At the heart of Shenzhen, China, the city’s massive, wavelike Civic Center stands surrounded by a mind-boggling panoply of futuristic skyscrapers. Forty years ago, this area was home to just a few scattered fishing villages on the Pearl River Delta. Today, approximately 24 million people live within Shenzhen’s greater urban area.

In China, Shenzhen has come to stand for something much bigger than itself. On a hill downtown, a statue of revered former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping striding purposefully toward the Civic Center helps explain why. Deng took control of China in 1978, after the death of Mao Zedong. The transition marked an end to decades of isolation from the outside world that had been dominated by command-and-control planning. Deng turned the country in a radically new direction, launching the Reform and Opening program to loosen the strictures that had bound the country for so long. And Shenzhen led the way into the future.

Deng granted the newly created city a license to operate as an economic superlaboratory, a place to explore the promise of the free-market economy. It was a sink-or-swim proposition, and in the years since, Shenzhen has succeeded wildly. Yet Shenzhen’s spectacular growth has come at a cost. As the area transcended its naturally marshy environment and turned from literal backwater into economic powerhouse, much of its land cover succumbed to blacktop and concrete. During storms, the abundance of paved-over land caused widespread flooding, as well as large-scale releases of urban pollution into nearby Shenzhen Bay and the Pearl River Delta.

Shenzhen is hardly alone in facing these problems. But continuing in its role as a national hotspot of innovation, it has become a unique laboratory for thinking about how to build livable cities throughout China and beyond.

Six miles northeast of Deng’s statue, Professor Huapeng Qin stands on a rooftop, surrounded by sensors measuring wind speed, temperature, and evaporation. He is looking for solutions.

Based at the local satellite campus of Peking University, Qin is at the forefront of an effort to turn Shenzhen into a “sponge city.” Using techniques that mimic nature, sponge cities can catch, clean, and store rain, which reduces the risk of flooding and keeps local drainage and water treatment systems from being overwhelmed.

Although it takes its cue from centuries-old thinking, the modern concept of the sponge city began forming in Europe, Australia, and the United States in the early to mid-1990s. The movement was a reaction to two common phenomena in urban development. First, just as happened in Shenzhen, most rapidly developing cities pave over huge amounts of land, eliminating a significant amount of natural forest cover, filling in lakes and wetlands, and severely disrupting the natural water cycle. Second, the traditional approach to urban stormwater management has focused on moving as much rain as possible off the land as quickly as possible, not capturing it for reuse.

Sponge city thinking marks a significant shift away from traditional “gray infrastructure”—think concrete pipes and dams—to “green,” or natural, infrastructure such as rain gardens and forests. The sponge city approach aims to restore some of those natural functions by allowing urban areas to transform the menace of stormwater into a boon: extra water for dry times.

Sponge city techniques therefore have multiple benefits. They can help soften the impact of flooding, improve both water quality and water supply, and help fix environmental problems. The sponge city concept is a relatively new arrival in China, but it has gained traction here fast. That’s partly due to the country’s tremendous growth over the past several decades, which has drastically altered the landscape. It’s also due to a new mindset about the risks of pursuing prosperity at all costs. In July 2012, a huge rainstorm in Beijing led to flooding that caused 79 deaths and an estimated $1.7 billion in damage. The incident galvanized national leaders.

In late 2013, President Xi Jinping officially endorsed the sponge city concept, and the following year the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued a set of technical guidelines aimed at ensuring that 70 percent of surface runoff be captured in place. The central government also launched what would ultimately become a 30-city pilot program to prove out the concept. Shenzhen is one of the pilot cities, and it’s no coincidence that the sponge city concept has gotten more traction here than anywhere else in China. From financial policy to the tech sector, “Shenzhen has always been very willing to borrow ideas from outside China and try them out,” says Qin. The sponge city idea is no different. “First it was just scattered pilot projects, but now the concept is being incorporated into Shenzhen’s master plan.”

In this case, Qin and his students are trying to learn more about techniques for creating green roofs, using plants grown in a medium of lightweight engineered soil to catch rain where it falls, slowly meting it out afterward. Such techniques are “very similar to natural systems,” Qin says. “Natural systems look very simple, but the processes are very complex. So we’re trying to understand those processes.”

A sponge city has several interchangeable building blocks. At a large scale, protecting or restoring forests and natural ground cover helps give water a chance to sink in. At smaller scales, there are several options. Permeable pavement can be used on roadways, sidewalks, and pathways to allow water to infiltrate the ground, rather than wash off into the local stormwater system. Retention ponds and constructed wetlands help catch and filter water, allowing it to slowly percolate into the local water table. So-called rain gardens perform a similar function at a smaller scale, and can easily be incorporated into neighborhood green space or even homes. Green roofs catch and filter rain, along the way watering plants that, Qin says, can help reduce surface temperature by up to nine degrees Celsius.

