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0:04
I thought I'd start by saying something about this cover because because it, it encapsulates the argument of the book really well. And the idea here is, is of cities in pods that are connected to each other or not, and that are sort of embedded in a, here in a wetland. And it's a, it's a cover that I created together with an architect, New York based architect and, and Nicaraguan originally Oscar Caballero, who did a lot of the artwork in the book.
0:32
And the, the way that we came up with it is that I, I, you know, I was fascinated by this piece of work by utopian depiction of The Walking City by Ron Herron. I don't know if any of you have come across this, but it's sort of this utopian, an idea that cities can get up and walk away if there is something that threatens them. And it captures very nicely this idea that a city is not just a stage for action for social policy makers or for organisations that are trying to do things.
0:58
But Eden itself is an actor that responds to external threats, you know, tries to be resilient or, you know, position itself strategically in some way. And also help me bring this argument sort of into the 21st century with this depiction. So, so a lot of credit to him. And today what I want to show is, is mostly to show off the artwork for the book from the book and some of the figures and sort of walk you through it's broader argument.
1:21
But then I'm going to do 2 deep dives into some of the empirical studies that undergird the arguments just to give you a sense of of what the empirical data looks like as well.
1:30
And off we go. So the, I already mentioned the idea of the book is to sort of understand how organisations, institutions shape urban climate strategies and, and so what I call city climate action. OK. And I, I think that this is unfortunately a quite timely issue. I, I wasn't planning on it to be quite so timely. But if you've been following US climate policy, you've, as many of you have, you will have noticed that the endangerment finding was recently struck
1:57
down, which basically gives the government, the United States license to regulate climate change. And the federal government in the United States has, you know, withdrawn from a lot of multilateral treaties, including the Paris climate reports. And I think in order to understand sort of the significance of this moment of climate inaction, it's helpful to recall, you know, 2015 when the Paris Climate Accords were signed. The the, you know, first large multilateral treaty since the
2:25
Kyoto Protocols that agreed to keep global warming at 1.5° of pre industrial, sort of an increase relative to pre industrial levels. And this was a, you know, an important moment where the international community came together, decided to do something finally about climate change. And as you know, you know, the this latest attempt at deregulation was not the first in which this happened in the US context at least, because, you know, just two years later, Donald Trump stepped into the Rose Garden
2:52
of the White House and announced that they are going to, you know, the United States is going to withdraw the earliest possible point from the Paris climate accord. So in other words, this national climate inaction is not happening for the first time. It's happening for the second time. And this book is really the origin story of what happened next, which is that after Trump made the speech in which he said that that his allegiance as a leader is to Pittsburgh and not to Paris,
3:18
the mayors of Pittsburgh and Paris got together and hosted the press release, wrote a press release in which they said that they in fact intend to continue collaborating with each other and they still care about the climate accord. They said we are still in and and so a campaign emerged that was supported by individual mayors. So you see here the mayor of Chicago at the time, the mayor of of Phoenix, Arizona, that was supported by major
3:48
philanthropies such as Bloomberg in order to to reassert the commitment of cities and other sub sub national leaders. So this could also included States and companies to basically continue to uphold the promises of the Paris Climate Accords, even if the national government didn't support it. And, you know, the, the, so that the number at the time was that, you know, 155 million people in the United States were basically represented by one of these organisations that said that we are
4:14
still in, you know, it's more than half the population of the United States. So in, in other words, there was a major effort in which cities jumped into action. And this was not just in the United States. This was actually supported by global network. The Global Covenant of Mayors was basically the, the international sibling of the [inaudible] campaign as well. And so at the time, I was trying to understand, you know, strategic planning in cities and urban sustainability broadly.
4:41
And I was lucky to have a, a meeting set up with the Chief Resilience Officer of the city of New York to try to understand what's going on. And he told me that, you know, in his view, the feds, the federal government in the US are completely abandoning climate issues in general. And so cities like New York have to step up and keep doing more. And the mayor is keenly aware of that role for New York as a national leader and as a global leader.
5:04
So this city really saw itself as a global leader, even though, you know, politically, legally, they have no right to engage in multilateral negotiations with another country in any way, right? Like diplomacy isn't is, is the the privilege of the national government. So this is the puzzle that motivates the book. The the real question here is you they have these initiatives, and, you know, cities are stepping up that perceives themselves as leaders.
5:30
And you have these impressive numbers to almost 300 cities in the United States that sign up for we're still in. There were over 13, 000 cities worldwide that, you know, have had had formal plans to engage in in, in, you know, greenhouse gas inventories and plan for climate change as part of the global covenant of mayors. But the truth is that these cities that, you know, showed some climate leadership at the time were only a small fraction of the
5:54
cities that were actually eligible to do something, right? So, so this is maybe a quarter, a fifth of the number of cities that really could have signed up to these initiatives. So the majority of cities in a way are not doing anything. So, so here's the puzzle. Some cities are in action and others show in-action, right? And so why is that? And I, I think, you know, the, the mission of the book is really to understand what that, what that means in the first bit,
6:19
what does it mean for a city to act on behalf of its citizens? And I think that that is important for a couple of reasons that I'm, I'm not, I'm, I'm, you know, alluding to, but I'm not proving in the book. So this is the premise, but it's also worth to, to interrogate these. The first one is that whether cities do something about climate change or not likely has some consequence for, you know, whether climate change is effectively addressed or not.
