In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, New York City reinvented its formerly industrial waterfront. Manhattan’s shoreline was once prized for the port and piers that in 1860 processed “52 percent of the nation’s combined imports and exports.”1 In the 2020s, New Yorkers and tourists flock to the waterfront’s interconnected series of verdant paths and parks. The Battery at Manhattan’s southernmost tip now includes a children’s playground that simulates different natural ecosystems and is built to accommodate flooding.2 Five slides made from granite from the Adirondacks are intended to give children a feel for bluffs, according to an informative plaque that reassures the supervising adults that a visit to the playground is educational, not just a means of burning off youthful energy.3 Along the East River, which runs north of the Battery, lies the South Street Seaport, which is full of touristy restaurants and shops. Running north of the Battery on the west side of Manhattan that borders the Hudson River, a series of parks flow into each other, including Hudson River Park. Pier 26, a part of the park that opened in 2020, recreates the native grasses, trees, and rocks that existed when Henry Hudson explored the area in 1609 when the Lenape people controlled it (Figure I.1).4 Further north along the Hudson, Little Island rises from the river like a bundle of blooming concrete tulips; it is a human-made play space for adults with open-air performance spaces. Like the Battery Park playground, Little Island opened in 2021.5
Figure I.1 Map of Lower Manhattan
The waters beyond the shoreline have been similarly transformed. In 2018, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection proudly declared that no one alive had ever before seen New York Harbor “as clean and healthy.”6 In the summer, the water is sufficiently clean that people kayak, fish from piers, and occasionally even swim in the Hudson River, although most of the river is not swimmable and there are state advisories about eating the fish.7 The website for Hudson River Park boasts that “[t]he Hudson River has been on a remarkable journey. Once very polluted, water quality has vastly improved – the result of 40 years of environmental regulations and advocacy.”8 Aquatic species not seen in the river for many years are returning.9 In 2019, a local team of whale enthusiasts identified 134 whales off New York’s shores, up from just four sightings in 2012.10
More ominously, the paths around Manhattan also offer clues about city leaders’ anxieties about the environmental threats facing the city as the climate warms. As of 2024, there are four construction projects underway along the shores of lower Manhattan to increase resilience to flooding from sea level rise and the sort of storm surge that badly damaged large areas of the city during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, when 17 percent of the city’s land mass flooded.11 The most notable of these projects is the East Side Coastal Resiliency project, New York City’s most ambitious climate flood protection initiative as of the early 2020s.12 It involves rebuilding and elevating East River Park on landfill to protect the area against flooding expected from more frequent and ferocious storms due to climate change.13 South of the park reconstruction, the city is installing floodwalls and “flip-up barriers.”14 At the bottom of Manhattan, the city is rebuilding part of the Battery to address flood risks, and New York State’s Battery Park City Authority is building new flood protections on the west side.15 Meanwhile, the city has installed barriers that look like large sandbags near the Brooklyn Bridge as a low-tech interim flood protection measure, pending the implementation of a better plan to protect the South Street Seaport and Financial District from the waters of the East River.16 Manhattan’s vulnerability to flooding from storms and sea level rise is hard to miss.
Photograph 1 Plaque, Battery Playspace at the Battery, Lower Manhattan, March 2024.
Photograph 1Long description
Informational plaque at Battery Playscape, Lower Manhattan, March 2024. The plaque reads: "Battery Playscape. Environmental awareness is fostered through play and discovery, for children of all ages and abilities. Explore all five ecosystems: Bluff, Riverbed, Marsh, Dune and Meadow."
Photograph 2 Slides representing the “bluff” landscape, Battery Playscape at the Battery, Lower Manhattan, March 2024.
Photograph 3 Near South Street Seaport along the East River, Lower Manhattan, March 2024.
Photograph 3Long description
Photograph of a waterfront scene in Lower Manhattan, March 2024. The image captures the East River with modern high-rise buildings in the background. A pedestrian walkway runs parallel to the river, lined with benches and greenery. People are seen walking and sitting along the path. The South Street Seaport area is visible with a mix of urban and natural elements.
