Five of Europe's Most Interesting Urbanism Trends

In a guest essay in Volts, Michael Eliason highlights five "intriguing and powerful" European urbanism trends that hold useful lessons for the Biden administration. These include:

• Brownfield redevelopment: Cities all over Europe are turning brownfields into dense, livable, eco-friendly neighborhoods that take advantage of existing land and discourage sprawl. "Citizen participation is also a major component of these projects. Unlike in the US, this participation isn’t a wasteful exercise whereby local homeowners get to block new homes and preserve the status quo. Rather, these processes allow residents to have a say in what their new district can look like, where things should be located, and what kinds of open space or car-free areas it will have."
• Diversity in housing options: Unlike the largely single-family zoning found in many U.S. cities, "cities like Berlin, Vienna, and Freiburg have proactive land policies for non-market housing like social housing, cooperatives, and baugruppen. They award sites to projects incorporating sustainability, affordability, or other innovations." Meanwhile, social housing plays a major role in Europe; a quarter of Dutch housing is social housing, and Paris is aiming for 30% social housing by 2030.
• Rapid transformation: City leaders are working to expedite projects and take "rapid, productive steps" to implement plans that seek to transform cities, improve livability, and reduce environmental impacts. In a reversal of U.S. NIMBYism, some cities are embracing change as a positive constant. "Rotterdam is never finished," goes a slogan in the Dutch city. "Quality of life is always improving."
• Productive cities: The concept promotes a sort of radical mixed-use that brings production into the heart of the city. Production, Eliason writes, "can include urban agriculture, energy production, food production/processes, recycling centers, or any of the small-scale production processes that constitute industry 4.0." As Eliason asserts, "[p]roductive cities mark a return to the way cities developed centuries ago, but with significantly less pollution and safety hazard."
• Circular economy: The European parliament's Circular Economy Action Plan lays out concrete steps "to reduce waste, empower consumers, change food systems, and make sustainable products the norm."