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> Summary of Events > Town Meeting #5 - September 17, 2009 - Stamford: the Green City
Town Meeting #5 - September 17, 2009 - Stamford: the Green City
The fifth event in the Reinventing Stamford civic conversation took place from 6 to 9 pm on Thursday, September 17th at the Academy of Information Technology and Engineering. The focus of the event was Stamford: The Green City.
What is a Green City?
The concept of the Green City is an evolving one. At a minimum, it means a place that manages its carbon footprint to be climate neutral. This is accomplished in a variety of ways, including energy efficiency, transit-oriented development, green architecture, and waste reduction and recycling.
A more expansive view of the Green City would include the idea of the climate positive city, a place that is a net producer of clean power, whose air and water comes out cleaner than it goes in, and where the human network enhances the natural system. Easy to say; not so easy to do.
A Green City also needs to be disaster resilient, not only because the more extreme weather events associated with climate change make cities, in particular waterfront cities, more vulnerable, but also because our increasingly networked global economy makes every city more vulnerable to other potential shocks, such as financial bubbles, pandemics, terrorist attacks, that could occur simultaneously with negative synergy. It's no good to just hope these shocks won't occur. We have to assume they will and be ready to absorb the shocks and exploit the opportunities that they contain.
That raises the other sense of Green City: a place where people with talent and drive can make money. Every threat we face also presents an economic opportunity. Stamford has always been exceptionally good at surfing the waves of economic change, rather than standing still and letting the waves crash over it. Stamford needs to do that again, seizing the opportunities in the Green Economy that play to its strengths. The most sustainable model of the Green City is one that works as well economically as it does environmentally. Stamford is the ideal place to define that synthesis.
As we think about how to make Stamford a greener city, it is important to remember the three dimensions of strategy that we explored in the spring:
Transportation: our transit and road connections to other places.
Place-Making: the built and natural environments, including the critical spaces between buildings.
People: talent, education, entrepreneurship, innovation, civic engagement
The panel tonight included a leading environmentalist, plus someone who approaches the Green City from each of these three dimensions of strategy:
Curt Spalding, the moderator, is the principal of the consulting firm Green Thinking Associates. He is the former executive director of Save the Bay, an extraordinary environmental education and advocacy group focused on preserving and enhancing the Narragansett Bay and its watersheds in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Since the September event, Curt was appointed New England Regional Administrator of EPA in the Obama Administration. They were lucky to get him in that critical post, as he will bring to New England the wisdom and collaborative ethic that he practiced so well at Save the Bay. Curt helped develop the draft Stamford Green Audit.
Joe McGee is VP for Policy at the Business Council of Fairfield County. He is one of the leading advocates of transit and transit-oriented development in Connecticut. Joe is the primary connective tissue between Fairfield County businesses and state government, both the legislative and executive branches. The Business Council was instrumental in convincing the Governor and the General assembly to invest in an expansion of commuter rail in Connecticut, an essential element in Stamford's competitiveness and in reducing its carbon footprint. Joe is a committed environmentalist, as a founder and charter member of the League of Conservation Voters.
Stan Eckstut is one of the world's top green architects, urban designers and place-makers. He knows Stamford well and loves its potential. Stan's ability to get people to work together to make great places is legendary. When the initial plans for Battery Park City in New York got bogged down in a war of egos among the starchitects responsible for the various buildings, the developers called in Stan to break the logjam. "Just give me the first two floors, and do what you want above," he told them. As a result, the pedestrian experience at Battery Park City is harmonious and pleasant and people-friendly, and the starchitects got to make their statements, largely out of sight of the residents and office workers. Stan not only knows what makes a great place, he know how to make them. His secret sauce is that there is not an Eckstut Style that he imposes on one site after another. He designs what's right for each site, preserving the best existing buildings, and designing new buildings that live gracefully next to them.
Celeste Johnson founded Obex, an early pioneer in the green economy. Obex converted Fairfield County's waste plastic into plastic wood for compost bins and decks. Celeste designed, built and maintained the plastic extrusion machines, hustled up the waste material, marketed the final product, and managed a workforce of men on parole to make it. This was a decade before anyone knew the phrase Green Jobs, before Kyoto, before An Inconvenient Truth. Celeste is a remarkable entrepreneur with the scars to prove it. In bitter twist of fate, Celeste suffered an industrial accident while repairing one of her giant extruders, just at the moment that she had landed a massive contract with Home Depot. She is now a teacher of environmental justice at Fairfield University. Her class attended the event. Celeste's life experience reminds us how hard it can be to make something happen, but also that extraordinary things are possible and that the Green Economy is not primarily about white-collar office jobs. It has the potential to create a mix of jobs that can enable upward mobility and reduced economic disparity.
The panelists made three critical points: Joe McGee suggested that Stamford needs to focus more on getting its internal transportation system right. Stan Ecstut suggested that one of the keys to place making is to design buildings that are not special purpose for one user, but rather generic buildings that can be used for many different users over time. This how most older buildings were built and is why they lend themselves to adaptive reuse. Celeste Johnson suggested that a green job is not something new, but rather a different way of organizing existing work.
The small group discussion was a white board exercise in 12 classroom at the AITE where each small group crafted a 30 second story on Stamford the Green City, both what it is and what it could be. At the beginning of the whole group session at the end, each small group presented its 30 second story. The stories can be found in the Resources section of the website.
This event was not about spinning or green washing. Rather, it was a distillation of what Stamford is doing and what it could be doing into a compelling strategy and story about Stamford as a Green City that can be told and retold to build and sustain momentum for change. A strategy that cannot be expressed as a story is not executable. Likewise, a story without a strategy is meaningless. Strategy development and story telling are the same thing if done rig
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