6:45
And that is because, you know, the majority of people now live in cities. And you probably know this, over 70% of overall CO2 emissions occur in cities, right? So also the majority of energy is being consumed in cities. So they are places that, you know, where, where a lot of you know climate change or anthropological climate change is created.
7:07
At the same time, the way in which climate change has affected cities has a lot of implications for the equality by which we address this problem by which we create sustainability. So not all solutions to climate change are implemented equally. There are both, you know, within city differences, right, like certain neighborhoods that are more exposed to toxic waste sites or that are, you know, better or worse adapted to urban heat or
7:36
many sort of many other reasons in which in which there are within city inequalities. And there is also another dimension of this, which is that the fact that some cities are acting and others are not creates between city inequalities as well. So there is an important here about whether the transition to climate action that we can engage in is just or unjust. And finally, as we've seen, especially in the context of COVID, most recently, the ability to respond to a shock like
8:04
climate change or to a threat like climate change is, is one indication that cities can stand up to broader structural problems in the first place. But it's not the only threat that cities experience, right? So COVID, for instance, was something where a lot of cities actually had shelter in place policies in place before the states or the federal governments in which they were located, right? So in other words, to understand what, you know,
8:27
drives cities to engage in some sort of action in in, you know, passing independent policies autonomously of the governments in which they're nested allows us to understand how they solve a variety of different issues and not just climate change. But in order to understand this, you know, in order to, you know, see what cities contribution can be to these different dimensions, it's important to, this is important in part because it also
8:53
allows us to think about how we might encourage cities that are inactive to also jump into action. OK. So the basic argument of the book, I'll just give you a very brief sense, is that city action can come about through two different processes. The first one is through attribution. So this is mostly related on, it's mostly in the city on the level of the city government or the city administration that, you know, passes some policy or engagement,
9:16
an action that is administrative action, in relating it takes action on behalf of the people in the city. There is another way in which we can think about city action, which is a distributed form of city action where it's individual organisations and people located in the city that are doing something about climate change that then creates in the aggregate this perception the city is greener or less green. And these two I argue in the book are complementary and mutually reinforcing.
9:41
And if we don't understand both of them, then we can't understand what, you know, gets some cities, you know, act more than others. The argument that I'm drawing on or that I'm that I'm developing and that I want to share with you now is that whether cities can engage in city action both through attribution and through aggregation is it depends on, on two features that I called the dual embeddedness of cities. That is, on the one hand, the institution and environment that
10:09
cities share with each other. So basically the expectations that are formed to the city, the kind of support networks that cities share with each other. And it is determined by the organisational infrastructure of the city. That means the ecology of organisations, you know, government structures, businesses, non profits and so on that are located in the city. And it's the combination of those two that we need to look at. OK, So the starting point of this framework,
10:35
of this dual embeddedness framework is the city administration, this idea that, you know, different city administrations have more or less receptiveness to, you know, external influences such as a desire to address climate change, and that they can vary also by organisational features, right by the administrative structure. And so we'll we'll get back to that a little bit. That much is clear. But the first part of the argument is that these city administrations are
11:06
highly responsive to the institutional environment in which they embedded. Who who here is like training in organisational theory or has read James Thompson's Organization in Action, right? So this is what inspired the title of the book. So I'll just tell you a little bit of background on this. This was basically a book that in the 1970s argued for the first time, or maybe 68 for the first time, that organisations aren't just sites of
11:30
individuals making strategic decisions, but they also responsive to a broader, you know, broader expectations to a culture in which they embedded to and we need to understand organisations as being embedded in open systems. OK, so this is essentially, I'm, I'm going to cut this short, right? Don't have to read tens of pages of theory, but the basic idea here is that cities too are open systems in which they are responsive to a broader environment. OK? So what is this institutional environment
11:57
here? It's mostly made-up by professional networks that are basically telling people inside cities how to run their city and that shape the propensity to act. And this includes international sort of intercity NGOs that that you'll hear about a lot now, and also some international national agencies that are trying to encourage cities. And it also involves sort of a network structure, which is that cities learn from each other and they are they, they influence each other, right.
12:22
So here is the idea that you have a, you know, our three cities here that are embedded in the shared institutional environment. And this is the the first, the first two chapters of the book are essentially about this, but how the institutional superstructure through attribution shapes administrative city action. OK, here's what I mean by administrative city action. The city of Lyon in which I currently live. Lovely city, not the most policy innovative place in
12:50
the world, but nonetheless announced that they're going to be carbon neutral net zero by 2030. And that's a pretty ambitious goal. And, you know, not only is it an ambitious goal, but you can actually see it in the city. So the the president of the Metropole of Lyon post this kind of mock ups on, on, you know, social media on a regular basis. And living in the city, I can tell you that it looks more and more like this and less and less like a wasteland of parking lots.