Photograph 4 Pier 26 in Hudson River Park, Lower Manhattan, March 2024.
Photograph 4Long description
Boardwalk at Pier 26 in Hudson River Park, Lower Manhattan, March 2024. The scene includes modern high-rise buildings in the background, with a prominent skyscraper centrally located. The boardwalk features railings and pathways leading to various sections, including a central area with planted vegetation. The Hudson River is visible to the right, with a boat docked nearby.
Photograph 5 Little Island, along the Hudson River, Lower Manhattan, March 2024.
Photograph 6 Construction of the East River Coastal Resiliency Project, Lower Manhattan, May 2024.
Photograph 7 Notice of the closure of Wagner Park for the South Battery Park City Resiliency Project, on the west side of Lower Manhattan near the Museum of Jewish Heritage, March 2024.
Photograph 7Long description
Notice sign for Wagner Park closure due to construction. The sign details the South Battery Park City Resiliency Project, aimed at protecting the park and community from severe storms. Includes images of park, map, and future park plans. Text mentions new lawns, gardens, and community spaces. The project is part of the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency Program.
Photograph 8 Construction of the South Battery Park City Resiliency Project, on the west side of Lower Manhattan near the Museum of Jewish Heritage, March 2024.
Photograph 9 Low-tech interim flood protection measure (resembling sandbags) near the Brooklyn Bridge, on the east side of Lower Manhattan, March 2024.
This book is concerned with the role of cities in safeguarding the environment in the early twenty-first century. Most American environmental law scholarship overlooks the role of cities in developing environmental law and policy.17 Instead, scholars typically focus on federal environmental law. When they do look to lower levels of government, they often concentrate on the role of states, most notably California.18 Legal scholars mainly seem to pay attention to the potential to advance an environmental agenda in states and localities when Republican dominance in Washington leaves the federal government inhospitable to environmental regulation.19
This book draws attention to the role of large cities in environmental protection historically and in the present. It examines the factors driving large American cities such as New York to address environmental problems in the early twenty-first century and those constraining cities’ environmental policy choices. A clear-eyed view of cities’ role in environmental law and policy and of the determinants of local environmental policy should help scholars, policymakers, and advocates identify the responsibilities to which local governments are best suited and design the structures needed to support them in these tasks. Integrating municipal governments in this manner has taken on newfound urgency in the twenty-first century as all levels of government need to address climate change, which is almost certainly the most complex environmental challenge that they have ever encountered. The return of Republican dominance in Washington in 2025, as this book went into press, makes it all the more pressing to understand the scope for local action.
Existing Scholarship
With 80 percent of the U.S. – and over 50 percent of the world – population living in urban areas,20 and cities accounting for over “70% of [U.S. and] global carbon dioxide emissions,”21 twenty-first century charitable and nongovernmental organizations have shown considerable enthusiasm about the potential for cities to address climate change and other environmental issues. Major foundations, such as Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Kresge Foundation, fund efforts in cities to address climate change and improve sustainability in the U.S. and abroad.22 Prominent global networks of city governments bring together local officials committed to limiting climate change. The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group is likely the most notable; as of 2024, it included almost 100 cities accounting for approximately 20 percent of “the global economy,” including fourteen U.S. cities, such as New York and Los Angeles.23 City governments are themselves allocating resources to environmental policy. According to a 2015–2016 survey of 504 U.S. cities with populations over 20,000, “46 percent … have staff whose jobs are dedicated to sustainability.”24
Scholars have also written several books for popular audiences arguing that cities are well placed to combat climate change and promote sustainability. Perhaps the most well-known is Cool Cities, by the late political theorist Benjamin Barber.25 Published in 2017, in the first year of the first Trump administration, Cool Cities argued that cities around the world have a right to spearhead efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, given the failure of nation-states to aggressively pursue decarbonization. Barber also saw cities as having the opportunity to make a major dent in GHG emissions, especially if they work together through forums such as the Global Parliament of Mayors that he helped to found.26 Barber emphasized that the large share of GHG emissions attributable to cities means that they have the ability to be part of the solution to limiting climate change. He thought that the politics of addressing climate change would be easier at the local than the national level because city governments are closer to people, and therefore more likely to respond to popular concerns about climate change.27
