State of the Planet

News from the Columbia Climate School

cities3

  • Brownfields: Untold Stories, Unrealized Value

    Brownfields: Untold Stories, Unrealized Value

    Across the country, in distressed urban centers, hundreds of thousands of industrial sites have been left lying fallow. These properties, known as brownfields, embody the story of America’s twentieth-century industrial might and bear the mark of that period’s unenlightened practices. Their closing and subsequent abandonment culminated in the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs, the creation…

  • Cities Produce the Emissions. Cities Must Deal With Them.

    By Elliott Sclar It is always good news when the international community gathers to address an important problem. On the other hand, an international conference on climate change implicitly frames this as a nation-state problem. It is, for all intents and purposes, an urban problem. Nations are supposed to be the ones governing carbon emissions;…

  • Brownfields: Untold Stories, Unrealized Value

    Brownfields: Untold Stories, Unrealized Value

    Across the country, in distressed urban centers, hundreds of thousands of industrial sites have been left lying fallow. These properties, known as brownfields, embody the story of America’s twentieth-century industrial might and bear the mark of that period’s unenlightened practices. Their closing and subsequent abandonment culminated in the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs, the creation…

  • Cities Produce the Emissions. Cities Must Deal With Them.

    By Elliott Sclar It is always good news when the international community gathers to address an important problem. On the other hand, an international conference on climate change implicitly frames this as a nation-state problem. It is, for all intents and purposes, an urban problem. Nations are supposed to be the ones governing carbon emissions;…