Sustainable Cities Network and Project Cities working with communities to build a stronger future

A pillar of Arizona’s education system, economy and culture, ASU is a natural bridge between some of our state’s leading experts and changemakers across a wide variety of issues. Through the Sustainable Cities Network, partner communities and organizations work together to streamline green city operations, advance renewable energy, mitigate extreme heat and the urban heat island effect, design sustainable neighborhoods, accelerate transportation electrification and conserve water in a changing climate. Included in the network’s offerings is Project Cities. This awardwinning, university-community partnership allows faculty and students to pair with a city to co-create strategies for better environmental, economic and social balance.

As humanity continues to shape the world around us, it is clear that collaboration is key to secure a sustainable future. That collaboration starts in our communities: the places where we live, work and play. In this conversation, Anne Reichman and Julia Davis of ASU join city employees John Sefton and Danae Presler to discuss what it takes to build communities that support our present and future — and how the Sustainable Cities Network and Project Cities can help.

Danae Presler the climate program manager for the city of Flagstaff and previously worked for the City of Avondale and City of Chandler. Presler’s work focuses on mitigating climate change through local action. She specializes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from energy and transportation systems in effective and equitable ways and advancing carbon dioxide removal strategies. She is also a member of the Sustainable Cities Network’s steering committee, composed of leading municipal and county representatives from around Arizona.

Anne Reichman is the director of the Sustainable Cities Network, a collaborative effort that fosters partnerships, identifies best practices, provides training and information, and connects Arizona State University’s researchers and local communities. She is also a Senior Global Futures Scholar within the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at ASU.

John Sefton is the community services director for the City of Chandler, where he has partnered on multiple occasions with Project Cities at ASU. He has more than 20 years of experience as a director of parks, recreation and library facilities across Arizona. He is also a faculty associate at ASU, where he teaches the “Recreation and Sport Planning and Facilities Development” course through the Watts College of Public Services and Community Solutions.

Julia Davis is the senior program manager for Project Cities, a signature program of the Sustainable Cities Network. Prior to joining Project Cities, Davis served as programs director for the Arizona Sustainability Alliance, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in the Phoenix Metro Area. Davis is also a member of the board of directors for the Arizona Association for Environmental Education.

Danae Presler: A sustainable city is one where both people and nature can thrive for generations to come. That means housing is affordable, it’s safe and convenient to get where you need to go without polluting the environment. Electricity is clean and renewable. There’s access to healthy food, abundant habitat for wildlife and green spaces for people. Clean air and water, sustainable consumption, minimal waste. Perhaps most importantly, a sustainable city is where community members are supported through social and cultural networks.

John Sefton: A sustainable city is one that’s ready for tomorrow. That means we’re doing all of the right things today to provide for a community that can thrive. It’s fostering a place people want to be and where they can grow in a healthy manner.

Anne Reichman: I prefer to think of “sustainable cities” more in line with the tribal nations’ definition, which considers that balance between people and the environment — but thinking much further ahead. It is easy to think in the short-term; however, we need to think in the longer term and shift to thinking in relation to generations to come. The needs of each community vary by state, county, city or town. It varies even within those cities and towns — it varies by department — so you have so many different perspectives. It’s incredibly interdisciplinary and can be quite complex.

Julia Davis: I definitely agree, and I think the theme across the board in these answers will be “present and future.” I think a sustainable city is one that is both responsive to the needs of its residents and businesses and community a healthier and happier tomorrow for everyone that’s living there now and in the future.

Presler: I would also like to challenge readers to think about their city and who has access to these opportunities and who’s being left out? A truly sustainable city is providing these opportunities equitably for all of its community members.

How can universities support sustainability efforts outside of their own campus?

Reichman: On the surface, universities have a responsibility to educate the next generation and the upcoming workforce. That’s a large task. Beyond that, I think the role of universities is evolving when it comes to supporting sustainability and cities. It’s an exciting opportunity. There is a shift happening where universities are taking on both the role of providing an education while also being socially embedded and taking responsibility for community-driven research.

I think this transition might be kind of uncomfortable for more traditional academics — academia can be a bit theoretical at times — but adding real-life, local challenges to the academic experience provides more value and impact to students and to communities they engage with. Universities can and should be drivers of change.

Presler: Universities often act as their own little cities. They have their own transportation networks. They have their own governance structures and food and waste systems. But what’s really amazing is they have these populations of mostly young people who are extremely curious and passionate. They are ready to make their mark on the world.

In addition to that, there are these amazing thought leaders and researchers who have literally dedicated their careers to understanding and advancing sustainability. They can be these amazing sources of innovation and talent to support cities. I think that universities and cities both stand to benefit from collaborating and supporting each other. Universities can help cities, unleash new ideas to challenges. In turn, cities can provide “real world” opportunities for these ideas to be implemented.

