The Rise of the Urban Sustainability Movement in America

Abstract

In searching for a tipping point at which sustainability became mainstream in America, one might look to 2005. In that year website SustainLane.com began issuing annual rankings of the fifty most populous cities in the United States. SustainLane is not the only rating system that uses quantitative scoring to rank U.S. cities in terms of how green they are, but it has become themost highly visible and widely referenced source for comparatively assessing sustainability in urban America. Its annual rankings have been reported by broadcast media networks National Public Radio, CNN, NBC, CBS, and ABC, posted on a wide range of social networking Internet sites, and received coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. Mayors Michael Bloomberg of New York, Richard Daley of Chicago, and Gavin Newsom of San Francisco have all publicly praised the website and the high rankings accorded their city’s greening initiatives.1 In the age of the Internet, SustainLane is perhaps the most visible sign of the rise of sustainability to the top of public policy agendas in the urban milieu in which nearly 80 percent of Americans now live and work.