13:16
In fact, they've been ripping out parking lots and planted trees instead because urban heat, you know, the sort of the, the heat waves in the summer have become such an issue that they're really affecting the livability in the city. The, the center of the city here, this is the presquille, so surrounded by two rivers has become a pedestrianized zone. So for part of the day, you cannot drive in there anymore at all. If you have a, you know, a diesel car, you need to,
13:39
you cannot get a permit to drive into the city center at all. And what's most interesting about this is that Lyon is not alone in this effort. It's, in fact, part of the 100 European cities that have committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2030. And so if you walk past the City Hall, you see this poster in which you proudly announced that they're part of this court of cities. And the interesting thing is that it doesn't really matter where I talk about
14:03
this, this research, there is always some way in which I can connect this to the local place because many, many places, especially those in which universities are located, also have this kind of commitment. So you know, the city Oxford, for instance, has a net zero action plan in which they they try to achieve net zero by 2040. The City of London has here you can see a commitment to becoming a zero carbon city by at 2050 and so many cities around the world have sign up to these to these
14:33
fairly large initiatives. And so you know, just to be very clear, City of Lyon or Oxford or London are not at all alone in this initiative in this administrative public plans to try to address, you know, to adapt to or mitigate climate change in some way. There are lots of different ways in which cities have done this. And so for instance, look at the city of Athens was part of a network of cities called the 100 resilient cities network in which it got
14:58
some money in order to develop a resilience plan in which they said that they're going to implement, you know, energy retrofits. And New York City says it wants to become a zero waste city. Vancouver says it wants to be the greenest place to work. And the city that has by far been the most ambitious in its plans all along has been Copenhagen, which was the first to say they want to be carbon neutral and they wanted they actually achieved this to a very large extent, you know, by 2025, last year.
15:25
The most interesting aspect of this, just as a side note, was they didn't just have a plan in which said that, but they also had a site plan that was not in Danish but in English in which they explained to other cities how they're going to go about this and encourage them to do that too. So one of the things, for instance, is that by 2025, you should be able to swim in the harbor. And at the time that was an outrageous idea because the harbor was dirty.
15:47
But if you've been to Copenhagen recently, you know that you can now swim in the harbour. The city of Vienna, You know, as the last example, you know, has the smart city plan, which doesn't even sound like anything related to climate change, but in that they commit to wanting to keep, you know, the green spaces in the city to over 50% and so on. And so these are not just plans, they often also come with the departments that are trying to implement these plans and so on.
16:10
So what I did for the book was to look at the 360 largest cities in the world. And I tried to understand whether they have something like this, a strategic plan that is holistic in that it, you know, covers different issues of broad issues and not just a very specific problem. They're long term. So they're not just for the current legislative period of the government, but they're actually more long term and they're purposive.
16:31
And that they actually have, you know, the features of a strategic plan in which there are, you know, key performance indicators and milestones in another way. In 2006, there were a little over 30 cities in the world that had strategic sort of strategic plans like this. In 2016, this is what it looked like. They had 160 cities out of out of the 360 or maybe even I think it was 176 to be precise, that have a strategic plan. And by now I redid this to 2025. It's, it's actually 190.
17:01
So in other words, this is a pretty standard diffusion model. You, you see more and more cities to pick up on something like this and the cities that don't already have it or not really getting it anymore either. So something happened in this period in which in which a lot of cities around the world, and not just if you go back to 2006, not just in Europe, but not just in North America, but really in different regions of the world, turn to this form of strategic planning,
17:22
setting out ambitious goals related to climate change. And you know, as you can imagine, though, this is not just a story of adoption, but also of non adoption, right? So if you want a little, allow me to do a little polemic. There are maybe, you know, 770 million people in the world to city governments have a strategic plan like this. And there are over 500 million people, you know, half a billion people whose city essentially has no plan. And so why is that? The first way to think about this,
17:49
I thought was to the lens of an urbanist and urbanist tell us that cities are basically engaged in place based competition. So there's particularly entrepreneurial cities that are at the top of some sort of world order and they try to stay there. And you know, Bob Jessop, a critical geographer, for instance, that some of you may know, said that, you know, the the idea of cities is usually try to promote the competitiveness of their local economy vis-a-vis others.
18:12
So my my prior was definitely that these strategic plans are just a way to try to attract, you know, people capital. I don't know what, by by saying things that people want to hear. And so I spoke to a lot of the strategists involved in doing sustainability related plans in different cities. And indeed, for instance, the chief strategist of the of the city of Vienna told me that we are in a vanity competition with Amsterdam,
18:36
with Stockholm, with London, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Singapore, New York, Rio, Barcelona. The question is who's the smartest? Who's the high flyer?
18:45
The chief sustainability officer of Chicago told me that he spends a lot of time reading the plans from these other cities. He wants to steal ideas, you know, to be better than something. What are they focus on? What are they not? But that so that that that's where I paused a little bit. You know, this is not just a matter of competition. He actually said, like, what can we learn from these other cities? This is not just a typical form in which you think about competition.
