The Many Spinoff Benefits of Urban Climate Action

Debates too often focus on narrow disaster preparedness or emissions reductions, overlooking the many other immediate quality-of-life benefits

ABOVE: A street in Amsterdam that is both climate-friendly and highly livable.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is one in a series of topics for exploration and debate at the upcoming International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference in Potsdam, Germany, October 15-18, 2025.

Michael W Mehaffy

One of the major challenges in dealing with the climate threat -- when we deal with it at all -- is that people assume it comes at the expense of other, more immediate social and economic goals. Too often, action on climate is seen as something that has to compromise the well-being of citizens today.

But in fact, most of the actions we need to take to mitigate and adapt to climate change are actions that will also improve our immediate well-being and quality of life. These are actions that will make our cities, towns and suburbs measurably and tangibly more livable, in the here and now.

Livable cities have always been the central topic from the beginning for the International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference series since its founding in 1985 by Henry Lennard, a Viennese medical sociologist, and Suzanne Lennard, a British architectural scholar. That focus will continue at our 62nd conference in Potsdam, Germany, 15-18 October. Potsdam is a beautiful and historic city in the Berlin region, easily accessible by rail from Berlin's airport and central city. October is an excellent time to travel in Germany, with fewer crowds, better availability and cost, and crisp autumn weather.

The theme of the conference is, “What is the Architecture of the (Livable) Future?" Too much of the debate on "the architecture of our time" seems to be about futuristic imagery, or greenwashing, or exotic but irrelevant approaches to large-scale sculptural art. Missing is a hard-nosed consideration of the ways we can make real progress for people and planet, guided by research evidence and case studies. We will explore evidence for the proposition that progress on climate action must go hand in hand with progress on livability.

"Progress on livability" is, in a nutshell, the mission of the International Making Cities Livable conferences. The IMCL brings together researchers, practitioners, city leaders, NGO heads, students and other key urban actors from across international borders, to share lessons and follow the evidence to drive forward positive change. The last conference included over 50 speakers from every continent except Antarctica.

This year we will examine, among other topics, the many spinoff benefits for cities that take action to adapt and mitigate in response to the climate threat -- if they do so in a coordinated, "joined-up" way.

First of all, of course, we can agree that a city is not livable if it experiences weather-related disasters, or if it has not adapted for thermal comfort and survival in the wake of increasing heat stress events. More fundamentally, a city is not contributing to livability if it allows its emissions and their impacts to run out of control.

But there are more immediate ways that a city's livability can overlap with climate-friendly goals. Among the climate-responsive actions that can provide immediate livability benefits:

• Urban greening, creating shade, making a more beautiful public realm, supporting walkability and lower-carbon, lower-emissions living;

• Integrated water features, also providing cooling, and when well-designed, supporting improved water quality, reduced runoff, and lower flooding risk;

• Removal of asphalt, including excess parking and roadways, reducing urban heating, replacing excess paving with cool surfaces and vegetation to reduce urban heating, improve thermal comfort, and raise albedo (sunlight reflected back into space without global warming);

• Cool surfaces, reducing urban heating, increasing reflectance, raising albedo;

• Building forms that promote natural ventilation, promoting thermal comfort and avoiding heat stress;

• Green zones that protect from flooding and also provide open space;

• "Blue-green networks," integrated systems of interconnected green and blue spaces like parks and waterways, designed to manage stormwater, reduce flooding, and enhance urban environments.

ABOVE: A climate-friendly area in Oslo, Norway -- and a very livable one, combining urban greening, water bodies, cool surfaces, building forms that provide natural ventilation -- and a walkable, compact, mixed-use and multi-modal urban form.

Above all, the most important climate action we can take -- while also increasing livability -- is to assure that the city form is walkable, compact, and mixed in uses and amenities, with a variety of choices in how to get around. As research has shown, this is a powerful determinant of the level of greenhouse gas emissions generated per person. It is also strongly predictive of how well a city can cope with climate disasters, and even work to avoid them in the first place.

The research shows that traditional city form – the walkable, compact, mixed use patterns that were common up to about 1930 - also provides the “social infrastructure“ that is needed to support resilience and adaptation, and even to save lives. Traditional city form also provides support for more efficient, low-resource and low-emissions lifestyles that still offer a high degree of livability and quality of life.  

More conventional or “modern” city form – built upon the automobile and other machinery, and segregating the city into machine-like parts – can also afford a very prosperous and healthy lifestyle, at least for those with sufficient income. But it must do so only with very high consumption and depletion of resources, and resulting high emissions. Increasingly, it is apparent that this way of doing things is simply not sustainable.

Even for those skeptics who would rather focus only upon financial considerations, it is apparent that modern city form carries high (if often hidden) costs to  municipalities, and ultimately to taxpayers. Research is showing that the cost of maintaining and repairing infrastructure, and providing municipal services like fire, ambulance and police, can become exponentially higher in more sprawling, low density urban forms.

We may wish that we could ignore all these trends, and go on with business as usual (as frankly so many of us do). But the trends will not ignore us. It is increasingly apparent that a transition is coming in how we build cities and towns, and do many of the other things that have an impact on people and planet. The only question is whether this transition will be on our terms, or on much more disagreeable terms forced upon us.

