A Guide for Sustainable Urban Development of the 21st Century

Delivering Effective Urban Managementgreenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The greenhouse gas emission reduction goal was latercodified into law under the Climate Protection Act (Local Law 55). 29Besides reducing greenhouse gas emissions and water use, PlaNYC creates a rich assessment ofquality of life in the city of more than eight million, sometimes illustrating issues by using storiesabout real people living in the city, such as a six-year-old boy named Sasha. Using breadth anddepth of analysis written in direct, non-academic language for the average citizen, PlaNYCcovers housing, open space/parks, brownfields, water quality, water supply network,transportation, energy, air quality, climate change, and city street greening.The plan provides numerous detailed maps showing the location of city amenities in 2007 in thecontext of future conditions that the plan will be addressing. A map of “Current PlaygroundAccess and Proposed Schoolyard-to-Playground Sites,” for instance, plots 290 under-utilizedschoolyard sites throughout the city that could be converted to public playgrounds. Shaded areasindicate on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis where there is “adequate” existingplayground access and where there is “inadequate” playground access, as well as non-residentialopen space. 30PlaNYC 2030 was based on input from town hall meetings and roundtables with thousands ofcitizens as well as business leaders, advocacy organizations, leading academic experts andpractitioners from various sustainability disciplines. The city also set up a website by which toreceive input for the plan before it was drafted.New York City developed the plan to face the challenge of adding nearly one million moreresidents by 2030 with an increasingly antiquated infrastructure network (the city’s subwaysystem, for instance, dates back as far as 1904). 31 Mayor Bloomberg also predicted that the29 “PlaNYC 2030,” New York City, United States, accessed 20 August 2010. Site includes 2007 Plan:http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/home/home.shtml and 2010 Plan Update:http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/downloads/pdf/planyc_progress_report_2010.pdf30New York City PlaNYC 2030, Open Space, p. 32-33:http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/downloads/pdf/report_open_space.pdf31http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway14