and begin sketching what the greenbelt could look like. A grassroots effort and substantial interaction with local leaders are the keys to success.
Staffing an Outdoor City
We need to rise to face significant and shifting needs. The outdoors requires champions to carry the flag of stewardship and innovation and pursue a bold outdoor-centric agenda. But while there should be a movement of Outdoor Citizenship, there also needs to be a representative at the municipal level who can liaise with city officials to set an outdoor strategy and initiatives, and help secure funding. The person would be appointed the city’s Outdoor Officer (or OO)—a role I’ve long thought needs to exist.
In my opinion, a city needs an OO just as much as it needs a director of public works or director of economic development. It is insufficient to simply have Departments of Parks and Recreation or Departments of Natural Resources. There needs to be a specific position that oversees a city’s broad outdoor strategy. Municipalities need on-the-ground leaders who intimately know the communities they serve. The role is tantamount to the prioritization of a city’s long-term outdoor strategy, and the OO would champion and spearhead outdoor-centric initiatives. An Outdoor City’s success can be contingent on having the right OO.
My time in government gave me perspective on how some people survive in government roles for decades, despite stressful red tape and bureaucracy. What I realized is that for many longtime government employees, bureaucratic exhaustion has set in. They have endured the government’s version of whack-a-mole—offering new ideas, new approaches, and innovation only to be shot down (whacked) time and again—for so long that they have gotten used to it, and have often given up proposing new ideas. It is a culture of rejection that incites a risk aversion—something not tolerated in a high-performing organization, but pervasive in other places, like government. The OO will need to be indefatigable and savvy enough to break through bureaucracy, no matter how insurmountable it may seem.
The OO will also need to have Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (BHAGs)—a wonderful term for a strategic vision plan coined by James Collins and Jerry Porras46—and a concrete plan to achieve them. The OO’s plan should galvanize the entire machinery of government, the private and nonprofit sectors, and the broader citizenry, and the OO should work closely with a diverse team of designers, engineers, influencers, community organizers, and advocates to push his or her outdoor agenda to its full potential. The officer should also guarantee that no new construction or other change negatively affects existing green spaces or human access to them.
The OO position could be realized in several different ways. It could be incorporated into the current Parks and Recreation Department director’s role, so the director takes a broader, more dynamic role in planning the city’s outdoor strategies, or it could be a newly developed senior executive position, with the person on the mayor’s board of senior advisors. Alternatively, it could be a “budget-positive” fellow, with the person’s salary privately funded and not pulled from the city’s budget, or funded through a combination of public and private resources. But even if there’s private funding, the OO needs to be a senior advisor to the mayor, so he or she has the clout to sit with the mayor, city manager, and other city department heads and get the support necessary to implement initiatives including:
1 Creating, developing, and protecting green spaces.
2 Guaranteeing green spaces are within walking distance of all residents.
3 Developing outdoor programming and outdoor recreation.
4 Turning the city into a resilient and sustainable place.
5 Developing a safe human-powered mobility network.
6 Fostering Outdoor Citizenship and engagement with the natural world.
The OO’s initiatives will need to include ones that immediately benefit residents, as well as long-term sustainable action plans. A dynamic and healthier Outdoor Citizenry will be an important byproduct of the OO’s longer-term impact, as will turning the city into a full Outdoor City. The results will improve residents’ health and quality of life, and the environment will be protected. There will also be a ripple effect in things like voter participation, philanthropy, and volunteer service. As the effectiveness of the OO’s work becomes increasingly noticeable, I expect the person’s department will grow in size and other cities will appoint their own OOs.
Restoring Green Spaces
We should look for ways to green our cities, to make them more sustainable, and to create stronger natural ecosystems. One way to do this is by cleaning and replenishing spaces that were formerly green spaces, but today house abandoned buildings or landfills, the results of urban sprawl. Over the years, developers have cleared land of stone, soil, and trash to build warehouses, offices, and housing, moving the stone, soil, and trash to create landfills on coastlines, wetlands, forests, and marshes. Tragically, the landfills often contaminate water supplies and aquifers, and the tremendous latent power the land had for disaster reduction and recovery is depleted.
It’s time to recalibrate our development goals and restore natural areas to their full potential. Historic maps and photographs can provide a starting step, showing us what natural areas used to look like; what once existed. We should also look at neglected spaces with a fresh eye, considering which could be transitioned into green spaces. Imagine changing the spaces beneath highways and bridges or above rail yards and rail lines into lush green spaces. We could also transition highway median strips and unused roadways, and do away with disruptive and unused electricity and telecom infrastructure, including grids, poles, and wires tarnishing what could be an attractive and thriving green space. The changes would improve the aesthetics of a city and the addition of trees would clean the air.
Emergency Preparation
It’s critical that cities have plans to prepare for natural disasters, particularly as global warming causes increasingly devastating ones. The disaster response plan New York City had in place when Hurricane Sandy hit in October 2012 was critical. The storm left many residents without food, electricity, and clean water and caused billions of dollars in damage, but the devastation would have been far worse without the advance planning the plan implemented.
One example is the work done by the leaders of the city’s public transit, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). In advance of Hurricane Irene a year prior, the MTA developed a “storm prep mode,” which it used to prepare for Hurricane Sandy. The evening before Sandy hit, the MTA ordered a system-wide shutdown of the subway system, and subway trains and buses were moved to higher ground to avoid damage from floodwater. Reflecting on this later, MTA chairman Joseph Lhota said:
We sealed as much as we could, and at the same time we wanted to get the rolling stock up to higher ground in the event of a surge of water. . . . At the LIRR [the Long Island Railroad] there were all kinds of preparations. The wind was projected to be 70 miles per hour and at 70 mph those wooden crossing gates will snap. So we took them off or tied them down.47
After the storm passed, the floodwater was pumped out of the subway and all public transportations vehicles were returned to where they belonged and reconnected to their power sources. By November 3, six days after the storm, 80 percent of the subway system was operating again. Without proper planning, the storm could have been a catastrophe for the city’s public transportation, which New Yorkers rely on. As a comparison, Lhota said, “New Jersey lost a lot of locomotives because they didn’t put their rolling stock onto high ground.”48 According to a statement from the New Jersey Transit Corporation after the storm:
Hurricane Sandy caused major damage throughout the state, leaving behind long-term mechanical and operational challenges that NJ Transit is working tirelessly to overcome. This will take time, and the blow delivered by Hurricane
