Impacts

Environmental Challenges
Challenge	Cause	Environmental or Social Impact
Urban Decay	Deindustrialization and population loss due to suburbanization.	Environmental degradation, lack of green space, abandoned buildings, loss of employment, and housing.
Suburban Sprawl	Rapid, low-density housing expansion and increasing automobile dependency.	Increases fossil fuel use, destroys farmland, and raises infrastructure costs.
Urban Heat Island	High concentration of concrete buildings absorbing heat and increasing temperatures.	Increases energy demand for cooling and can worsen air quality.
Environmental Injustice	Placing hazardous facilities in poor or minority neighborhoods.	Leads to increased health risks for vulnerable populations.

Responses to Sustainability Challenges in Urban Areas

Greenbelts:
- Rings of undeveloped land or farmland surrounding a city core to prevent sprawl (common in European cities like London).
- In the United States, communities build greenways within the city and suburban areas to promote green space.
Brownfield Redevelopment:
- Cleaning up and repurposing contaminated, abandoned industrial sites (brownfields) for new uses like housing or parks.
- This is a sustainable "recycling" of land that reduces the need to build on green spaces.

Urban Infill:
- Building on vacant or underused land within existing city limits to increase density.

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD):
- Involves locating mixed-use communities near mass transit stops to reduce reliance on automobiles and a city's ecological footprint. (Remember this from Lesson 3?)

To improve sustainability in cities, urban planners use a variety of sustainable urban design initiatives.

Two that geographers are very interested in are smart-growth policies and new urbanism.

Smart-growth is a set of planning policies designed to combat urban sprawl and protect the environment in urban areas. Zoning, greenbelts, land use management, limiting horizontal expansion, and urban infill are all smart-growth strategies used in cities globally.
New Urbanism is a set of architectural and community design strategies that applies the principles of smart growth at the neighborhood scale. While it also values compactness, its focus is on the "human-scale" experience of the built environment. Basic components of new urbanism include:

- Mixed Land Use:
  - It designs neighborhoods where homes and businesses are integrated, allowing residents to live, work, and play in the same area.
- Community Design:
  - It emphasizes pedestrian-friendly streets, shared public spaces, and a variety of housing types (e.g., townhomes next to single-family homes) to create socially and economically diverse communities.
- Architectural Focus:
  - It often reflects traditional European urban life, prioritizing local identity and a strong sense of place.

It's the SPEED chart again!

The chart below uses SPEED to show the analysis of Urban Sustainability:

📥 You should download or print this PDF version of the SPEED Urban Sustainability Analysis to help study for your final exam and the AP Exam.

Case Study

Ponce City Case Study

Accessible Version: Ponce City Market Case Study

This infographic summarizes a case study on the redevelopment of Ponce City Market in Atlanta, GA, highlighting its impact on urban sustainability, demographic changes, and the surrounding community.

Sustainability Features: The project reused a historic 1926 building, reduced car dependence through Atlanta BeltLine access, and created mixed-use spaces.
Urban Challenges: While improving the area, the redevelopment caused rising property values and rents, creating a risk of displacing longtime residents and local businesses.
Impact Analysis: The project has affected the city on a local, regional, and national scale, acting as a model for urban redevelopment while driving demographic shifts toward higher-income residents.

In this lesson, you learned that cities change due to suburbanization, gentrification, and migration for jobs or housing. Geographers study how these changes can help some but harm others, like rising rent or losing local businesses. By understanding these issues and solutions, geographers see how cities strive to be better, more sustainable places.

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