19:07
It's also a form maybe of collaboration. And this is actually a topic that came up a lot. So for instance, the city manager of a small town on the West Coast, like in the San Francisco Bay Area, really a small town told me that, you know, before I discuss the problems of anyone in another level of government in the US, you know, the county, the state or whatever, I pick up the phone and I call the mayor of Barcelona. And I don't know if the mayor of Barcelona picks up, but you know,
19:32
they're definitely, you know, some sort of tie. And and so this this tie is this form of collaboration with each other, these professional networks among cities and I learned reinforce expectations for what a good city is supposed to do, right? Like if you are a world leading city, a global city, you are supposed to have a strategic plan that thinks about, you know, broad issues, not just how to advance your local economy.
19:56
And these networks of learning have emerged roughly around the same time as we see the diffusion of these strategic plans. So equally an organisation that advocates for local governments for sustainability.
20:09
For instance, had, you know a little over 200 members in 1997 and it has roughly 2000 now. The number of organisations that are registered as international non governmental organisations that explicitly deal with local or city related topics has equally increased pretty dramatically. And the greatest growth happened somewhere between the 1990s and the 2000 and 2010. So this is where like a lot of these organisations were created and some of these organisations you've probably heard of.
20:37
So ICLEI I already mentioned, the global covenant of mayors and introduced you to 100 Resilient cities. You may have heard of C40. That's, you know, an organisation that has the 97 cities in them that they are the, the leading edge of, of planning locally for climate change and a variety of others, some of which you know, are very large organisations and, and not exactly, you know, not even non governmental like UN Habitat. But you know, the, the, the list of these is quite long and they
21:04
have, they have proliferated in a way and try to help as cities learn from each other.
21:11
We can use these networks in an interesting way, which is that we can think about them as conduits of learning between two cities, right? You heard if we're part of the same network, we might learn from each other. And C40, for instance, is an organisation of both Copenhagen and New York are members of, and that gives us an implicit tie between Copenhagen and New York that allows them to know what they're up to. And I basically use this logic, you know, this this sort of bipartite network in
21:35
order to think about how are cities related and what's their position in the broader network of intercity learning. And this is what this network looks like, the variety of different clusters. And some cities are more central than others in a network, right? Like they're more tied into what these intercity associations are sharing and the kind of information that they have to, that they... if you want this in high resolution, you have to buy the book.
21:59
OK.
22:01
And so in fact, when I, you know, when I spoke to the, the CRO in New York City, for instance, he told me that the most important part of these networks is not what the networks themselves offer, but it's in fact the city to city learning, the city to city interactions that happened there. Like it's one thing for cities to think that they have peers, but another to have developed really strong relationships with CROs and sustainability officers in other cities.
22:28
He says, there are people that I text and call and we bounce ideas off of each other. So in fact, I found that a lot of the chief sustainability officers actually have a WhatsApp channel with each other and they would just text each other and they say, like, well, you know, here's this this policy problem I have. How did you solve that? And that creates a lot of solidarity among people who in many cities are quite isolated from the rest of the of the administration because they're doing
22:50
something that is radically at odds with what cities have been doing all along. Right. So that's to think on such a holistic broad term. He said that when he was telegraphed that the Paris withdrawal was coming, we were all on the phone weeks in advance saying, how are we going to respond? What are we going to say? So the fact that this press release happened just the day after the United States pulled out of the Paris Accords was not a coincidence, but it was actually, you know, premeditated.
23:14
And in fact, that, you know, that the people who were poorest in this process were, you know, this is someone who was on the on the East Coast of the United States and who already, you know, it was important to them to be to be a spokespeople of cities in that respect. But the person who was really poor was the chief sustainability officer of Los Angeles because he actually also wanted to send a press release very early.
23:35
And he had to set his alarm at 5:00 in the morning to be able to be the first to send out this press release right before New York does it. So maybe a little bit of competition after all. So in other words, there is an interplay between collaboration and competition. And, you know, one of the things that I learned in the book is that these professional city networks indeed seem to be important ties for learning and for collaboration.
23:57
Cities that have a greater centrality in the networks have greater pressure to do something. They have greater exposure to this toolkit for planning and governance and to this idea that, you know, they they have better access to technical assistance. They have a safe space in which they can exchange ideas with each other. And what was interesting, so not only does that increase the likelihood of having a plan by quite a lot in some classes, it increases the likelihood by 80%.
24:22
And you know, there is of course some, some some bi-directionality in the causality because you can also join the networks in response to, to having a lot to say. But what's interesting is that it's especially the less competitive cities, so the ones that are not at the top of the economic pecking order, that benefit the most, that have the greatest effect or the greatest association between the centrality and the professional networks and whether they have a plan or not.
24:44
Because they're the ones that arguably can also benefit the most and don't already have access to these kinds of resources. So this led me to conclude that this institutional superstructure indeed enables cities to act, or at least it helps them do so. And this is the first part of this of this network that I of this model that I showed with you. And of course you're now thinking, OK, fine, but like, what about these local place based organisations that are actually in the city right?
25:06
Like they must matter too. And indeed they do.