The optimism that C40, Barber, and others evince about the potential for local governments to address climate change stands in sharp contrast to a long-standing view in American legal scholarship that cities and states – apart from California – are incapable of dealing with pressing environmental problems. A well-known 1977 Yale Law Journal article by our late colleague Richard Stewart, the leading environmental law professor of his generation, articulates several rationales for federalizing environmental law in the face of the failure of local and state governments to limit air and water pollution.28 Writing just a few years after Congress passed the Clean Air and Water Acts in the early 1970s, Stewart refers to a lack of capacity at the local and state levels to deal with pollution problems, the vulnerability of these lower levels of government to influence from polluting industries, and the inability of subnational governments to limit pollution harming their residents that originates elsewhere, among other reasons.29
Early twenty-first century legal scholarship continues to be skeptical of the ability of local governments to successfully address society’s most important contemporary environmental problems, such as climate change. Some legal scholarship emphasizes that limiting GHG emissions is an interjurisdictional pollution problem and that local efforts to reduce these emissions will merely displace them to nonregulating jurisdictions.30 Other scholarship goes further and suggests that local governments are likely not only to be ineffective in limiting climate change but also to delay or thwart societal decarbonization. There are concerns that local governments, responding to the opposition of local residents to disrupting their local environment, will block building renewable generation and transmission infrastructure necessary to decarbonize electricity supplies, and new, denser residential housing that would lower GHG emissions by reducing car travel and the energy needed to cool and heat homes.31 While the precise concerns about local governments may have changed since the 1970s, the skepticism about their potential to contribute to addressing environmental issues endures.
This Book’s Contributions
This book charts a middle path between enthusiastic optimism and the skepticism about the potential for cities to address climate change and other environmental issues. Centering urban politics, we argue that large cities have strong incentives to tackle environmental problems that local residents mainly benefit from solving. In addition, community-based advocates can prompt cities to attend to global environmental problems, such as the need to limit planetary warming. However, there are more challenges to cities acting aggressively on their own to tackle global problems than the optimists about cities tackling climate change tend to acknowledge. In light of their status as constrained entities nested within states and a large federation, cities will struggle to effectively contribute to addressing society’s most pressing environmental problems without support from higher levels of government. Breaking down our arguments, this book makes four contributions.
First, we emphasize the potential for leading cities to play a meaningful role in protecting the environment and argue that it is time to stop reflexively equating environmental law with federal law. Environmental protection is not, and has never been, an exclusively federal or state enterprise. Early twenty-first century literature arguing that cities should take on decarbonization and sustainability tends to imply that it is proposing a novel role for cities, thus overlooking the historical role of U.S. city governments in environmental protection going back to the nineteenth century, a role which was revived with new vigor in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Recognizing the history of local environmental protection efforts helps to establish the viability of a local role in addressing contemporary challenges – while also offering cautionary lessons about the extent to which local governments are well positioned to protect the environment.
Second, we offer a framework for understanding the factors that give rise to, and constrain, local environmental law and policy in the early twenty-first century and the categories of environmental problems that cities are likely to address.32 We agree with the many scholars of urban politics who argue “that the central issue of local governance is economic development.”33 Created and constrained by state law and at the mercy of federal choices about interest rates, tax levels, and immigration policy, local governments have agency, but it is fragile.34 They must tend to their economic base to be able to fund the services, such as policing and fire, which are their core responsibilities. Within the confines of the bounded agency that cities enjoy, there are two main reasons that local governments act on their own to safeguard the environment – without compulsion or subsidies from the federal or state governments: to make the city more attractive to the economic elites that shore up the city’s tax base and to respond to political pressure from organized grassroots groups. The first is a top-down explanation, while the second is a bottom-up explanation.