Shenzhen’s embrace of the sponge city concept has been driven by its spirit of innovation, but also by the fact that the effects of an unbalanced water cycle are often plain to see here. Heavy rains can overwhelm local water treatment plants, sending nutrient-laden wastewater directly into Shenzhen Bay and the Pearl River Delta, causing large algae blooms. People are also worried about the impacts of climate change. In what may have been a taste of what’s to come, Super Typhoon Mangkhut, which hit in 2018, blew down half the trees in the city.

Qin says computer models predict that with climate change, total annual rainfall will be comparable with current levels, but that precipitation will be much “flashier”: extreme events like short-duration, high-intensity rainstorms will become more common. This area has absorbed an influx of millions of people over the past few decades, largely by turning its back on the water that was once its defining characteristic. Now, Qin and others across the city are committed to finding new ways forward. The lessons they are learning and applying here are the first steps in what may soon be a sweeping transformation—not only in the city around them, but also throughout China.

“Sponge cities are just one example of how China is taking up the sustainability agenda,” says Zhi Liu, director of the Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy. Acknowledging the urgency of building climate resilience in the face of extreme weather and other challenges, he says, “This is not something China wants to do in order to look good. It comes out of necessity.”

Until two years ago, the 105-acre patch of green space now known as Honey Lake Park was an abandoned agricultural experiment station. The dominant features of the park, which sits not far from downtown Shenzhen, were a neglected grove of lychee trees and two fish ponds. Today, walking into the park feels like walking into an architectural rendering. Yet in the company of an expert, it quickly becomes clear that the park is not only aesthetically pleasing but also eminently functional.

Yaqi Shi, a technical director with the Shenzhen-based Techand Ecology & Environment company, helped design the park. The paths that we are walking on, she explains, are constructed of permeable pavement, and the park’s rolling contours are hugged by small swales that help slow and catch runoff. A series of ponds in the middle of the park is sown with native rushes that Techand raised in its own nursery. Signs throughout the park point out the various sponge city elements and explain how they work.

Shi, whose professional focus is ecological restoration, speaks with the brisk economy of an engineer. But the delight in her voice is evident when she speaks of the evolution of this project. “The park turned out to have a really user-friendly feeling,” she says. As we walk, Shi points out a library, a children’s play center, and the local wedding registration office, all within the boundaries of the park. A pavilion at the edge of a pond provides an ideal backdrop for cooing newlyweds to pose for portraits.

A walk with Shi also makes it clear that much of the technology underlying sponge cities is, in fact, surprisingly low-tech. The real art of the approach lies not so much in being technically clever, but simply in being thoughtful. Shi explains, for example, that much of Shenzhen is underlain by a layer of clay, which prevents water from infiltrating very far into the ground. To make permeable pavements work means hiring contractors to dig out the clay, sometimes to a depth of six feet, and replace it with gravel and more permeable soil.

Nonetheless, once you get a sense of what to look for, Shenzhen suddenly starts to seem like an entirely different city. On the northwest side, a relatively new suburb called Guangming has wholeheartedly embraced the sponge city concept. The suburb’s recently built New City Park is a model of retaining stormwater in place, from a water-absorbing latticework in the parking lot to permeable pavement on the paths, to swales and miniature, artificial wetlands designed to slow and soak up water. The massive adjacent public sports center has a green roof and a vast expanse of permeable bricks and pavement. The anaerobic digesters at the Guangming water treatment plant are covered by an enormous green roof; there’s another at the foreign languages school. Over at the high-speed rail station, where bullet trains thunder in from Hong Kong, the streets out front are made of permeable pavement.

After a while here, it’s hard to resist the temptation to, little by little, empty your water bottle onto Shenzhen’s sidewalks and streets, simply for the novel sensation of watching the water disappear into what otherwise appears to be regular blacktop and concrete.

Back downtown, the Nature Conservancy’s Xin Yu shows me another side of the sponge city revolution. We meet in the lobby of a Hilton hotel just a mile from the Civic Center and the nearby hilltop statue of Deng Xiaoping. After quick pleasantries, Yu takes me out a back service door. Compared to the airy elegance of the hotel lobby, it feels as if we’ve passed through a portal into another dimension.