25:10
OK, second part. The organisational infrastructure is the idea that the city administration also responds to organisations that are located in the cities, in the city. that are unique to the city, right? So cities are, you know, if it were just the superstructure, we think that all cities end up doing exactly the same thing. But that's not all at all true, right? If you even read the plans, you'll see that everything, you know,
25:34
what they actually say in these plans differs a great deal from each other. And one of the reasons I argue that is, is because of this organisational infrastructure that is specific to each city. And the most important feature here, I argue, is not state capacity or market capacity, but it's civic capacity. It's the fact that there are many places that have more or less nonprofit organisations, social movement organisations,
25:59
a more diverse ecology of organisations that actually deeply care about climate change than others, that has an effect independent or just the political preferences of the people in that city. And that varies by, you know, from place to place. And it basically determines what the cast of actors is that engages in governance on the local level. So if you, if you, and look at this figure, you'll see that yes, the city administrations are embedded in
26:23
the same institutional environment, but the organisational context that filters these influences differs a great deal. And therefore you get different, different outcomes. And the, the way in which I, I want to illustrate this is by drawing on an example from the two chapters on how cities lead and scale. In other words, how the organisational infrastructure helps create distributed city action through aggregation. Because this is the flip side of this argument.
26:48
And the, the, the argument I want to draw on is from some work, empirical work that, you know, some of you may know, Jane knows, on green buildings and especially the question of how that happened that energy efficient buildings scaled across the United States. So here I'm now looking at a specific country at the US context. And why did I look at cities, at green buildings? Because they have a tremendous environmental impact on cities.
27:13
So in industrial nations, the energy use of the city is up to 70% due to use in buildings, right? Like where you live, where you work, it's not manufacturing, it's not transit, but it's the buildings in which we live. And what climate scientists estimate is that we just use existing technology to retrofit buildings and you know, make newly constructed buildings more energy efficient. That would get us about 1/8 of the way to stabilising carbon emissions at pre industrial levels.
27:44
So in other words, you, well not pre industrial levels, but you know, basically reach the 1. 5° wall. So in other words, you basically just need to implement the technology that we already have and that avoids the worst climate scenario. And on top of this, just from an economic point of view, this is also an incredibly fast growing industry. So this period that I looked at between 2000 and sort of like 2016, right, we saw that that's where a lot of the movement was this,
28:10
this industry grew at 12% every year, even through the recession, where the construction industry as a whole tanked. So in other words, this is an industry that that that is, you know, has become increasingly important within construction. And, and so I, I thought that was an interesting piece of sort of a, you know, a little fun fact in this book by Bill Gates in in which he, you know, so maybe now the now withdrawn priority of, of, you know, how important it is to do something about
28:34
the climate disaster, in which it says that the world is going to be building equivalent of another New York City every month for the next 40 years. So that's the kind of impact that, you know, concrete, cement, and overall the construction industry have on our ability to mitigate climate change or carbon emissions. At the same time, this is a really neat way to look at what cities can do because greening building codes is one of the things that they actually have control over, right?
28:59
Like that they have a jurisdiction over. So this is the number one strategy of cities for emission mitigation. And so what many cities in the US context have been doing is they take that, they take one particular framework, a certification framework that was developed in the private sector and they use that to incentivise or to require high building standards, right. So they they don't just do this to legislation, but they draw on this.
29:25
And the thing that they draw on, it's called LEAD: leadership in, in environmental and energy design or energy efficient design. And it's developed by the US Green Building Council, an organisation with, you know, headquarters in Washington, DC, which basically gives a guideline for if you want to be a green certified building, you need to, you know, check a number of boxes in a variety of different areas. And if you get enough points, you get certified, you know,
29:48
you get a standard certification or you get a, a silver or gold or even a platinum certification. You may have heard this in the UK context, in the context of another certification scheme. Does anybody know LEAD? It's not heavily used in the UK, but it's BREEAM that's, that's very, that's very popular in the UK and that's the UK certification scheme, very similar. So this has some costs. You have to pay for the certification.
30:08
And if you want a platinum building, that costs about 15% extra on a large building, which is a lot of money. And there were always some promises that there would be cost savings, right? Because the building is better insulated, you need less, you know, spend less money on heating, for instance.
30:24
And so this pays for itself. But especially at the beginning, there was very little evidence that that is true. And what I found is that there were few organisations that did this because they wanted to save money. Most of the organisations that were engaged with this in the beginning didn't even weren't even sure that there were going to be reputational effects on this, right, that they were going to look better. But in fact, many organisations did this because they
30:46
wanted to signal that they care about the environment and they care about sustainability.
30:54
I just wanted to take one example of this. There are many, many energy efficient buildings like this around Oxford, too. This is the building that I'm now working. It's like newly constructed in Lyon and it has, you know, a green roof and photovoltaic panels. There is no more parking for cars except for, you know, people with disabilities. There is you basically have to bike there. It's well connected to public transit. There is no air conditioning system, but there's a passive cooling system
31:18
built into the building. That's the kind of building that we're talking about. It basically just has a lower carbon footprint as others. And I want you to think about this building as one red dot on the map that I'm about to show you, which I, I just show you that this sort of this distributed adoption of green buildings, right, by individual project owners in the United States starting in 2000.
