Last week, President Obama had this to say about the future of transportation at his final State of the Union Address: “Rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future — especially in communities that rely on fossil fuels. That’s why I’m going to push to change the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet. That way, we put money back into those communities and put tens of thousands of Americans to work building a 21st century transportation system.”

We wanted to know—what will this 21st century transportation system look like? We turned to some of our authors to find out:
 

Ray Tomalty, co-author of America's Urban Future (forthcoming February 2016)
The president was of course alluding to a carbon tax, which he is known to favor over cap-and-trade systems. Economists estimate a carbon tax could raise $1.2 to $1.5 trillion per year in the US, and if even a small part of this were spent on developing innovative transportation technology, a 21st century transportation system would be a real possibility in the US. At present, only about $2.3 billion in federal spending is devoted to transportation research. This is helping to test new technologies such as vehicle-to-vehicle communication, which has great potential to avoid accidents and improve traffic flow, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve travel times, and obviate the need for road infrastructure expansion. This technology is being tested on small stretches of urban highways across the country, but at the present rate of investment, it will be decades before fully automative vehicles are widespread in the US.

Many transportation experts believe the most pressing application of driverless technology is in driverless buses, which can greatly reduce the cost of public transit and vastly improve service. Unfortunately, little research and development is being dedicated to this purpose, something that could be addressed with funding from a carbon tax. Drone technology is another research and development area in need of greater public investment, a technology that is bringing the driverless movement to aviation and creating new possibilities for personal and goods transportation. Beyond research, new investment is needed in innovative transportation infrastructure. High-speed train service is a proven technology all over the developed world but in its infancy in the US (only one high-speed route in the country, the Acela Express linking Boston to Washington).

More thinking and research is also needed to explore the link between new transportation technologies, behavioral responses, and land use planning. This will require greater cooperation among local, regional and state planning authorities and cross-sectional cooperation among planning and transportation agencies. As the soon-to-be-released book, America’s Urban Future, written by Alan Mallach and myself shows, this is a field in which Canadian metropolitan areas have a long history of experimentation, so there may be something to be learned by looking north of the border for ideas on moving forward on this front.


Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Grady Gammage, author of The Future of the Suburban City (forthcoming April 2016)
By about 2050, driving your own vehicle will be a recreational activity like off-road four wheeling.  Routine travel in autonomous, mostly electric vehicles will be commonplace.  The cars will be smaller, lighter and often shared use but mostly they will still have only one or two people in them at a time.  Transit in all forms will dramatically increase, but in most cities people will still be living in houses with driveways and garages and they’ll use personal mobility vehicles to get around. 
 

Carlton Reid, author of Roads Were Not Built for Cars 
Cars? Where we’re going we won’t need cars. The past can tell us a lot about the future, and the past tells us that we’re very poor at predicting the next transport revolution.

18th-century folk thought canals would last forever. Early 19th-century folk thought the same about turnpike roads. And for those who grew up in the "railway age," the only future imagined was of steel rails and steam trains. Few predicted the motor car’s eventual dominance, and it’s reasonable to assume that the same inability to accurately predict the future afflicts us, too. As "car age" people, we tend to extrapolate into the future of transport using what we know, and that’s car-shaped objects on roads. The Tesla is a wonderful thing but the technology that underpins it is hardly new – electric cars were more popular in the 1890s than gasoline cars. And electric cars may appear to be “cleaner,” but this is only true if they’re replenished by solar power – all other recharging methods involve traditional power sources so, really, most electric cars are coal-powered cars.

And what of autonomous cars? Again, this is hardly the disruptive technology that many think it is. I’ve been using driverless cars for 50 years, cars which scuttle away and hide when not needed. Taxis. I can summon one with an app when in a meeting and it will appear outside and whisk me to wherever I want to go. When I use taxis, including Uber, I can kick back and let the driver – a silent automaton if I so will it – worry about the road ahead. I fiddle on my smartphone without even raising my eyes. Where autonomous vehicles might change the world – if we let them, and I’d rather we didn't – is over who has priority on roads. Currently, driverless cars are programmed to avoid cyclists and pedestrians. In a city full of cars driven by onboard computers it will be a great game to ride or step in front of them, safe in the knowledge they’re programmed not to touch you.