Davis: To add to that city-university connection, I’ll say that universities and cities have a really natural relationship. There is a lot of opportunity for short- and long-term collaboration, especially with students involved, to be able to create new solutions to continue to make cities better and better places to live.

Sefton: I see universities as places that can be almost exploratory without the constraints of politics, which is a really powerful tool in city-university partnerships. There ends up being a really beautiful trio of partners: You have professionals who represent industry, professionals from the university and the future leaders in the form of students.

Speaking from the city perspective, universities are a great resource because we can tap into a broad array of disciplines all in one place. There just feels to be this very broad and very deep opportunity for us to explore whatever the challenge might be, whether it’s artificial intelligence, sustainable landscape architecture, or operations and management.

How does Project Cities and the overall Sustainable Cities Network strengthen sustainability efforts?

Davis: Project Cities is a unique universitycommunity partnership program within the Sustainable Cities Network. The program connects community partners, typically municipalities, who are facing sustainability challenges, to faculty experts who are teaching courses at the university. Then, we’ll work with the community partner and the faculty member to codesign a project for that class, so the students can then develop solutions through projectbased learning during their coursework. We have a lot of great connections and partnerships through the Sustainable Cities Network. The network is this dynamic, ongoing network that cities are part of. If they want to dig further into projects and research with faculty and students, they can tap into Project Cities very easily.

Reichman: The Sustainable Cities Network was founded in 2009 as an education and outreach program. It aligned with the newly minted School of Sustainability in 2006, the first in the nation. There was a lot of interest in what sustainability efforts were happening at the local level, and we noticed there wasn’t a lot of connectivity between universities and cities when it came to sustainability.

There were very few sustainability managers within cities at the time, so there was a unique opportunity but also a challenge. So this peer-to-peer network, the Sustainable Cities Network, was created to bridge that gap. We work through a steering committee made up of Arizona’s most active communities in sustainability. From there we host work groups, essentially based on the interests and the needs of local communities.

We’ve taken our cues from communities. They’ll say “We want information on energy, green infrastructure, or climate and resilience,” and so we tend to create these monthly conversations and meetings focused around specific areas of interest. We want to share best practices. So this is a free, voluntary network with a low barrier of entry. We’re providing access to any practitioner within any department in a city, town, tribal community or county to engage with each other and the university on sustainability issues.

The network isn’t only open to cities and towns. We engage a lot with our nonprofit sector partners, community-based organizations and then some of our private sector partners who support sustainability actively in their course of business. It’s an interesting group, and it has helped jumpstart many initiatives within our region and our state.

Danae and John, what is it like working with Project Cities and the Sustainable Cities Network from the city perspective?

Presler: Working with the Sustainable Cities Network has been nothing but amazing and I cannot believe that this gem of a resource is free. I went to my first Sustainable Cities Network meeting eight years ago and I was hooked. At the time, I was working at the city of Chandler and they didn’t have a formal sustainability program. I was working in the neighborhood resources department, but I was really interested in sustainability so I started attending these meetings. They opened my eyes to this whole network of peers across all different entities. It was really helpful to discover that there were other people that were working in this area.

Reichman: If I can jump in, I think it’s important to see that not only do you have support, but it isn’t a competition. The Sustainable Cities Network isn’t the place to be competitive. As we know, Phoenix is a very competitive region among cities. Sustainability is, interestingly enough, one area that I think brings communities together.

I think everyone who participates in the network understands the value of clean air, clean water, public transportation and access to affordable housing and food. So there are a lot of benefits, and I think it’s a rejuvenating group. We try to prop each other up. We’re not interested in reinventing the wheel. I think everybody borrows each other’s ideas, and they’re totally comfortable with that concept.

Presler: Absolutely. I love it because ASU is really socially connected in the Phoenix metro area especially, but it’s also the largest public university in the state of Arizona. Everyone knows what ASU is. It’s also a neutral party. It’s not one city that is taking the reins and bringing everybody else in. It is a third party university that is also very committed to sustainability, that is being the convening voice.

Sefton: My experience with Project Cities has been really rewarding, especially because of how creative we can be. There are a few projects we’ve done that have been exploratory in nature, and the city might not have the capacity to assign city staff to a project. Project Cities gives us an opportunity to try something that will guide future decisions.

One recent project we did was exploring park access: How do people use public parks? Are they active or passive? Are people more likely to be of a certain gender or age group? The project looked at five parks across Chandler, and we can use the data we gathered as we move forward with park improvement projects in the future.

Many of the Project Cities efforts are project based. How is this approach beneficial for both the students and entities involved?

Davis: Through Project Cities, students are learning through community partnerships. I’ll use John’s park example: The students were gathering real data, seeing in real time what was happening and hearing actual feedback from real people. This is a very different experience from writing papers or reading textbooks.