Local environmental protection efforts sometimes emerge in a top-down fashion because local elites perceive such efforts as consistent with the overarching priority of promoting local economic prosperity. City policymakers may advance environmental protection measures based on their own assessment that the measures will promote the city’s economic interests. Policymakers also might be influenced by advocacy from large businesses, major landowners and developers, and other powerful local interests that stand to obtain private economic benefits from the measures, such as higher property values or more business revenue. In the early twenty-first century, New York and other postindustrial cities built new parks to attract knowledge workers and tourists and began planning and, in some cases, investing in adapting their physical environments to protect their economic prosperity as the climate warms.
In contradistinction to the first explanation, local environmental protection efforts sometimes emerge from the bottom up in response to advocacy from local grassroots community groups who find allies within city government. Not all local environmental protection efforts are in the service of economic development; indeed, local efforts sometimes impose costs on local actors who argue that the efforts will jeopardize the city’s economic prosperity. Grassroots advocacy is motivated by a variety of concerns. With the development of organized groups representing historically marginalized communities of people of color and low-income residents, city governments have faced calls in recent decades to address unfairness in the distribution of environmental burdens, such as garbage processing facilities, and benefits, such as green space.35 In addition, as global warming has accelerated, some environmental activists frustrated by politics in Washington, D.C., have turned to city governments to make progress in reducing GHG emissions out of a belief that limiting climate change is a moral necessity. Sometimes, although perhaps not often, the politics align at the local level for grassroots groups to prevail, even though local business elites express concerns that policies that the advocates are proffering will impose local economic costs. A case in point: Prodded by local climate activists, in 2019, New York City officials who were committed to standing up to President Donald Trump enacted a law capping GHG emissions from large buildings starting in 2024 that could impose significant compliance costs on building owners.36
In short, we maintain that cities have heterogeneous motivations for protecting the environment. Sometimes they act based on a perception from elites inside and outside of government that environmental protection will benefit the local economy, even if it will be costly upfront. Less often perhaps, cities act in response to bottom-up advocacy from grassroots groups that find allies within city government for policies aimed at saving the planet or promoting a more equitable distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. Such policies are not obviously linked with promoting economic prosperity and indeed may impose economic costs on powerful local actors. Politics at the local level are not simple, and not all meaningful local government activity is focused on promoting economic development.37
However, the opportunities to achieve environmental progress at the local level through multiple paths – from the “top” and the “bottom” – should not be taken to imply that cities can address today’s most salient environmental issues on their own. It is useful to distinguish two ideal types of environmental problems: local and global problems.
Both city policymakers and grassroots advocates are likely to focus on protecting local environmental quality, for example, by protecting green spaces and removing solid waste. They may disagree about how to order their priorities; policymakers concerned about economic development might most want to enhance the physical beauty of the city in wealthy or heavily touristed areas, while grassroots advocates might be most concerned about pollution in low-income neighborhoods. Nonetheless, addressing the local environment should be attractive to both policymakers and community advocates because people within the city – and the local economy – stand to benefit from local public goods such as parks, the remediation of contaminated lands, and waste removal. By extension, local governments should be motivated to tackle the early twenty-first century challenge of increasing the resilience of their populations and landscapes to the effects of climate change, such as hotter temperatures, flooding, drought, and wildfires. Increasing local resilience, for example, by reconstructing parks such as the East River Park, stands to create new amenities from which local residents can benefit in the short term, while also avoiding loss of life and property damage from future flooding. Yet, adapting urbanites and their environments to climate change is costly; the budget for the East Side Coastal Resiliency project alone is $1.45 billion.38 Accordingly, cities will require financial and other assistance from higher levels of government to adapt to climate change, even though cities have humanitarian and economic motivations for increasing local resilience to climate impacts.