Because cities are expected to fill with more and more people I don’t see how driverless cars will be able to navigate around these empowered pedestrians or emboldened bicyclists, at least not in central business districts. It’s far more likely that there’s another technology waiting in the wings that we can scarcely even imagine. That is certainly what happened to our forebears. Until then (and, if I’m allowed to, even after then) I’ll continue to ride my bicycle. A driverless car has clear user benefits, but an autonomous bicycle would be rather dull and pointless.
 

Richard Willson, author of Parking Management for Smart Growth
Just as we need to stop subsidizing the past in energy policy, we need to stop subsidizing the past by favoring driving and parking over more appropriate transportation modes. Parking should be priced to cover both its actual cost and the costs it imposes on others and the planet. This is rarely the case in US cities, where the dual legacies of excessive minimum parking requirements and parking subsidies have distorted vehicle ownership and travel choices. These distortions have in turn, undermined land use efficiency, design, social equity, and livability. The 21st century transportation system will have fewer privately-owned cars and less parking. New technologies will ensure that we have all the mobility we want with fewer cars. Car companies know this – that’s why they are redefining themselves as mobility companies.
 

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Jeffrey Kenworthy, co-author of The End of Automobile Dependence 
New technologies will clearly be part of any 21st century transportation system, including autonomous cars, but they should not be embraced in the way they are currently envisaged. A car is a car and takes up space with roads and parking, as well as helping to facilitate the continued destruction of agricultural land and natural areas through sprawl. This can be said of autonomous cars as well as electric cars, so ideally a 21st century transportation system will not look like the current automobile-dependent system in the USA, where cars are still responsible for around 96% of all the motorized passenger travel in cities. 

A 21st century urban transportation system will have a multitude of modes (walking, bikes, car-sharing, transit, car-on-demand, private cars and probably other innovative technologies such as pedelecs, Yikes, etc.) seamlessly linked together. This will be achieved increasingly through the use of smart communications technologies, which will give people instant access via smart phones and tablet computers, for the best combination of modes for any trip.

In all the excitement over autonomous cars, we must not forget that electrically powered conventional transit modes such as light rail (LRT) and metro systems are still vastly under-provided for in US cities, due to being starved of adequate funding over the last 80 years. With advances in design, materials, comfort, on-board facilities, wireless networks and many other improvements, especially more protected rights-of-way, using transit in the future will be very different from what we know today. 21st century transportation systems should not only see more transit, but much more non-motorised movement, such as walking and cycling, leading to a less obese nation. This change alone will see billions shaved off US health care costs, not to mention the cost savings of a "road diet.”
 

John Renne, co-author of Transport Beyond Oil 
Rapid changes in technology, such as self-driving electric cars and trucks, hold promise that the transportation industry will continue to innovate during the 21st century. Combined with a societal move towards an information and sharing-economy there is no doubt that marginal efficiencies will allow for a less carbon-intensive transportation system. However, the scale and intensity of weather impacts due to climate change necessitate a more drastic approach to achieve the key goal of limiting global temperature rise. The good news is that the path is simple. Anything we can do to promote walkable and bikeable communities will have the greatest impact. Therefore, we need to prioritize mass transit, which is the only transportation technology that has been proven to create walkable communities at the local level and deliver regional connectivity with the lowest consumption on carbon and emissions.

Americans are increasingly demanding more walkable and transit-friendly neighborhoods that provide a higher quality of living. Despite pockets of revitalization, however, most US metros continue to follow old patterns of sprawl and central city decline. 

In America’s Urban Future, urban experts Ray Tomalty and Alan Mallach draw lessons from Canada’s urban policy successes to offer ways to revitalize US cities and suburbs. After examining the differences and similarities between the US and Canada in governance, land use regulation and more, the authors list specific policy recommendations that would foster healthier US urban centers and more energy- and resource-efficient suburban growth. Thoroughly researched and thoughtfully presented, America’s Urban Future is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of American cities and metro regions.

Check out Chapter 1 from the book below. 

A changing climate means a changing society. The Island Press Urban Resilience Project, supported by the Kresge Foundation and the JPB Foundation, is committed to a greener, fairer future for all.​ This post was originally published on Rooflines.org

High-density public housing may seem like an idea whose time has come and gone, buried along with the ruins of notorious projects like St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe and Chicago’s Cabrini-Green. Since the 1990s, HUD’s Hope VI program has demolished hundreds of public housing projects, usually replacing them with lower-density developments that house far fewer people. But is the issue really about density? A remarkable project currently underway in Toronto suggests that sometimes higher, rather than lower, density may be the best way to go.

