This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to talk about his book Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems. We chat about the future of cities through the eyes of a mayor, those who operate like urban mechanic and the challenges that connect cities around the world.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: Going back to the pandemic a little bit, I also appreciated what some of these mayors said about the cities dragging their feet over time, and some of the stuff that should have been done way ahead of time got accelerated because of the pandemic.
But maybe it should have been done earlier, like internet connection for low-income families and things like that. Things that are [for] the public good, but we just hadn’t prioritized them before. And so I think that’s an interesting way that some of these mayors are looking at things, too, is, like, the pandemic forced them to rethink what’s important. What are we providing to people that might help them in the long run?
Anthony Flint: Yeah, and I think there’s a little bit of a theme of urgency. And being nimble. I’ll tell you the one thing that has stuck in my mind is Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, she appointed Africa’s first Chief Heat Officer and did one thing that, I don’t know why I’m still impressed by this, but it just seemed like it was a intervention that didn’t take a lot of time. It didn’t take a study, it didn’t, they just made it happen. They worked in collaboration with the ARS Rockefeller Foundation — and that was to put shades over the open air markets in the city.
Primarily women, almost entirely women, would go a long way and they would come and they would just suffer in the heat. And they developed a fabric that was pretty easy to manufacture and design and set up so that you just have these cooling shades over the open air marketplaces. Now is that gonna solve climate change or are there gonna be other extreme heat incidents that continue to make life miserable? But for that one slice of life in Freetown, there was no fussing around. It was just like, this is a good idea. We’re gonna do this, and these shades were installed. It sounds really simple, I think that’s the kind of nimble activity that has become more and more important.
Jeff Wood: Another thing that I was really impressed by was a mayor that you’d mentioned already, [Burlington, Vermont Mayor] Miro Weinberger, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot too, is the idea of public utilities and public goods and the public side of things and thinking about a publicly owned utility, a public power company that can actually, you know, transform your city.
And so Burlington seems like it’s on its way to the future where other cities may be lagging behind. And part of that is just because they have ownership of a public utility and they have people inside of the public utility that see the benefits that they can bring to people.
Anthony Flint: Burlington, Vermont is a great case study in getting to net zero, it sounds almost quaint today, doesn’t it, that this would be a goal for anyone, but the package of initiatives in Burlington are impressive and focused, and the policy goals are really achievable now. They do have this municipal electrical utility that does seem to be unique, but part of what the book suggests, or we hope, and we even added a bunch of what we called replicable strategies, was to take something like that and see where is this possible in another city?
Take what, steal our ideas to take what’s going on in one city and see if it can’t be applied to another. It’s really been a study and innovation in that way. And I think, other people have picked up on this, namely Bloomberg and their mayor’s center now at the Harvard Kennedy School.
That’s what it’s all about, is exchanging these ideas and strategies for anyone to use, and particularly, new mayors coming in, getting an education on what, what has been tried, what’s the context? And just talking with other mayors about their experience with what’s it like to have your own municipal utility that you can make as green as it can be.
I sense there’s a lot of ferment and one of the things I’ve imagined — and in fact we’ve done this where we’ve done a mayor’s panel at the American Planning Association — so you get some of these mayors together and it’s really fun.
Jeff Wood: That’s my dream here in San Francisco is taking back the PG&E infrastructure, making our own public utility. And then, if we have all these electric vehicles and stuff, one of the things that Miro said in the book is [that] every time we bring another electric vehicle or heat pump online, that’s revenue for the city.
And so my dream was to set up the public utility in San Francisco, which there’s been discussions about, and if people are gonna park on the street, give them electric chargers from the city utility, and then use that money that they would generate — that would go to a profit center for oil company otherwise — use that to fund your transit system or use that to fund some other public good that the city needs. Use it to fund the development of solar panels or heat pumps or whatever it may be, that will reduce the weight of need in your city. And so I’ve had this dream before and so I loved seeing it actually happen in another place. And to know that it’s possible is always a good push forward.
Anthony Flint: Exactly. To see how it can play out. And of course every city’s different, but yeah the power of example.