We find ourselves in the narrow alleyways of an area known as Gangxia, a former farming village that Shenzhen gradually engulfed, and that subsequently metamorphosed into a crowded warren of five- and six-story apartment buildings. Gangxia and other so-called urban villages are a phenomenon found in practically every Chinese city, and are testament to the frenetic pace at which the country has urbanized over the past 40 years. They are often gritty, but they’re an important haven for low-income migrants who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford the high rents of most urban areas. They typically come to form largely self-contained communities with small businesses that cater to all the needs of their residents, from vegetable sellers to modest karaoke parlors.

Yu nimbly leads me through the narrow back alleys, and it quickly becomes clear that “village” is a misnomer. The densely packed buildings here are known as “handshake apartments,” built so close together that residents of neighboring buildings can reach through their windows to shake each other’s hands. Restaurants are preparing for the lunchtime rush, and the air is filled with the staccato rhythm of vegetables being chopped. Business here, Yu says, is vibrant and extremely competitive: “These alleyways really are alive.”

Gangxia’s original residents didn’t technically own the land upon which their houses were built, but they did have rights to use that land. As Shenzhen grew during the 1980s and 1990s, they replaced their own houses with apartment buildings, often keeping one floor for themselves and renting out the rest, to take advantage of rising rents.

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has played an important role in showing that it’s possible to incorporate sponge thinking even in the heart of the urban jungle. “There are a lot of ideas, but the government or companies can’t necessarily try things out,” Yu says. “NGOs can. We can figure out what ideas work and take them back to the government to promote more broadly.” (Due to the current political climate in China, Shenzhen municipal officials were not in a position to meet for this story.)

Yu opens a gate to an otherwise nondescript apartment building and climbs several flights of stairs to the roof—and an improbable flourish of lush greenery. A multilevel lattice framework groans with plants of every description. This green roof, Yu says, catches over 65 percent of the rain that lands on it.

Showing what’s possible hasn’t always been easy. When TNC first started this green roof project, Yu and his colleagues had to contend with angry neighbors who thought they were illegally adding another story to the building. “People kept calling different government departments: the police, or the construction bureau, or the city administration bureau,” Yu says. That led to several visits from local code enforcement teams, who used ladders to gain access to the building and a cutting torch to try to dismantle the garden’s supporting framework. “They kept asking for approval documents,” Yu says, and laughs. “But those don’t really exist. We had nowhere to go to get them.”

With time, however, efforts like this have spread broader awareness of the sponge city concept. “Public consultation—how you get the public to understand what this is about—is very important,” says Liu of the Lincoln Institute. “I think NGOs can play a big role in this area, and TNC is a trusted international NGO in China.”

TNC’s work has also gained the backing of officials and business leaders. Yu was invited to be a member of the technical committee for Shenzhen’s municipal sponge city program. When corporate tech giant Tencent decided to incorporate sponge city techniques in its iconic new headquarters in Shenzhen, the company turned to TNC for ideas. And Tencent’s founder, chairman, and CEO, Pony Ma, is not only a member of TNC’s board of directors for China, but also a delegate to the powerful National People’s Congress. There, he has made sponge cities part of a broader personal platform of advocating for nature-based solutions. Ma has also inspired fellow business leaders to commit to—and invest in—ensuring that their businesses meet sponge city standards in Shenzhen.

Some 1,200 miles north of Shenzhen, in Beijing, Kongjian Yu’s office seems to sprout a plant from every spot where he hasn’t managed to stuff a book. The Where the Wild Things Are feel is entirely consistent with Yu’s personality, which is driven by a kind of restless energy. It’s hard to imagine him sitting in one spot for five minutes.

Yu, who was born in a small farming village in coastal Zhejiang Province, went abroad and earned a Doctor of Design degree at Harvard, in 1995. Upon returning to China, he was deeply disheartened by the direction that development had taken. “When I came back, I was shocked by the scale of urbanization,” he says. “I was amazed by how this process ignored all our natural and cultural heritage, filling in wetlands, destroying the rivers, cutting down the trees, and wiping out all these old buildings.”

Yu was hired as an urban planning and landscape architecture professor at Peking University. In the staid world of Chinese development theory, he has made his name as something of a flower child—and a gadfly. Yu became a prodigious author and tireless lecturer, and turned out a series of open letters to China’s top leaders. He called for China to abandon its mania for building monumental public squares; advocated for a revival of the traditional Chinese approaches to farming, water management, and settlement; and suggested that the money allocated for annual National Day parades be better spent building good parks.

Above all else, Yu railed against China’s obsession with concrete, a repudiation of decades of thinking here. “The philosophy in China, in Mao’s era, was that humans can beat nature,” Yu says. “And that caused a lot of disasters for us.”

