Above photo: Construction along the Wharf in Washington, D.C. In 2017, the U.S. Green Building Council named Washington, D.C., the world’s first LEED Platinum city. Sara Cottle.
The new book “Cities in Action” shows how civic capacity is what turns cities’ climate goals into real change.
The librarians at the San Mateo Public Library were literally in the dark when they decided to go green. Property owners in San Mateo County had just passed a general bond obligation contributing $35 million for a new library building, topped off by the State of California with a $20 million grant.
“We had several public meetings asking our citizens: What do you want in your new public library?” a senior library management analyst recalled. It was the late ‘90s, when California utility PG&E was experiencing rolling black outs, and a teacher who was starting a sustainability studies program raised her hand during one of those meetings. “[She] said: ‘Why can’t we build a sustainable building?’ It was like a light bulb went off.”
The library ended up 20% above California’s building efficiency standards, Energy Code Title 24, and it became one of the first public buildings in California to receive a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification. As local environmental nonprofits took note and featured the library in its campaign to build sustainably in subsequent years, the library “set the tone” for the city. In 2001, San Mateo became one of the first places nationwide to adopt a sustainable building policy, requiring public buildings to apply for LEED, a voluntary certification scheme for energy-efficient green construction developed by the U.S. Green Building Council at the end of the 1990s. The library was a major cheerleader for green construction; according to the librarian, green building just became “the right way.”
LEED encourages project owners to choose sites with access to public transit and bicycle parking, build using recycled materials and certified wood, and incorporate biophilic elements in the interior design. The framework was meant to improve the lived experience of living in energy-efficient, fully insulated concrete boxes that were built in response to the oil crisis of the 1970s. This certification is in constant development and has expanded, over the period of my observation, to include the certification of homes and the energy-efficient operation, rather than merely construction, of buildings as well as entire cities and neighborhoods.
Although some engineering experts may contest LEED as an industry standard as timid, it has, for almost two decades, been the tool of choice for municipalities whose goal is to encourage green construction. According to the Department of Energy, building certifications are twice as common a “city action” intended to affect energy use than public transit expansion and bicycle infrastructure.
Early on, it was uncertain whether the promised cost savings and energy efficiency were going to justify the extra costs of construction. As a former foundation president told me of the decision-making for certifying their foundation’s new building in the early 2000s, there was a “fair amount of skepticism because of the cost.” The foundation went through with the certification to do justice to its significant environmental grantmaking program and achieved a LEED Gold certification, spurring a neighboring peer foundation to pursue LEED Platinum several years later.
It turns out that civic capacity — the presence of prosocial organizations in the nonprofit sector that seek to recognize and solve social and environmental problems where they arise — has played as big a role in explaining why LEED took off as the actions of municipal governments. The values of nonprofit organizations prompted them to adopt buildings early and establish proofs of concept that catalyzed action among other citizens and even city administrations.
Cities make bold promises and claims about how they will neutralize the impact on the climate and improve the experience of urban dwellers and the sustainability of urban ecosystems. As I show in my book Cities in Action: Organizations, Institutions, and Urban Climate Strategies, the right institutional conditions encourage and amplify administrative actions. The institutional superstructure, including a growing intercity network and knowledge exchanges among their city members, sets lofty expectations from the top; a strong local civil society lights a fire from the bottom.
But the practices of city administrations — avoiding bottled water and sending electric vehicles to pick up your compost — are just a drop in the bucket of carbon emissions. Who has ever consulted their city’s strategic plan before buying a car, deciding what energy mix to use, or switching on the air-conditioning? At the end of the day, administrative city action matters only if it meaningfully goes together with distributed city action — the individual behaviors of people and organizations in their city.
Does this simply mean that cities with greater punch — those with stocked coffers, officers educated at elite colleges, and widespread legislative and political powers — hold the best cards to green the city? State capacity surely does not hurt, as the success of European countries to simply regulate high expectations about energy efficiency shows. But it is the cities that punch above their weight that make the greatest strides — and civic capacity is one feature that enables that.
The most important and thorough finding from my in-depth inquiry into the emergence and expansion of green construction among U.S. cities — later published in the American Journal of Sociology — was that civic capacity matters greatly for how green construction diffused.
The number of buildings was consistently and substantially higher in places with more civic capacity, controlling for many other things such as the city’s politics, geography, and demographic makeup. Using a variety of econometric analyses to examine the timing and extent of LEED-certified buildings, I found that places with greater civic capacity adopt green construction sooner than others and that more nonprofit organizations per capita are associated with more green building certifications.
A comparison between Chicago and Cleveland illustrates the power of civic capacity. Chicago has a robust network of nonprofit organizations that are actively involved in addressing social and environmental issues. Its local chapter of the USGBC, the Illinois Green Alliance, has been working to promote the adoption of green construction practices and policies in the city. Chicago has seen constant growth in the adoption of green construction, with several new net-zero buildings dotting its skyline.
The city of Cleveland, in contrast, has a weaker network of values-oriented organizations and has seen slower adoption of green construction practices. Despite early efforts to advance sustainable development by advocacy organizations like the Cleveland Green Building Coalition (a precursor of the local chapter of the USGBC for North Ohio), green construction did not take off in the early years. Cleveland now features roughly half as many green buildings per inhabitant as Chicago.
One reason for the civic capacity effect was that cities with more nonprofit organizations were more likely to see green building early on because nonprofits make decisions not just based on financial considerations but also ethical ones. Early adoption is why the boost that civic capacity provided to the marginal number of new buildings registered for LEED was stronger before 2006.
How did a certification primarily aimed at the market for office buildings land on more fertile ground in cities with more civic capacity? It would be reductive to say that nonprofits were the key, or that city administrations did the work, or that it was a market phenomenon. Instead, as I show in Cities in Action, it was the interplay among the public, nonprofit, and corporate spheres that was really responsible for the successful uptake of green construction practices in cities.