31:38
And what I want you to see here is first of all, that there is a little bit of a contingent pattern so the places that have a lot of buildings early on also have a lot of buildings later, right? So the initial period is very important. And second, if we overlay these clusters here with the city regions in the United States core based statistical areas, you'll see that this maps very nicely, right? Like in other words, in order to understand the diffusion of
32:03
green buildings, you just need to understand between city variation. And that's what I tried to do in a research design in which I looked at at basically all places in the US and how many green buildings do you have and do you newly adopt in a given year between 2000 and 2016. The outcome was the time at which you start having buildings and then the number of buildings of this individual adoption of LEAD certifications.
32:29
And I looked at both sort of two features, the distributed and the administrative aspect here. The distributed adoption means these individual buildings. The administrative adoption means whether there's some kind of policy by the city to incentivise or the require building owners in that city to have lead certification. OK. So we can look at both and the relationship between these two. And what I show in this research is that what's an important feature that drives
32:59
whether cities adopt green buildings or not is the civic capacity of the city. So that is the presence of value driven formal organisations that, you know, somehow recognise that there are social problems or environmental problems and they initiate solutions about them, right? So these solutions don't necessarily have to work, but they say, OK, here's something in this and we're going to do something about it. And in the US context, these kinds of organizations often are
33:25
registered as 501C3 nonprofit organisations. And, and so basically I measured this as the excess of nonprofit organisations beyond what you would expect. So it's basically the residual of the predicted value of nonprofits based on the politics of the place, the number of people in that place, the region. And, and so you know what, what you would expect. And you'll see that there are some cities that have more nonprofit organisations that you would expect based on these demographic features.
33:49
So, you know, New York City, for instance, is a city that just has a lot of nonprofits, even considering how large it is. There are also a couple of funny outliers here that you will recognize like Cambridge MA, Ann Arbor Michigan, Berkeley CA, Santa Monica, places with universities, right, that are full of undergraduate students that, you know, want to go out there to the world and found nonprofit organisations to change the world.
34:10
There are also lots of places that that have a lower number of nonprofits than you would expect. So they're just generally have a very low number of nonprofits and, and you know, don't have this kind of representation of [inaudible] environmental issues in the appropriation. And what I found in this research is that the measure of civic capacity here on the X axis has a very strong correlation with the presence, the pace and the extent of these buildings.
34:34
And so on the Y axis, I'll show you the registered number of, of lead buildings per capita in the place. And there is a, you know, a really strong positive correlation between these two. And and you know, this correlation holds when you control for a variety of lack factors, the size of the city, the politics, the regime, the location, you know, all of the sort of the secret sauce of cities is controlled the way to fix effects. And still you have this positive correlation.
34:59
And I know as people studying interventions, you're gonna say, wow, is this really causal? And I'm gonna show you a little bit about causality a bit. But this is not really my point. My point is that there's a strong correlation. And I'll tell you a little bit from looking on the ground why there is this strong correlation, which I think is crucial to understand. And for that, it helps to look at the actual buildings and to look at what those buildings are. So here are all of the buildings.
35:22
You'll see that they started growing pretty tremendously around 2006. You know, they, they grew, you know, almost exponentially, even through the recession to the financial crisis. And what's so interesting is that this this, this growth here is primarily due to the dark grey area here, which is companies. And this light grey area, which is homes, and to a much larger degree it's it's education, it's a light orange hre, or nonprofit organizations, state governments mostly,
35:51
and also the federal government and municipal governments. But you're really companies did a lot of this. And so it's it's actually funny. If you talk to people at the US Green Building Council, they'll tell you that one of the reasons that a lot of these companies were doing this is that they were trying to do reputation repair for the fact that during the recession, they had a pretty bad rep. And so some of these organisations include retail organisations like Target,
36:14
for instance, hotels like Intercontinental, large banks like Wells Fargo, the General Services Administration that did this on behalf of the federal government. And so these organisations are not, you know, the most progressive, innovative outlying organisations out there, they're like fairly conservative organisations that were doing this. And so previous accounts really focused on these as the mass adopters of green building.
36:36
And I think that that is in a way short sighted because as we saw on the map before, what happened in the first five years or six years of this process was to some extent deterministic for what happened down the road. And so what we really need to understand is where did this start and who started it? And so if we just look at the first couple of years of, of the diffusion, you know, after LEAD was instituted, you'll see that the distribution is quite different. So there are companies in here.
37:01
The home's certification scheme didn't even exist at the time. The the largest share was in fact, local government organisations and nonprofit organisations. And so those are actually organisations that are quite different from the ones that we were just looking at. Even among the companies those stand out. So biotech firms like Genentech, for instance, were among the first in the San Francisco Bay Area where I was looking at this in particular.
37:25
This is an organisation that is staffed by scientists that, you know, care about climate change, also about keeping the temperature levels stable. The California Academy of Sciences, you know, also committed to the environment and, and, and, and scientific institution, a Public Library like the San Mateo Public Library. They got a, they got a lot of money, a federal grant to build a new building. And while they were planning the building, there was a, a blackout.