By the 1990s, Regent Park, a public housing project built in Toronto in the late 1940s, was showing many of the same problems that had prompted the Hope VI program in the United States. With over 2,000 housing units on 69 acres, located less than a mile from booming downtown Toronto, Regent Park had become Canada’s own poster child for distressed public housing.

In 2005, Toronto Community Housing, a city-owned nonprofit social housing provider, partnered with local developer, The Daniels Corporation, to execute a revitalization plan for the entire complex. Although far from complete, Regent Park’s transformation is well underway, and was recently featured inThe New York Times.

Although the appetite for large-scale revitalization seems to be modest in the United States these days, looking at how Toronto is rebuilding Regent Park offers some intriguing lessons for the federal government, as well as for states and cities that are grappling with the challenges of remaking distressed public housing projects.

Don’t be afraid of density. When it’s completed, the new Regent Park will contain over 7,500 housing units—more than 100 units per acre. The site also includes extensive commercial space, public open space and community facilities. The increase in density means that the new community is walkable and compact, and that it can support major stores like supermarkets, along with restaurants and smaller stores, as well as actively use the recreational space provided. It also means that a source of internal subsidy is created—Toronto’s hot housing market helps–to underwrite much of the cost of the affordable housing. Most Hope VI projects, by contrast, keep the same or lower density; many end up with semi-suburban landscapes that, for all their New Urbanist rhetoric, are neither particularly walkable nor urban.

Replace the low-income units. All of them. When it’s completed, the new Regent Park will contain more affordable housing units–with rent geared to income, as the Canadians say–than were there before. Not only are all of the former public housing tenants given the right to return to the development, but lower income earning families are given an opportunity to become homeowners in Regent Park through a program that covers 35 percent of the purchase price, as long as they can afford to carry a mortgage on the remaining 65 percent. By comparison, most Hope VI projects replace only a limited number of low income units; most former tenants receive Section 8 vouchers so they can move elsewhere.

Create high quality amenities. Regent Park offers some of the best recreational amenities available in Toronto. The development includes a six acre park; nearly three acres of athletic grounds with a hockey rink, basketball court, soccer/cricket pitch and a running track; the Daniels Spectrum, an arts and cultural center with event, performance and exhibition spaces; and the Regent Park Aquatic Center, a multi-purpose swimming pool complex in an architecturally spectacular facility that the project architects describe as capturing “a feeling of transparency and connection to the outdoors.”

These facilities not only meet the recreational needs of the residents, but do two additional things: they draw people to Regent Park from outside the area, and they provide a common ground where people from the various backgrounds and income levels represented in the community can mix and meet.

Be responsive to the community. Toronto is one of the world’s most ethnically and culturally diverse communities, and Regent Park is a microcosm of that diversity. According to one source, 57 different languages are spoken in the neighborhood. The planners of the new Regent Park have engaged the community in the planning from day one, and made a real effort to be responsive to this diverse community, particularly in meeting the cultural and religious needs of the area’s large Muslim community. The sensitivity of the planners to the needs of immigrant communities reflects a strong Canadian ethos, which is currently being seen in the country’s welcome for Syrian refugees. Canada, with 10 percent of the population of the US, has already admitted over 25,000 Syrian refugees, a number that is likely to double over the course of 2016. The Regent Park project includes a variety of educational youth programs and activities, as well as a large number of job-generating businesses, projected to create 1,100 new jobs, with neighborhood residents given priority for the jobs being created. Few Hope VI projects contain much if anything in the way of job-generating facilities, although to be fair, few are even close to the scale of Regent Park.

The program has not been without its problems, particularly with respect to relocation. With most of the city’s public housing stock located in outlying parts of the city, many residents have been forced to move–even if temporarily–to unfamiliar areas where they may feel isolated and uncomfortable. It’s not clear how many of the displaced tenants will in the end move back to Regent Park after being relocated. Still, even though it is still a long way from completion, it is an amazing achievement; and perhaps most important is the prediction of University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski, dean of Canadian housing scholars: “as time passes, people won’t know where Regent Park begins and ends.”