Cities have weaker incentives to take serious steps to address global environmental problems compared with local ones. Reducing GHG emissions to limit climate change is a paradigmatic example of such a global problem.39 No single jurisdiction’s actions will be sufficient on their own to stabilize the planet’s temperatures and minimize planetary warming. Even the United States cannot unilaterally limit global warming by reducing its emissions; historically the world’s largest GHG emitter each year, it is now the second largest source of GHG emissions annually after China, which emitted 27 percent of the world’s GHGs in 2019 compared to the United States’ 11 percent.40 America’s most populous city has even less of a chance of stabilizing planetary temperatures on its own; New York City accounted for just under one percent of U.S. GHG emissions in 2022.41 Moreover, serious local government efforts to reduce GHG emissions in large American cities will likely impose upfront costs on local actors, such as the owners of buildings, which are the largest source of emissions in New York City.42 Compounding matters, the principal beneficiaries of these GHG reductions will likely be people outside the city’s borders. Given the structure of the benefits and costs of reducing GHG emissions from the local perspective, it is not clear that cities, left to their own devices, will do much to mandate their residents lower their emissions. Grassroots advocacy can extend the boundaries of what is possible at the local level to encompass policies that local elites think will be economically costly, such as New York City’s 2019 law capping GHG emissions from large buildings. However, such advocacy requires sustained community mobilization to overcome the ever-present tendency in city governments to favor policies perceived as enhancing local economic development. Pondering the motivations of cities to engage in environmental protection leads us to be only cautiously optimistic about the potential for large cities to meet the challenge of climate change and to underscore the need for higher levels of government, especially the federal government, to help the nation’s vast urban populations address climate change.
In addition to setting out a framework for analyzing the motivations of cities to protect the environment, the book’s third contribution is a series of case studies of New York City’s efforts in the first two decades of the twenty-first century to address three environmental problems: the local problem of improving the quality of the city’s physical environment, the global problem of reducing GHG emissions to limit planetary warming, and the local problem of adapting the city’s environment to increase its resilience to climate change. Drawing on original research, Chapters 3 through 5 cumulatively offer a partial history of local environmental policy in New York City in the first two decades of this century that we hope is of interest for its own sake, independent of the way in which the chapters illustrate the book’s argument about the disparate interest group dynamics from which local environmental policies emerge. New York City’s limited ability to make progress in reducing GHG emissions and adapting to climate change in the first two decades of this century reinforces our view that caution is warranted about its capacity – and, more importantly, that of the many other smaller cities without New York’s resources – to address the most pressing environmental problems of our time unassisted by higher levels of government.
With a clear-eyed view of cities’ motivations to protect the environment and the constraints that they face in doing so, this book’s fourth contribution is to define at a high level an environmental agenda for large cities for the warming world of the early twenty-first century. Setting to the side the problems of providing local public goods, such as green space, that cities have been addressing for centuries, we focus on what cities should be doing to increase local resilience to warming that is already occurring, and to assist in the global project of decarbonizing to limit climate change. We also discuss the ways in which higher levels of government, in particular the federal government, should facilitate local efforts. As mentioned earlier, localities that adapt to climate change will likely reap economic – and human – benefits of environmental safety from floods, drought, heat, and fire. Cities should be regularly updating their understandings of the risks that they face from climate change, and the differential vulnerabilities of populations and geographies within their borders. To reduce these vulnerabilities, they need to invest in bolstering the social infrastructure that their populations enjoy, as well as local physical infrastructure, such as for drinking water and stormwater. Regulation of land use and buildings could also be an important tool for reducing vulnerability to hazards such as flooding, wildfires, and extreme heat. Given the upfront costs of adapting to climate change and the expertise required, local governments, even of very large cities, will require ongoing assistance from the federal government, including in the form of predictable, annual federal funding for local climate resilience.
