During the Mobilize Summit, urban transport and development practitioners come together alongside world-class researchers to celebrate best practices and accelerate implementation of sustainable transport projects grounded in equity. All the panelists agreed about the need to help decision-makers trust and believe that change is possible. “For instance, everyone thought rampant bike theft in Medellín would be the inevitable downfall of our bike share program, but it just didn’t happen that way,” explained Lina. “Our early adopters were the ‘rock stars’ who helped change hearts and minds simply through their passionate embrace and adoption of cycling.”

Oakland and other cities in California are working to end dependence on natural gas in new construction. Cities, product manufacturers, regulators, and utilities in California have been working together under the Building Decarbonization Coalition to end the use of natural gas in buildings. This coalition and its members have demonstrated the availability of electric technologies to replace gas systems in all building types, shown that all-electric new construction is cheaper to build and operate than buildings with gas, and helped educate builders and contractors to show how modern electric systems like heat pumps and induction cooking deliver better cooking and heating for homes and businesses than their gas-based alternatives.

In its second year, the Ford Mobility City:One Challenge (Formerly City of Tomorrow Challenge) program is a space for residents, businesses and community groups to connect and collaborate on solutions that improve mobility in cities. This year the Ford program has expanded to four more cities; Michigan Central Station (Detroit); Indianapolis, IN; Austin, TX; and its first international city, Mexico City.

Improved understanding about local air quality can support significant policy changes and targeted incentives, including electric fleet conversions for particular transit routes, the provision of emission-control technologies or alternative routes for heavy duty trucks, targeted fuel-switching efforts for home heating in heavily impacted communities, or the enactment of new regulations for specific industrial operations. We can also use data about localized air pollution exposures to study health outcomes under specific environmental conditions.  With the wealth of these new, localized data on air quality, supported by low-cost sensor technology, we can design the policies and deploy clean energy strategies that truly empower local communities and protect public health.

Landscape architects have long been designing for these multiple benefits, and their broad training and systems thinking makes them well-equipped to tackle new challenges brought on by a changing climate, increasing urbanization, and growing inequity. Cities are landscapes and should be planned and designed using a landscape approach; one that considers the larger systems and flows of water, energy, waste, species, and people and how they are nested at various scales. The landscape approach results in distinct multi-functional spaces that are so well resolved that the design intricacies may not be apparent at first glance. These landscapes respond to their context to facilitate connections, transitions, circulation, and views, in addition to addressing key project goals.