Readers interested in learning more about urban policy (and more) in Canada, and how the US can learn from the Canadian experience can look up Alan's new book with Canadian planner Ray Tomalty, America’s Urban Future: Lessons from North of the Border, published by Island Press.

Ray Tomalty is the co-author of America's Urban Future: Lessons from North of the Border, which draw lessons from Canada’s urban policy successes to offer ways to revitalize US cities and suburbs. Here, he looks back at the legacy of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

This month, the Olympic torch relay began in Brasília. After leaving the capital, the torch will visit more than 300 Brazilian cities and as it winds its way to Rio de Janeiro, gradually shift the nation’s attention from its political and economic troubles onto its Olympic hopes. The 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro will give Brazilians 16 days to prove their athletic and organizational mettle, but many are hoping the massive public investment and world attention occasioned by the games will bring lasting economic and social benefits well beyond the closing ceremonies.

Although all host cities of major international sporting events hope their games will bring lasting benefits, not all have succeeded. While the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing brought accolades for the architectural icons built for the games, long term reuse of the facilities was not a high priority for planning officials. As a result, the billions of dollars invested in the world’s biggest sporting event left little of permanent importance.  A similar story can be told of the 2014 Winter games in Sochi, where much of the $50 billion spent on the Olympic build-up has now been all but abandoned.

Not all Olympic events have been followed by such unpleasant hangovers. Some, like the 2010 Winter Games hosted by Vancouver and Whistler in British Columbia, have made concerted efforts to repurpose infrastructure and leave a lasting legacy of sporting facilities, housing, and public infrastructure. Moreover, the Vancouver experience shows that that you can turn even relatively modest investments to lasting advantage: A total of $6-billion was spent between all three levels of government (federal, provincial, and municipal) to deliver the the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver and Whistler, including the direct costs of Olympic facilities and the indirect costs associated with supporting infrastructure.

Mindful of mistakes by previous host nations, the Vancouver Organizing Committee set aside a $110 million legacy fund to ensure that public investment in the games would continue to pay dividends well beyond the games themselves. The trust fund is being used to sustain Olympic facilities indefinitely after the games. As a result, six years after the Olympics left town, these venues are in good shape, being actively used, and contributing to the vitality of the communities around them.

The Pacific Coliseum, which housed the figure skating and short-track speedskating events in 2010, is home to the Western Hockey League’s Vancouver Giants and also hosts dozens of concerts and other events annually. The Richmond Speedskating Oval attracts more than 700,000 visitors a year by hosting a variety of championship events. The Vancouver Olympic/Paralympic Centre was built to host curling events at the games and now serves as a community centre with with ice hockey and curling rinks.

The Whistler Sliding Sports Center has become a training hub for luge, bobsled and skeleton. The Whistler Olympic park, which was used to host the Nordic events in 2010, today offers 130 kilometers of picturesque ski and snowshoe trails, along with biathlon, ski-jumping, tobogganing and baseboarding facilities. The Whistler Athletes’ Centre has transformed into a high performance training and accommodation facility for all levels of sport, educational groups, as well as art and culture organizations.

Another major legacy of the Vancouver Olympics is the Olympic Village, a mixed-use complex costing nearly $1 billion that housed athletes during the 2010 games. The village was built in an abandoned industrial area mostly covered in parking lots, at the southeast corner of False Creek near the Olympic Village SkyTrain station.  The private developer went under in the real estate meltdown of 2008-2010, but the project was taken over by the City of Vancouver and completed in time for the Olympics. The LEED-Gold certified project has 1100 living units, of which almost one third are designated as affordable rental or ownership. The development triggered further investment and is now at the hub of a vibrant mixed-use district, expected to reach a population of 20,000 by 2020.

When planning for the 2010 Olympic Games began, the Sea Salt Processing Building was one of the last buildings still standing from the industrial era along southeast False Creek. The abandoned factory was purchased by the Vancouver Organizing Committee and transformed into an entertainment venue for the athletes. Today, the LEED-certified building has been transferred back to the private sector and serves as a popular food destination with a micro-brewery, craft pub, bakery, café and restaurant.

As another result of the 2010 Olympics, seniors across British Columbia are now being provided with much needed affordable living accommodations. Following an agreement between the provincial government and the Vancouver Organizing Committee, 320 modular housing units from the Olympic Village at Whistler are currently being relocated and converted into permanent, affordable apartments in six communities across the province.