Since reducing GHG emissions will impose upfront costs on local actors largely for the benefit of people beyond local borders, cities lack clear incentives to require local actors to reduce these emissions. In 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA),43 which, if it lives up to its proponents’ aspirations, may alter the economic calculus at the local level and induce local governments to undertake some actions, such as electrifying municipal vehicle fleets and installing solar panels on city government-owned buildings, that localities may not otherwise have pursued. Assuming the core elements of the IRA survive during the second Trump administration, accessing the subsidies that the IRA provides for decarbonization should be a central priority of city governments if for no other reason than any funding that cities leave on the table presumably will be taken up by other cities with which they compete for residents and industry. However, it would also be desirable for large cities to do more than access IRA funding. They should pursue a regulatory agenda to decarbonize privately owned sources of GHG emissions in their communities often under local authority, such as buildings. Large cities should also use their authority over land use regulation to promote societal decarbonization by increasing allowable residential density and facilitating the development of renewable energy infrastructure. Until Congress can legislate mandating economy-wide decarbonization, federal regulatory efforts are legally and politically precarious and cities, along with progressive states, may be able to fill some of the voids left by inadequate federal policy. Activists in cities likely will need to mobilize to promote this local decarbonization regulatory agenda. Given that decarbonization is often perceived as imposing costs on local actors for the sake of the world, local policymakers are unlikely to mandate decarbonization without pressure from activists.
Other commentators have noted that effectively addressing the climate crisis requires a “whole-of-government approach.”44 Yet, the “whole government” of which they speak is often the federal government alone,45 and the federal government cannot be consistently relied upon to assist in the fight against climate change. Going forward, policymakers, environmental advocates, and scholars must look beyond the federal – and to a lesser extent, state – governments that have been the main focus of environmental law since the 1970s and recognize the importance of supporting urban municipalities in addressing contemporary environmental challenges, especially in adapting to climate change.46
Plan for the Book
This book proceeds as follows.
Chapter 1 sets the stage for considering the role of large U.S. cities in environmental protection in the early twenty-first century. It highlights the historical role of cities in providing environmental protection in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the gradual emergence of state and then federal environmental law in the latter third of the twentieth century as subnational governments proved inadequate at addressing the nation’s environmental problems. This chapter concludes by emphasizing the potential, depending on state law, for cities to address environmental policies notwithstanding the significant federalization of environmental law, in part because federal environmental law typically imposes minimum standards that cities and states can exceed.
Chapter 2 elaborates our analytical framework for understanding why cities adopt environmental policies in the early twenty-first century, and the implications we draw from this framework about the constrained ability of cities to address pressing environmental problems such as climate change.
Chapters 3 through 5 turn from abstraction to real-world local environmental policy. These chapters analyze environmental policy in New York City in three issue areas in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Readers interested in local environmental history could dispense with Chapter 2 and proceed directly to Chapters 3, 4, and 5.
Chapter 3 focuses on New York City’s efforts to reconfigure the local environment to promote economic development as the city emerged from deindustrialization by creating new parks, redeveloping waterfront areas, cleaning up polluted sites, and improving air quality. This chapter also underscores the nascent incorporation of equity into environmental policy in the city in the first decades of the twenty-first century in response to community-based advocacy. It highlights the city government’s efforts to center equity in the siting of facilities for processing the city’s garbage.47
Chapter 4 analyzes the steps that New York City took starting in 2007 to reduce GHG emissions from buildings. Until the late 2010s, city policymakers did not impose any significantly costly regulatory requirements on local actors to decarbonize, and relied instead on information tools that did not threaten local economic interests. As mentioned earlier, in 2019, partly in response to grassroots community advocacy, New York City legislated declining caps on GHG emissions from the city’s large buildings, which, if the caps are enforced, will be expensive for many owners to achieve.
Chapter 5 addresses early efforts on the part of New York City policymakers to adapt the city to climate impacts, focusing in particular on efforts to protect the city against coastal flooding. Until 2012, when Hurricane Sandy caused massive flooding in the city, city policymakers mostly focused on gathering information about the climate risks facing the city, but took few tangible actions to address these risks, apparently perceiving them as distant, uncertain, and not yet worth the costs of addressing. The lived experience of Sandy, and a massive injection of federal funding into the city after the storm, changed the calculus for policymakers, who developed the city’s first plan for protecting its coastline. However, after Sandy, policymakers were slow to build coastal protection infrastructure. In the first two decades of this century, adaptation efforts, at least concerning coastal protection, appear to have been largely driven from the top, and community-based advocates have not to date exerted influence over adaption equivalent to their impact on local decarbonization efforts.