However, this is not a burden, but an opportunity -- to make more livable neighborhoods that are healthier, more enduring, more beautiful, and ultimately more joyful.

When it comes to cities, how did we get here? We used to think we were "modern" and sophisticated, when we pulled apart the components of the city and reconnected them with machinery (cars, infrastructure, etc), and by demolishing older buildings and neighborhoods, replacing them with all-new "rationally planned" developments. We largely abandoned the inner cities, leaving them as relics at best or wastelands at worst, and we mostly headed for the new dispersed, car-dependent suburbs, with their boxy corporate office parks and shopping malls surrounded by massive parking lots, and their vast monocultures of drive-to houses.

Too much of the world is still built this way, and if anything, the trend is accelerating in many places. The implications for climate impacts, resource depletion, ecological destruction, long-term economics including municipal finance, health and well-being -- in a word, livability -- are profound.

ABOVE, a 1948 drawing by the German architect Adolf Bayer, showing what at that time was thought to be a more "modern" and "rational" city on the left, and a "messy" and "crowded" traditional city on the right -- "order" and "disorder". History has shown the flaws of this way of thinking.

This was not the inevitable result of pure market forces or economic dictates. It was, in fact, the outcome of a conscious theory about what cities are, developed and implemented through massive government and corporate efforts. And we now have undeniable evidence that the theory was wrong.

The 1948 drawing by Adolf Bayer (above) encapsulates this idea perfectly. Instead of the crowded, diseased, "disordered" city, we would have a sanitized, rationalized, "orderly" city of pristine machine-like parts. But as Jane Jacobs and others famously observed, this was foolishly naive: it disrespected the more complex forms of order of the traditional city, replacing their complex web-network relationships with simplistic "tree-like" hierarchical relationships.

Most people recognize that this generation of "modern" cities has failed us, and many of us are wallowing in a kind of "post-modern" confusion -- stuck in a warmed-over kind of business-as-usual, unable to see the path forward. Some of us seem desperate to double down on the modernist paradigm, only sticking on some green tech and redoubled social goals, in the hopes that this will make everything OK. In Jane Jacobs' withering words, "the method fails."

But a path forward is there, as the research and the case studies show us.

For one thing, we can find enormous helpful lessons in the treasury of successful evolved patterns and practices of the past -- the ones we recklessly discarded in our rush to be "modern." This is not nostalgia; on the contrary, it's intelligence. Specifically, it's the "collective intelligence" of centuries of human experience, of trial and error, of refinement and improvement. We can tap into the enormous resources of historic buildings and neighborhoods, and moreover, of the still-useful patterns they offer us today.

The research shows that older buildings and neighborhoods offer a number of combined advantages for climate-friendly cities. For one thing, “the greenest building is the one that's already built" – an older building that is retrofitted and adapted for thermal comfort is well positioned to endure for even longer, with a very low annual deficit of embodied energy and materials. That translates into low resource consumption, depletion, and emissions -- and often, buildings and places that are well-loved and cared for.

There is something else that older buildings and neighborhoods teach us, and it is perhaps more controversial than it should be: that is, their aesthetics are proven to be popular and successful over many generations. They tend to endure, unlike the shiny-new object-buildings that quickly age and go out of style. (And there is a remarkable consistency to their popularity among non-architects, who often don't care for the new work of architects.)

New research is beginning to tell us why this is so. These older buildings have complex geometric forms, including fractals, symmetries and other "biophilic" properties, that actually have a measurable effect on human well-being and even health. They create attractive edges of streets and other public spaces, where people are more likely to linker, walk, and interact with one another. They support low-resource consumption, low-carbon, high-enjoyment lifestyles.

Remarkably, research is even beginning to show that there are important benefits for health and well-being, purely from the aesthetic characteristics of buildings and places.

These and other findings have prompted some architecture critics to call for a "big rethink" about the still-common approach to architecture and building. At the 62nd International Making Cities Livable conference, we will explore the research and debate the issues, and we will consider the outlines of a "new architecture." Will it be, in part, a revival of Classical or traditional architectures? A new kind of modern architecture? Or something more "organic," along the lines advocated by Christopher Alexander and others? Or some combination?

We hope you can join us to explore this vitally important question!

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The International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference series, hosted by the Lennard Institute for Livable Cities, was begun in 1985 by Henry and Suzanne Lennard. They were both passionate about sharing the best lessons for creating livable, healthy, prosperous cities, towns and suburbs for all. Our flagship conferences are held in beautiful and instructive cities hosted by visionary leaders who are able to share in-depth lessons, both positive and negative. The conferences are peer-to-peer gatherings of city leaders, researchers, practitioners, NGO heads and others who are "in the trenches' driving forward positive change for cities, towns and suburbs. Our last conference in Cortona, Italy in November 2024 included over 50 leading speakers from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Attendee comments included “Truly a great conference,” “Fabulous sessions… Wow!,” “It was terrific,” “Thank you for hosting this magnificent event!” and “Thank you for the great conference sessions… [and] the knowledge sharing and inspired messages from people from around the world.”

To learn more about the Potsdam conference, please visit https://www.imcl.online/potsdam-2025.