Almost half of the total public investment in the 2010 games was for supporting infrastructure like road and transit upgrades. The lion’s share of this indirect funding ($2 billion) went for the the Canada Line, a 19.2 kilometres (11.9 mi) rapid transit route linking the Vancouver International Airport with Olympic facilities and the downtown. Although it had been on the planning books for decades, the 2010 Olympics was the catalyst needed for it to hurdle from plan to reality. Although many criticized the investment as politically motivated and said other transit projects would give more bang for the buck, the Canada Line has turned out to be phenomenally successful. Unlike many transportation megaprojects where demand fails to meet rosy projections, actual ridership on the Canada Line is 50% higher than anticipated even by the project boosters. Moreover, the line has resulted in a building boom along its axis and around many stations.

The most remarkable makeover is happening in Richmond, a suburb south of Vancouver, which was until recently a bedroom community with a typical suburban landscape of low-density residential precincts, highway-like main streets, large low-rise malls and sprawling parking lots. City planners went into high gear as soon as the route was announced in 2005. Developers lined up early with projects and kept coming after the 2010 Winter Olympics focused the world’s attention on Vancouver. Now apartment towers cluster around stations and along the elevated track with many more projects in the works. By 2040, Richmond expects to see 30,000 more people living around the line with nary a surface parking lot remaining in sight. 

The Vancouver 2010 Olympics were anything but extravagant. No equivalent to the Beijing Bird’s Nest or the Montreal Olympic Stadium (the “Big Owe”) was built in Vancouver. Nonetheless, the Vancouver Olympics had its fair share of doubters. The Olympic organizers were dogged at every turn by vocal opponents who claimed the games would saddle the province with expensive “white elephants” that would go all but unused after the splash of the Olympics seeped away.  

Despite these warnings—or perhaps because of them—the games were far from a boondoggle. Careful planning, financial foresight, and exemplary cooperation among various levels of government have leveraged the Olympic investment into a boon – not only for the private interests that have benefited from the associated boost in tourism and land values, but also for the general public, who regularly use the legacy facilities. At the macro level, the 2010 Winter Olympics have helped in the realization of Metro Vancouver’s longstanding ambition to fashion the region into a network of transit-oriented, walkable, neighbourhoods with a world-renowned quality of life.

A changing climate means a changing society. The Island Press Urban Resilience Project, Supported by the Kresge Foundation and the JPB Foundation, is committed to a greener, fairer future for all. This post was originally published on citymetric.com.

In the first of two articles, Alan Mallach, a senior fellow at the US non-profit Center for Community Progress, asks: What does it mean for a city to be economically resilient?

Urban resilience is the ability to respond to physical, social and economic challenges; not only shocks, such as hurricanes or earthquakes, but to the stresses that weaken a city’s fabric, such as high unemployment or endemic violence.

In an increasingly uncertain global economic environment, economic resilience has become increasingly important. But, as cities become increasingly polarized – spatially, economically and racially – I fear that this is not only impeding their ability to respond to their challenges, but has become in itself a challenge to future urban economic resilience. In this article, I will try to lay out a framework for looking at this issue, and in the next one, I will try to drill down and assess what it means for American cities.

I’ll start with two economic resilience stories, one fairly well known and one less so.

In 1965, Singapore split off from the newly established nation of Malaysia to become an independent nation. At the time, its prospects did not look inviting. It had no natural resources, little industry and no domestic market, it was, in fact, little more than a sleepy port widely seen as in decline from its days as a bastion of the British Empire. At that time, as one writer has since written, it was “poverty-stricken, disease-riddled little entrepôt.”

Within a few decades, though, it had been transformed into a model of growth and prosperity – the smallest, and in some respects the most consistently successful, of the so-called “Asian Tigers”.

The second is closer to home. In the late 19th century, Scranton, Pennsylvania was a major center of iron and steelmaking, with its economy dominated by the massive Lackawanna Steel Works. To the city’s shock, in 1902 Lackawanna announced that it would move its entire operation to Buffalo, New York. The city barely skipped a beat. The population kept growing, fuelled by new industries and the steady demand for the region’s anthracite coal. In many respects, the years between 1900 and 1950 were the high point of Scranton’s history.