Chapter 6 outlines a high-level agenda of actions that local governments in large cities should undertake to adapt to climate change and contribute to decarbonization, taking into account the opportunities and constraints at the local level. The chapter also highlights the assistance that even large cities require from the higher levels of government, especially the federal government, the best resourced level of government, to address the challenges of a warming world. We then offer a brief coda that recapitulates the book’s main themes.
New York City as a Reference Point
New York City is a central reference point in this book, although we also discuss environmental law and policy in other cities as well. As residents of New York – one of us is a native New Yorker and the other has lived in the city for over two decades – we are sensitive to the city’s famous parochialism that The New Yorker magazine captured in a 1976 cover of a map of the United States that showed essentially nothing of interest between the Hudson River and the Pacific Ocean.48 There also are reasons to doubt the generalizability of findings from studying local environmental policy in New York to other cities. New York City is the country’s most populous city, and it has outsized wealth and resources, and extreme poverty and economic and racial inequality. Moreover, cities differ widely in the environmental challenges that they face; their political structures; their latitude to address environmental challenges based on their topographies, climates, and economies; and the politics of the states that empower them.49
Nonetheless, there are strong reasons for using New York as a reference point for thinking about the role of cities in environmental policy. As a large, diverse city, New York City faces many environmental challenges that other cities face on a smaller scale, such as adapting to rising temperatures, increased risks of flooding and poor air quality due to wildfires outside local borders, decarbonizing the local building stock and a history of people of color and low-income communities being disproportionately burdened by pollution. As the leading American city, its approach to environmental issues is often emulated by other cities, a phenomenon that Chapter 4 documents. Since New York’s approach is a reference point for other cities, it makes sense that the city could be a reference point for scholarship too.50 Moreover, our vantage point as New Yorkers enables us to understand local environmental policy in the city in a way that we would be hard pressed to do for other cities. Indeed, one of us (Spiegel-Feld) has contributed to the development of local New York environmental law. Drawing on our knowledge of New York, we identify patterns and frameworks whose relevance can be considered for other cities in future work.
A Note on Terminology
The book takes a broad view of what falls within the rubric of environmental law and policy. We include within environmental law and policy measures affecting air, water, land, the atmosphere and other resources that will protect and improve human health and biodiversity. Historically, some of the measures that we label as environmental policy measures – such as the construction of water supply systems, improving air quality, or the development of systematic garbage collection – were probably not viewed by many people as environmental measures. Supplying cities with clean water and sewers or reducing air pollution were regarded as public health measures;51 systematizing garbage collection might have been seen as a “housekeeping” function.52 Without denying that the policy measures that we bring under the environmental rubric might also be characterized in other ways, we think of them as environmental policy because we take a capacious view of the scope of the environment and what affects it.53
We are also mindful that the word “city” has several meanings.54 As used in this book, the word “city” refers to a local authority – that is, a nonstate and nonfederal authority – that has general jurisdiction to govern a given geographic area, irrespective as to whether it is formally organized as a city, county, parish, or other.55 As mentioned earlier, the book is primarily concerned with large cities, by which we generally have in mind cities with populations of at least 500,000. For example, in several places in the book, we provide data about patterns in environmental policy in the twenty most populous cities in the United States, which as of 2022, ranged from New York City, with a population of over eight million, to Oklahoma City, which had a population of just over 694,000.56 The book focuses on large cities because it is often these cities that people seem to have in mind when they emphasize the economic importance of cities and their potential to address climate change and other environmental issues. While there are differences in the resources available among the top twenty cities, the differences between the resources of these cities and the many smaller cities are likely even more vast.57