That attitude only accelerated in the years after Mao’s death, and by the early 21st century, China was setting records for the amount of concrete it was pouring each year. Global systems demystification guru Vaclav Smil has estimated that China used more cement in just three years, 2011 to 2013, than the United States did in the entire 20th century.

While Yu has encountered opposition to his outspokenness, he has also tapped into a growing demand for this new kind of systems thinking. Today, in addition to serving as dean of Peking University’s College of Architecture and Landscape, he heads a 600-person landscape architecture and urbanism consultancy called Turenscape. Municipal governments across China routinely seek the company out for help. He wrote the definitive two-volume practitioners’ guidebook on sponge cities in China, and contributed to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy book Nature and Cities. His work is also featured in Design with Nature Now.

A core tenet of Yu’s overall approach is a concept he calls fan guihua. The concept is frequently translated as “negative planning,” but might be more accurately rendered as “inverse planning.” It’s essentially a counter to the type of development that has shaped China’s growth for so long. “You plan what’s not built,” Yu explains. “You plan what should be protected.”

This, obviously, is a fairly radical idea in contemporary China. Yet in the course of his work, Yu came to a surprising realization: the idea of living with water, rather than battling it, was a concept that had historically been very familiar. In central and southern coastal China, including the area where Shenzhen now stands, a distinctive method had evolved over centuries to catch rainfall and carefully manage it with earthen dikes to raise mulberries, silkworms, and fish, a sort of landscape-scale aquaponics system. And when Yu and his students looked deeper, they realized that sponge city-like concepts had been a fundamental principle of Chinese city planning for centuries. Traditionally, he says, many Chinese cities had the capacity to absorb two-thirds of local rainfall within their boundaries.

With this discovery, the idea of a different way of managing water—and the perils of a drastically altered hydrologic cycle—became a major theme of Yu’s work. Nature, for its part, began putting an increasingly fine point on the issue. During the 2012 flood in Beijing, “seventy-nine people were killed. Drowned. On the street,” Yu says. “In the capital, we drowned 79 people. How is that possible? We lost face. That immediately became a political issue.”

Yu wrote another letter to high-level leaders saying that adopting the sponge city approach and creating a resilient landscape might offer hope. As it happens, Xi Jinping had recently become the secretary general of the Communist Party and president of China. After decades of the country struggling with notorious pollution and other environmental problems, Xi has staked his reputation on creating an “ecological civilization” in China.

The exact contours of that concept are sometimes difficult to discern, but in broad outline it encompasses both a nationwide push for ecological sustainability and the creation of a green, uniquely Chinese alternative development model for the rest of the world. Both sponge city thinking and a more expansive embrace of low-impact development fall squarely within Xi’s larger aspirations.

“China’s in an environmental crisis. We have to do this,” Yu says. “When people can’t breathe, when the water is polluted—I think he’s very sensitive to those issues. I think he really wants to build his legacy on doing this.”

The biggest challenge to making sponge cities work on a broad scale has nothing to do with building rain gardens, installing permeable pavement, or placating neighbors. “Finance is a major issue,” says Liu.

Liu, who came to the Lincoln Institute after 18 years with the World Bank, is largely focused on governance and financing issues associated with land use in China. Taking the sponge city concept to scale won’t be easy, and he cites the challenges in Shenzhen as an example. Sponge city improvements in Shenzhen, which officially began in 2017, now cover 24 percent of the city’s total surface area. The government has a goal of increasing that to 80 percent by 2030. But hitting that target will be a significant challenge.

The central government has pledged a total of $5.8 billion (40 billion Chinese yuan) to incentivize Shenzhen and the 29 other pilot cities to invest in and carry out sponge city work. But it wants each of those places to bring at least 20 percent of its developed area up to the sponge city standard by the end of this year.

Liu says that bringing a square kilometer of already developed urban land up to the standard typically costs $22 million to $29 million (150 to 200 million CNY). The 30 pilot cities are each eligible for 400 to 600 million Chinese yuan per year from the central government for three years. That’s enough to upgrade, at most, four square kilometers per year. To meet—and actually exceed—the central government’s 20 percent by 2020 target, Shenzhen brought about 235 square kilometers up to standard, at a cost that likely ran anywhere from $5 billion to $7 billion.

“Asking the municipal government to come up with that kind of money is not easy,” Liu says. Shenzhen was able to pull it off because of its strong municipal budget and private commitments from the city’s tech and manufacturing giants. But, he adds, “if you go to the interior cities where the municipal finance is very weak, it’s very difficult.”