How cities bounce back

While the sometimes quasi-authoritarian rule of Singapore’s long-serving former president Lee Kwan Yew has legitimately been criticised, that should not detract from the remarkable nature of his and his nation’s achievement. While their economic strategies were brilliantly opportunistic, the two critical underlying themes that drove Singapore’s growth were first, a determination to provide honest, transparent and competent government based on the rule of law; and second, an intense focus on education, to maximise the value of the nation’s human capital.

The fact that Singapore was a relatively cohesive society, in which its leaders operated with a high level of legitimacy, was important – but that would have mattered little without those leaders’ systematic, long-term, laser-like focus on those two themes. 

Scranton’s task was easier. Coal mining helped propel its economic revival, while local entrepreneurs did the rest. A local button maker realized that his equipment could be adapted to make the newfangled phonograph records, and went on to become one of the nation’s premier suppliers to that growing industry. Human capital and transparency were less of an issue in the early 1900s, as government by elites was little questioned, and a steady flow of immigrants provided the brawn for the mines, factories and workshops.

Both Singapore and Scranton offer useful lessons. What Singapore shows is that, in the absence of natural resources, the principal resources a city, region or country can bring to bear for economic growth are its human capital, the competence and transparency of its government, and a determined focus to maximise the value of whatever locational or institutional assets it may possess. These are assets that should withstand future economic shocks. Despite the many differences between Singapore and cities in the United States, the lessons are equally relevant in today’s American context.

While Scranton’s strengths enabled it to be resilient in its particular early 20th century context, those strengths were – unlike Singapore’s – limited to that context. When coal mining declined and deindustrialisation spread after World War II, Scranton had little to fall back on, and entered into a long-term economic and demographic decline.

Gentrification and Resilience

When we look at the revival of American cities since the 1990s, that story too can be told as one of resilience: cities like Pittsburgh or Baltimore, thrown by the loss of the manufacturing industry that fuelled their growth, roaring back to become post-industrial cities, driven by world-class medical centres and universities.

Today, neither city has much of an industrial base; roughly one out of every six Pittsburgh residents is a college student, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is the largest employer in the state of Pennsylvania. More than one of every three jobs in both cities is either in education, health care or social services; if you plug in a reasonable multiplier, one can estimate that two thirds or more of the local economy in both Pittsburgh and Baltimore is driven by education and health care, including the billions in medical research dollars that flow to places like Johns Hopkins and UPMC.

Crime is down in most parts of these cities, and thousands of highly-educated millennials are flocking to them, turning areas like Baltimore’s Hampden into hip destinations.

But is this resilience, or something else? Large parts of these cities are still impoverished and disinvested, and many neighborhoods that were vital 10 or 20 years ago are losing ground. These cities are becoming more and more polarised, spatially, economically and racially.

The new jobs are mostly filled by suburban commuters; fewer and fewer city residents have jobs, and most of them commute long distances to the suburbs. Baltimore’ unemployment rate in 2014 was 12 per cent, and 16 per cen for the city’s African-American population. Crime may be down in the Inner Harbor, but is still endemic in many parts of the city.

Are Baltimore – or Pittsburgh, St. Louis or Seattle – resilient cities? Or are they simply riding a wave of economic and demographic change, fuelled by the pure dumb luck of having institutions like Johns Hopkins and Carnegie-Mellon, or entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, in their midst?

I suspect it’s the latter. In the next installment, I’ll look more closely at why these cities’ growing polarisation and their failure to address critical issues of governance and human capital are actually making them less resilient, and less likely to respond effectively if and when they no longer find themselves at the crest of the economic wave.

Trying to predict how different US cities will be affected by climate change is something like trying to predict the movement of a single molecule in a sea of Brownian motion. Not only are the direct impacts of climate change complex, and not limited to hotter temperatures and higher sea levels, but any prediction needs to take account not only the gradual unfolding of change over time, and the considerable adaptability of human beings and their institutions. Still, this is too important an issue not to take a stab at predicting, recognizing that predictions do not have a very good track record.

Humans can deal with precipitation, and even with extreme storm events–as long as they don’t happen too often–more readily than they can live either underwater, or without water.

Even those conditions can be addressed, up to a point, and not by growing gills. Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel 2312 contains a vivid description of a vibrant future Manhattan where the streets have become waterways, and people move between buildings on bridges and skywalks. It’s expensive, but doable.