It’s transforming how students learn by having them interfacing with the community on the ground while also advancing what they’re learning in their coursework. The other benefit of working with students is that projects have to have firm start and end dates to correspond with semesters. University-led projects can take years and can hit all kinds of delays. By sticking strictly to semester schedules, we are forced to operate on timeframes that have to be achievable in time for finals.

Importantly, these shorter projects don’t mean that the projects can’t build on each other across multiple semesters. John and I have worked really closely together, so we’re always able to meet and think of new projects and opportunities in Chandler. On the university faculty and staff side, it is a lot of work to put these types of partnerships together. You have to really foster and maintain long-term relationships with our communities across the state. This is, overwhelmingly, a good thing when you’re trying to keep universities and communities connected.

We’ve done more than 110 projects over the past seven years across all kinds of areas: energy, water, housing, historic preservation, community surveying and strategic planning. To be able to do this work with different groups across the state is an incredible opportunity for everyone involved.

Looking to the future, especially in a state that has gone through tremendous growth, why might municipalities and other entities benefit from Project Cities and the Sustainable Cities Network?

Presler: We’re all trying to do better and we don’t need to do it alone. If anything, we really shouldn’t do it alone. I think where the Sustainable Cities Network has maybe the biggest benefit is for small and rural and tribal communities who are doing this work, perhaps with only one dedicated sustainability professional. I’ve been there. It was what brought me to the network in the first place. When it was just me, the scale of the challenges didn’t shrink to accommodate my schedule. As we face these growing challenges, it’s especially important for those of us who might be on our own to branch out.

If you’re in a community and maybe you are the only one that’s dedicated to sustainability work, or you have a passion for this and just don’t know where to start, Sustainable Cities Network has a strong network of practitioners and peers and just — frankly — friendly, wonderful people who you can learn from. You can also inspire them with what you’re working on.

Sefton: Being able to walk away with the tangible results that come out of the projects is reason enough to get involved with Project Cities or the network. As Julia mentioned earlier in this conversation, there have been more than 110 of these semester-long projects through Project Cities. At the end of each of these projects, there are valuable insights for cities and other partnering entities to utilize. These are projects that, most likely, never would have happened otherwise. That’s a huge opportunity window for opportunity.

The collaboration is really impactful in a lot of different ways, from economic development to environmental knowledge and involvement to just thinking about workforce development. It’s an opportunity for businesses and cities and other entities to recognize their true social impact, and to work directly with the next generation of leaders toward solutions. We’re really focused on what’s going on in the real world, and being able to expose the students to some of the challenges and the opportunities that we have in those spaces.

In a bit more of a societal perspective, it is also incredibly rewarding to see those students walk away with this on their resume. The students who get involved come away with insights on real-life work; when they talk about the most impactful work they did as students, a lot of the time they’ll reference these experiences.

Reichman: I think something that might attract groups to the Sustainable Cities Network is that we have all the historical presentations online so that people don’t have to start from ground zero. Many of the communities we work with, both urban and rural, are dealing with very similar circumstances in slightly different contexts. So accessing questions and presentations that have been done in the past can certainly provide a good foundation.

There is also the access piece: Working with the Sustainable Cities Network doesn’t just open you up to a wealth of information, but also to collaboration opportunities through Project Cities or our general researcher base at ASU. I think data is critical when it comes to understanding your community’s needs and identifying viable options and innovative solutions.

Having that data is also crucial when applying for grants. We’ve mentioned all of the previous projects done through Project Cities — oftentimes, it’s important data that may be missing. If you have that data in hand, you’re certainly in a better position to be able to state your case and get the funding that you need. So relying on a research institution to help collect that information can certainly be helpful as well.

What responsibility do municipalities and similar groups have in ensuring strong and cohesive sustainability efforts within their communities?

Presler: I think a huge part of our jobs needs to be learning from community-based organizations and community members themselves. They are the experts in the community. More and more, I think cities are realizing this. We need to establish strong relationships, which means building or rebuilding trust.

In some cases their cities have, intended or otherwise, enacted practices with inequitable impacts in their community. Trust takes time to build, and longer to rebuild if it’s been broken. I think where municipalities can ensure cohesion in their sustainability efforts is by really and truly listening to their community.

Sefton: At the end of the day, people who work for cities and municipalities are there to create good places for people to live. I think that goal is also at the heart of sustainability, so they are naturally intertwined. We are acting now to create a better future. Nobody wants to live in a place with an expiration date.

That means we need to think about the longevity of places where people can both work and play. We need to ensure access to clean water and sanitation. We need equitable housing and access to housing. We need good work opportunities for people. Those needs won’t change, regardless of where we sit in time. So I think that those two things — the work it takes to maintain a good place to live and the work it takes to be sustainable — they should naturally be advancing forward together.