6.3: Cities as Living Laboratories

In this section, we further explore the value of “going local” by investigating cities as living laboratories of social transformation. Political theorist Ben Barber founded the Global Parliament of Mayors, which is dedicated to swift, coordinated global action around social challenges that nation-states have often been too slow and clumsy to tackle effectively. He believed this was particularly true with regard to climate change. As Barber put it, “cities are the coolest political institutions on earth.”

In the United States, most of the action on reducing emissions and on coping with climate change generally has not taken place at the federal level. States, localities, and corporations have done much more than the national government. This is true across the world as well. There has been deeper commitment to coordinated climate action at the municipal level than at the national level. Agile, environmentally progressive mayors have coordinated integral collaborations and regional coalitions to produce rapid change.

After the release of Laudato Si’ in spring 2015, Pope Francis called for urgent, coordinated action, and he began by summoning mayors. The mayors who convened at the Vatican in July 2015 urged world leaders to pass a “bold climate agreement that confines global warming to a limit safe for humanity, while protecting the poor and the vulnerable from ongoing climate change that gravely endangers their lives,” according to a New York Times story about the meeting.

The Pope is from Argentina, of course, and there is perhaps something distinctively Latin American about why the Pope began with mayors. Latin American cities in recent decades have been particularly successful at transforming attitudes and behaviors around climate change and environmental health while producing more equitable outcomes for urban residents. Many Latin American cities have become almost mythical as living laboratories of equitable green urbanization, committed to advancing social justice and climate justice together.

Figure 6.3.1 Placards used by Mayor Antanas Mockus in 1995 to stimulate a sense of mutual responsibility among the citizens of Bogotá. He encouraged people to use the thumbs to express approval and disapproval of one another’s behaviors. Reproduced from CÍVICO Bogotá.

A good place to begin is Bogotá, Colombia, in the 1990s. Philosopher Antanas Mockus became mayor of Bogotá during its most intense period of violence in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was a scene of social chaos and urban breakdown, unemployment, poverty, and choking air quality—the worst anywhere on the continent. People referred to Bogotá as the most dangerous city on the planet; it seemed a Hobbesian war of all against all was underway there.

Mockus declared that urban transformation begins not with “law and order” and not with new infrastructure—that would come later—but with civic strategies designed to transform social attitudes, norms, and behavior, to change hearts and minds collectively and individually. He became legendary for the distinctive ways he intervened in the behavioral dysfunction of urban Bogotá, using the arts, culture, and sometimes outrageous performative interventions to dramatically reduce violence and lawlessness, reconnect citizens with their government and with each other, increase tax collection, reduce water consumption, and ultimately improve quality of life for the poor.

One particularly well-known example was the citizenship cards project. Soon after taking office, Mockus distributed small cards across the city, hundreds of thousands of them, each depicting a thumb (Figure 6.3.1). He encouraged people to use the thumb card to express approval and disapproval toward one another as they moved through the city. So when you saw something that violated your sense of urban dignity, you’d show the card thumbs down. At first, people thought this was crazy. But what happened was that people began to look at each other again, and they began to recognize how their actions affect others and how the actions of others affect them. Through this performative gesture, people were deciding together on the kind of city they wanted to inhabit. Social norms began to change; public trust began to emerge.

Figure 6.3.2 Bogotá’s Transmilenio bus rapid transit (BRT) system in the early 2000s became a model for BRTs. Photograph by Felipe Restrepo Acosta on Wikimedia Commons.

These cultural changes paved the way for Mayor Enrique Peñalosa’s renowned green infrastructural interventions in the succeeding administration. Sometimes called the world’s most transit-friendly mayor, Peñalosa launched a multinodal transportation network comprising bus rapid transit, bicycle hubs, ciclovia (bikeways), and dedicated walking paths that stitched sprawling Bogotá together. This project involved massive cross-sector collaboration and helped to revolutionize public transportation in Latin America (Figure 6.3.2). In other words, shifting social norms came first, and the transit interventions followed. This is an important insight for us today as we think about developing sustainable solutions for cities.

Like Mockus before him, Peñalosa understood that changing social norms was essential to his egalitarian transportation agenda. He famously said, “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars; it is a place where the rich ride public transportation.” Like Mockus, Peñalosa was committed to modeling positive behavior and rode a bicycle wherever he went. He often claimed that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is as important as one in a $30,000 car, bringing social equity together with environmental and climate justice.

Mockus and Peñalosa emerged from a long tradition of participatory urbanization across Latin America, stewarded by climate-forward mayors who were inspired by Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire and his “critical pedagogy” for reclaiming the humanity of the colonized. These mayors committed to robust agendas of civic participation in order to ignite a sense of collective agency and dignity among the poor and, ultimately, to produce greener and more equitable cities. For example, in the 1980s, Workers’ Party mayors in Porto Alegre, Brazil, experimented with participatory budgeting, in which communities got to decide together how to allocate a percentage of the municipal budget for their own neighborhoods. In the same decade, Mayor Jaime Lerner pioneered bus rapid transit and dozens of green interventions across Curitiba, Brazil. In the early 2000s, the “social urbanism” of Mayor Sergio Fajardo of Medellín, Colombia, transformed public spaces and green infrastructure into sites of education and citizenship building—and made Medellín a global model of urban social justice. This tradition still thrives in cities across the continent, from La Paz to Quito to Mexico City, and carries important lessons for equitable green urbanization in cities across the world today.

Researchers at UC San Diego have been inspired by these Latin American models of participatory green urbanization and are working to adapt these lessons to disadvantaged areas in the neighboring cities of San Diego, USA, and Tijuana, Mexico. In the final section of this chapter, we will explore the UCSD Community Stations as a model of integral, university-community partnership for local climate action.