Not all coastal cities will be undone by higher sea levels. Depending on topography, political will and resources, some will adapt–whether by building sea walls or surrendering to what we might call ‘Venicization’– and go on. Others will not, and may gradually be lost. Another possibility is that some cities may do a sort of internal triage: we can’t save the whole city, but we can save part of it. Given how our society works these days, that part will most probably be the part with the most property value at stake. That might happen in Miami, which has a very small, very dense, high-value core surrounded by hundreds of square miles of low-density development all sitting on incredibly flat, porous limestone.

Water can be desalinated, or moved thousands of miles. It’s (only) 1,500 miles as the crow flies from Lake Michigan to Phoenix. I doubt that a 1,500 mile long pipeline would be a good idea, but if there’s enough political will and money, it could be done. Las Vegas already recycles most of its water. The point is that not all coastal or arid zone cities will disappear. Some will, some won’t, and some will survive, but as much smaller places. Some wealthy cities like San Francisco, Seattle or New York, are likely to do well. They have already started thinking about how to tackle these issues, and they can access enough resources to make a difference. But I would not rule the Sunbelt out any time soon.

As others have pointed out, many of the cities best situated to deal with climate change are the old Rustbelt cities like Detroit or Cleveland. They sit on lakes or rivers, rather than oceans, they have access to ample water supplies, and they are relatively unsusceptible to catastrophic events like hurricanes. Their climates could get quite a bit warmer than they are today and remain livable, and increased rain and snow are fairly manageable. Two million people live comfortably in Sapporo, Japan, which on average gets twice as much snowfall as Buffalo.

It’s tempting to assume, therefore, that millions of Sunbelt residents will reverse course and move to Detroit or Buffalo, but why would they? Unless Detroit or Buffalo turn into a hotbed of economic growth, what will they do when they get there? Where, when and why people move is complicated. People, for the most part, are far from footloose. They prefer to settle in one place, and when they move, it is usually to some place close by. In 2015, nearly 45 million Americans moved; nearly 60% moved within the same city or county, most of the rest in the same state. My guess is that if things become too bad in Phoenix, for instance, people will look to the nearest place, the place that most closely resembles Phoenix, where things are not (yet) as bad. It might be Dallas, it might be Las Vegas, but at least initially, it’s not likely to be Detroit.

For many years, climate change is likely to be a gradual process. Year by year, the water level will get a little higher or the snowpack a little thinner. Some cities will adapt better than others, and either figure out a way to become sustainable, or buy more time for themselves. In the meantime, relatively few people will uproot themselves years in advance on the premise that many years later, things will become intolerable. This is not like Katrina, when the waters suddenly came rushing in.

At some point, though, something will have to give. If conditions keep deteriorating, and adaptation measures are not up to the job, change can be managed for a long time, but not forever. At some point, the problems cascade and the system implodes. That’s when its 120 in the shade, the electrical grid goes down, and the taps dry up, all at the same time. At that point, people start becoming refugees, not migrants. That means that they become a resettlement problem, for FEMA or whichever non-profit agencies they hire to build the refugee camps, and figure out where to move the refugees to and get them back on their feet.

It’s likely to be traumatic. If, as I expect, most of the population in the cities that will be undone by climate change will still be living there when their systems collapse, millions of people will find themselves homeless. Moreover, it is likely that by then the resources of our governmental and social service systems will have already been stretched to the utmost by decades of steady environmental and economic decline. At that point, the problem will be far greater than what happens to any one city; it will be about whether we will be able to survive as an organized, functioning society.

A Changing Climate Means A Changing Society. The Island Press Urban Resilience Project, Supported By The Kresge Foundation And The JPB Foundation, Is Committed To A Greener, Fairer Future.​ This Post Was Originally Published December 6, 2016 in CityMetric.

As Niels Bohr, or maybe Yogi Berra, said: predicting is difficult, especially when it’s about the future. Perhaps even more so when considering Trump’s stance on urban policy – one of many issues the president-elect has never disclosed his position on, or even shown any particular interest in.

Actually, that might make prediction easier, not harder.

Why? It seems pretty clear that Trump doesn’t have much policy bandwidth; in fact, he may be the least policy-minded person to serve as president since Warren Gamaliel Harding.