37:50
So that these rolling blackouts in California, because of the energy supply, they were sitting in the dark. And there was a, in, in the community council, there was a student who was studying at a local Community College sustainability. And she said, like, maybe we should do something about this, you know, so, so they decided to to get LEAD certified. Large foundations like the Hewlett Foundation, they have a massive environmental grant portfolio or by environmental grant portfolio.
38:11
So they also got LEAD certified. And it's not just organisations that are deeply committed to climate change in the first place. In Chicago, for instance, one of the first was a disability rights organisation named Access Living. And I spoke to, to one of the, the staff there was there at the time. And he told me that what happened is that they were looking into ways to make the building as ADA compliant as possible. So do to make it compliant with the, the regulations for,
38:36
for disability rights. And, and as they were looking into this, they realise there are other ways to build a really cool building. And so one of the ways, and one of the practices that they adopted this to, to get LEAD certification as well. So it's not just environmental issues, but these are often organisations that have some sort of mission and they're quite different from the banks that we will see. OK, so now you're going to ask yourself, but what's the role of the government in all this?
38:59
And there is a very important run to play even after this sort of catalysing stage of nonprofits that got this thing started, which is that many cities had policies that, as I mentioned, either either required or incentivised green building option. So Dallas, for instance, here has a policy in which they, they say that basically every new building that's built by the city needs to have it, you know, some sort of LEAD certification.
39:24
And the city of Chicago passed a very early policy that they then updated in which they said that basically if you wanna fast track your permit and save the permit fees, you have to be LEAD certified. So there are lots of these kinds of incentives for building owners to become LEAD certified as as well. So you know, you as as social policy scholars and students will probably assume, and that's what I assume, that these kinds of policies were at the beginning of the story.
39:51
And and that is that is not really what happened here. So if you look at the distribution of this adoption of buildings, this is what the S curve looks like. So beautiful diffusion curve. And here's what the S curve looks like of policies that incentivise or required LEAD certification in cities. And what you see here is that out of maybe 900 metropolitan micropolitan statistical areas, only a little over 100 had any kind of policy in the 1st place.
40:15
The policy wasn't the driving force of action at all. And the other thing you'll probably notice is that the the speed of the S curve for the the inclined of the S curve is, is way delayed from the individual buildings. So this building, these policies matter and they matter a great deal. OK, so I, I show this by doing basically an interrupted time series where you look at being a before and after policy related to comparing to propensity score match cities that you know had the same
40:42
likelihood of adopting a policy but didn't. And so what you see is that, what you expect is that there is some sort of immediate impact of the policy and then acceleration, right? You see more buildings down the road if you had a policy compared to no policy. So this is roughly what I was hoping to see, parallel trends. And it turned out that that is not what it looks like. This is what it really looks like. So indeed there is an effect, an acceleration,
41:05
but the parallel trends assumption is violated, right? So there is endogeneity. But in this case -- oh, let me just say something about the magnitude. So, so this, this in fact was about 18 additional buildings per year. But keep in mind that they're very large buildings, right? They have a significant footprint in the build environment. After propensity score matching, that effect was still about 10 buildings per year. So this is really not a trivial effect.
41:29
But what was interesting is that the prior certification adoption, so basically individual organisations, in fact predicts whether you have a policy in the first place. So in other words, policy followed individual certification activity, not the other way around. And it's the catalysis of these nonprofit organisations that made it possible for city governments to come in and to legitimate this practice so that then the Targets and the banks,
41:53
and I don't know what could do this knowing that there would be some sort of incentive, some sort of payoff to doing this as well. So now you've got the full picture. This is basically the idea of the dual embeddedness model. You have cities that are quite different from each other on local grounds that are embedded in a shared institutional environment. And because the institutional environment is filtered through these local
42:13
organisational infrastructures, maybe they have similar pressures to do something, but what they do in response differs a great deal. And this is basically what explains variation. And so to summarise the argument a little bit, or just to put this all into one picture, the dual embeddedness explains city action in that it can both enable and inhibit city action, right? So everything that I've told you that enables them in this linear framework can also hold cities back.
42:38
And that is true to the institutional superstructure, to planning and to learning, enabling administrative city actions or through these plans and through these strategies that often are followed with other administrative actions. It happens to the organisational infrastructure through leading and scaling and the effects of distributed city action. And importantly, there is, as we just saw, an interaction between these two, right?
43:01
So, so these two are, you know, they feed each other and shouldn't really be understood in isolation. And I think that this argument has a couple of implications that that, you know, for different audiences.
43:13
And I want to pull out two that I think are interesting. And I, I pick these two in particular because a colleague who, who introduced the talk recently, was saying that she was excited about the talking part because it's going to tell us how the hell are we going to organise to survive in the current moment? And I don't know that I can live up to, to that kind of question, but I think we should at least discuss it because it might give us a couple of pointers.
43:36
So the two things that I want to specifically highlight are the role that organisations play on the meso level to explain societal outcomes. And the second is at the bifurcation of city power, the ability of cities to autonomously respond to larger social and environmental problems. So the first bit here is the link between macro and meso. And I don't know, have you guys all had to sit through Coleman 1990 here? So the idea here is that any kind of institutional effect, you know,
44:06
cause and effect on the macro level is somehow linked to individual level links. And and so we really need to study in the individual level dimensions. And I think there is this is not wrong, but I also think that that is not the only way to understand how institutional dynamics operate. And so that the important thing that I would like to highlight here is that we can understand cities as sort of bounded, observed, observable meso level societies, right?
