How Green is Your City?

Front Cover
New Society Publishers, 2007 - Business & Economics - 205 pages

In our peak oil, post-Katrina world, how do America's largest cities stack up in terms of sustainability? Which cities are more self-sufficient and better-prepared for our uncertain future, and which cities are operating business-as-usual?

How Green is Your City? examines the outcome of a sustainability study of the 50 largest U.S. cities, compiled by SustainLane. The 2006 SustainLane US Cities Rankings employed 15 standards to measure each city's performance and ranked them overall according to the cumulative results. Among those standards:

  • Public transit use
  • Air and tap water quality
  • Planning/land use
  • City innovation
  • Affordability
  • Energy/climate change policy
  • Local food/agriculture
  • Green economy
  • Sustainability management

Leading the pack is Portland, Oregon, with its high quality of life and commitment to green building, local food, alternative fuels and renewable energy, while Columbus, Ohio, with its dependence on the automobile and poor public transit, ranks at the bottom.

How Green is Your City? offers an in-depth analysis of each city's management policies, strengths and challenges, as well as the emerging job and tax base expansion opportunities with the growth of clean technologies.

How Green is Your City? will appeal to city planners, legislators, green businesses, as well as anyone interested in their quality of life and making their city a more sustainable place.

SustainLane.us was designed as an online open-source knowledge base devoted to government officials, while Sustainlane.com is for reviews in the green and healthy product market. Author Warren Karlenzig, along with Frank Marquardt, Paula White, Rachel Yaseen and Richard Young of SustainLane.com contributed to this project.

From inside the book

Contents

How Green Is Your City?
1
How We Did It The Methodology
11
The Rankings
19
Copyright

27 other sections not shown

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About the author (2007)

Warren Karlenzig is Chief Strategy Officer and Research Director for SustainLane. He has worked as a strategic consultant with federal agencies, major cities and the world's largest corporations for more than 15 years. Formerly, he was Editor-in-Chief of Knowledge Management magazine, and Lead Strategist for Dimension Data/ Proxicom. His areas of expertise include planning complex information and data systems, and communications. In sustainability, Warren has been a leading consultant with clients including the White House Office of Science and Technology, the US EPA Futures Group and the US Dept. of Energy. His book, A Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing was the first substantial work on the subject (Global Green USA, 1999) and he was involved with San Francisco's influential Sustainability Plan, formally adopted by the City's Board of Supervisors in 1997. He coordinated and co-authored the "Economy and Economic Development" section of the plan, which was directly cited in San Francisco's 1999 and 2003 green municipal building ordinances.

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