What that means, I believe, is that when it comes to issues that don’t engage him on a gut level – and are not red meat to his base – he’s not likely to push any policy ideas of his own. Instead, he’s more likely to leave those issues to the Republicans in Congress, along with whichever right-wing apparatchik or mortgage lender becomes housing and urban development secretary.

That means that there’s not going to be much urban policy, period. The Republican party leadership doesn’t care much about cities, which are full of Democrats, minorities and poor people.

Programs with broad constituencies, like Community Development Block Grants and the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, will probably remain but shrink further; Low-Income Housing Tax Credits may stay under the radar and survive. After all, they’re good business.

Modest Obama initiatives like Promise Zones will disappear, and nothing will replace them. Cities have become used to getting relatively little help from the federal government to address their social and economic problems, and they will soon get even less.

Changes to housing policy are potentially more serious. The big issue is less about affordable housing – though if Congress decides to significantly reduce the number of vouchers in circulation, it could spell disaster for hundreds of thousands of struggling families – but rather with the nation’s mortgage system.

For the last decade, that system has been a makeshift hybrid of public and private actors, held together with the fiscal equivalent of duct tape. Everyone agrees that it needs to be changed. But with major policy differences separating the administration, different factions in Congress, lenders and advocates, nothing was done.

Now, that may change. Congress and the Trump administration could work together to privatise the mortgage industry, deregulate financial markets and declaw the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Those actions could further starve cities of the capital they need, reducing mortgage access for low- and middle-income urban households, and in low-price neighborhoods. A less likely but possible alternative could be a return to the worst excesses of the subprime mortgage scandal.

On the big issues that will affect cities’ futures, we shouldn’t expect much. If you start with the premise that climate change is a hoax, you’re not likely to see much point helping low-lying cities like Miami or Norfolk adapt to something that doesn’t exist.

There is, however, encouraging evidence that cities are already taking action on adaptation— even in red states where the phrase “climate change” cannot be spoken in public. Another positive sign is strong Republican interest in major infrastructure investment: Trump has called for spending $trn on infrastructure over the next 10 years. Unfortunately, Trump believes that money will come from private sources incentivised with “revenue-neutral” tax credits—a strategy that is highly unlikely to succeed. Infrastructure spending may help some cities, but if it favors projects that can draw private financing, a lot more money will end up in fast-growing urban areas like Houston or Denver than in the Midwest or Northeast.

Trump talked a lot about manufacturing jobs during the campaign, which may have swung a lot of rustbelt voters to his side. Certainly, a revival of manufacturing, and thousands of new, well-paying factory jobs, would be a great boon for the cities.

The problem is – as many of the people who voted for him may sooner or later realse – it’s all smoke and mirrors. (Interestingly, a wildly unscientific poll on attn.com has 91 per cent saying no to the question “do you think Donald Trump will restore manufacturing jobs?”) Sadly, those jobs are largely gone, for many and complicated reasons. Starting a trade war with China won’t bring them back.

The neglect part is pretty clear. What about the malign part? This is harder to predict, but there are some tea leaves to read. There’s an ominous line buried in the Republican platform that reads, “We expect Congress to assert, by whatever means necessary, its constitutional pre­rogatives regarding the District.” It goes on to say that Congress should pass a law “allowing law-abiding Washingtonians to own and carry firearms,” even though the citizens of the District of Columbia have voted for strict gun controls.

This is not an outlier. Other Republican-controlled statehouses – including those in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina – have sought to impose their preferences on cities and cut back municipal powers.

A good example came from North Carolina this past spring. Buried in the bill that mandated same (biological) sex bathrooms, which got the headlines, the legislature added a zinger with huge policy implications: a law that supersedes any local effort to regulate “wage levels of employees, hours of labor, payment of earned wages, benefits, leave, or well-being of minors in the workforce”. Goodbye to city ordinances setting minimum wage, or mandating parental leave or health benefits.

I suspect we will see more of this sort of thing at the federal level. Since Congress’ ability to directly dictate city ordinances is limited (at least, outside the District of Columbia), these provisions are likely to show up as conditions of federal funding, either at the city or state level. You want federal transportation funds? Legalise concealed carry. You want federal education funds? Require same-biological-sex bathrooms, etc.

History has shown that all the talk about “less government intrusion” and “the best government is closest to the people” quickly goes out the window – one might say is trumped – by any policy agenda that stirs the passions of the Republican base.

It’s likely to be a long four years.