44:30
So organisational societies that that that we don't just need to understand on the macro level of all of society, but we can think about them as being an opportunity for comparison that are differentiated by the organisations that live in them. So this is the this is the main point. So why does this matter? Because the organisational composition, so the kinds of organisations that are located in the city matter a great deal
44:52
for whether the city is able to engage in collective action and has collective capacity to act. So this city capacity I think as a sort of a third key to the city after understanding the state capacity of local governments, which is often very limited and the market capacity of the kinds of companies and local economies that are driving the action city. So we really need to understand the civic side of things here and and sort of
45:17
emphasise that the role that societal organisational dynamics also play in linking cause and effect on the macro level. So, for instance, in this case, what I would point to is this idea of the early adoption of an innovation through these catalysing non profit organisations, but also different, you know, ways in which non profit organisations and governments are linked, learning from each other, influence each other, engage in policy and so on.
45:41
And and in many cases also whether these organisations pull in ideas from the broader institutional environment and translate them to the local level. And I think also for those of you who are picking, you know, empirical sides or designing social science research in the room, I think that cities are a wonderful level for, for understanding these kinds of dynamics or for studying. They're really generative fields. You know, if you think about it, there are a couple of dozen countries in
46:07
the world, but there are more than 1000 times as many cities in the world. And they're like a really generative way to compare with each other, you know, how sort of, you know, how we organize society effects outcomes. And you know, what's what's important to me here is also to point out there's a lot of diversity in how they respond to issues in part because of this dual embedded.
46:28
So in other words, pay attention to organisations.
46:32
The second take away is to, you know, be very serious about the fact that there is power in the local and to embrace the local, but to also beware of a certain tendency towards bifurcation. And the framework that I'd like to draw on here is by Charles Tilly, an important sociologist who in his last unpublished book looked at sort of the, the development, the evolution of the role of cities in society over hundreds of years.
47:03
And he says that with many a wiggle, there is a historical trend from cities as being autonomous from each other and basically not integrated at all towards a centralised state in which cities are less dominant and the nation state is more dominant, but there is a high level of integration. And so I, I think this is a, this is a, a beautiful overall historical analysis, even though it was, was never really fully carried out. But it also points us to sort of a reverse trend.
47:30
And then reverse trend is that we've seen the rise of something like a network city, right? Like mega, mega cities, global cities that independently of the governments in which they are, the national context in which they embedded are interacting with each other, deciding what to do, our autonomously setting policies and actions. And so what's, what's cool about this is that some cities seem to be regaining this kind of, of dominance, this kind of agency.
47:53
They do that to soft power, all right, like they, they host conferences together that are not quite the same as as a COP, but still there's a lot of knowledge exchange. They build coalitions among each other like the We're still in campaign or the global covenant of mayors. And they engage in these networks of learning where people who need support about how to implement a particular policy can find that from their colleagues in other cities.
48:15
So this is this is this is a great opportunity, I think. But at the same time, not every city is tuned into this network of learning at all. Many cities don't have what New York, for instance, has the CRO described this as sort of their foreign minister. They have someone on staff who's just in charge of this intercity association. So keeping the contact with them, of keeping contact with other cities as well, and basically allows the city to tie into
48:41
this broader institutional superstructure and learn from it. And so, you know, one point that I want to leave you with is, you know, this is a book about city climate action. But in a way, what what my interviewees impressed on me was that this is not just a matter of sustainability or climate change or resilience on now equity or smartness. These these are just labels and something that they say that something we just have to deal with, right? Like so now we've got to deal with resilience.
49:12
And before we dealt with climate change, whatever. The important part is that organisational infrastructures so the interactions and organisations within the city, synapses of learning of different organisations within the city and the way in which cities can pay attention to the broader institutional environment, are the kind of processes by which cities learn and scale solutions that then persist, that are not just specific to whatever the issue of the day is, but they can be more permanent,
49:43
more permanent effects. And I think it's very important to understand them if we don't want to, to see this kind of bifurcation into network cities and isolated ones.
49:54
So I just want to leave you with a, with a, a quick impression of a, of a particular, of a particular green space in which we started this talk. And that was Donald Trump stepping into the Rose garden and announcing that at the, the United States are withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. You may have heard this, that, you know, Trump announced that or proposed that they're going to pave over the grass in the Rose garden and they're going to, you know, remove the green space entirely.
50:21
And so this on the left here is what the Rose Garden now looks like. So indeed, they managed to, you know, defeat nature in this particular instance. But while this happened, you know, in 2025, C40 at the cities in C40 put out another press statement in which they said the same thing that they said in 2016. It even start, or 2017, it even start the terms that, you know, this global network of mayors is reacting to the withdrawal from from the Climate Accords.
50:48
And they're going to step up and they're going to to revert this act of climate vandalism, as they call it.
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