Liu points out that in the case of new development, cities can implement standards that will require developers to pay for improvements, a cost typically passed on to residents and firms. “If you look at the upfront costs for development, sponge cities are not a very expensive thing to do,” Liu says. Retrofitting existing development, however, is a much bigger challenge.

“The toughest issue is that public finance is used to finance the public good, with very little opportunity for cost recovery,” he continues. “That’s really the toughest story about China. It’s a matter of priority. The cities just have too much on their plate. So by the end of the day, very few cities can find enough money.”

Sponge city infrastructure is “just like a streetlight,” Liu says. “It’s a shared public good, but nobody wants to pay for it.”

In truth, the biggest challenge of turning the sponge city into reality may well be unraveling the financing mechanics. Yet the cost of not rising to the challenge may be higher than anyone fully appreciates.

“It’s really like thinking about buying insurance,” Liu says. “We are all facing uncertainties, but the trend of more intense storms is quite clear . . . The cost of inaction might not look that high today, but when we’re faced with a catastrophic outcome in 10 or 20 years, we’ll regret that we didn’t spend the money earlier.”

Even given those high stakes, the sponge city idea could ultimately be about even more. Back in Shenzhen, standing on the roof of the apartment building in Gangxia, TNC’s Yu says sponge cities do a lot more than tame floods and save water for dry seasons. 

“If you only talk about stormwater management or runoff control, the average person won’t necessarily buy in, because they’ll feel like it doesn’t have any connection to them,” he says. “But features like green rooftops are different. They can have a synergistic effect. They help absorb rainfall, but they also improve the neighborhood view, contribute to urban biodiversity, and create a green space that everybody can use.”

Matt Jenkins, who has previously worked as an editor for Nature Conservancy magazine, is a freelance writer who has contributed to The New York Times, Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, and numerous other publications.

Photographs (in order of appearance):

Shenzhen, China, is one of 30 pilot “sponge cities” in China that are investing in nature-based stormwater management solutions. Credit: Wang Jian Xiong via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

Xiangmi Park, also known as Honey Lake Park, is a former agricultural research area in Shenzhen that was redesigned for community use. Bioswales, permeable pavement, and other elements allow it to double as a stormwater management tool. Credit: Vlad Feoktistov.

Rooftop garden on the Tencent Binhai towers in Shenzhen. Tencent founder and CEO Pony Ma is an advocate of sponge cities who has inspired fellow business leaders to invest in nature-based solutions in Shenzhen. Credit: The Nature Conservancy/Theodore Kaye.

Editorial note: Scenario planning is a process that enables communities to create and analyze multiple plausible versions of the future in the face of rapid technology advances, climate change, and other twenty-first century challenges. Robert Goodspeed is the author of the forthcoming book Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions, currently available for pre-order, which describes the fundamentals of the tool and the ways it can be useful for a wide array of projects. In this article, adapted from a post that was first published on his blog Goodspeed Update, he offers a few pieces of advice for scenario planning success.

1. Name Your Scenarios

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve flipped open a detailed scenario planning report, only to find the scenarios simply labeled A, B, and C. How forgettable! For the findings to be memorable, the gist of each scenario must be clear. I suggest that urban planners adopt the best practice from corporate strategic planning: Use pithy, evocative names that can help your audience remember the key ideas, which improves their ability to digest the analysis and conclusions. Sometimes, public sector urban planners feel uncomfortable giving scenarios names that might trigger unwanted associations; calling one “sprawl,” for example, might suggest the planners are already biased against it. But there are ways to come up with names that are both vivid and accessible to diverse audiences. For example, one case I discuss, the Gwinnett 2030 Unified Plan for a county in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, contained scenarios for regional growth with names that suggested some of the factors they explore: Middle of the Pack, Regional Slowdown, International Gateway, and Radical Restructuring.

2. Limit the Number of Scenarios You Create

There is a common mistake that undermines the power of the scenario approach. It’s very understandable—once you go to the trouble of holding the scenario workshop or adopting a powerful scenario planning tool, why not analyze as many scenarios as possible? The problem is people have trouble keeping track of more than roughly seven distinct ideas in working memory. Your huge matrix of scenarios may be a marvel of analytical rigor, but it is likely to glaze the eyes of decision makers who find it overwhelming. Instead, cognitive theories suggest that four to seven scenarios may be ideal. That’s enough to highlight the range of possible futures, but not too many to be confusing. Many projects create three, but that tends to encourage the audience to understand them as simply different degrees of one dimension, when most scenarios are defined by more than one dimension. For example, Vibrant NEO in the Cleveland, Ohio, region considered both urban form as well as regional growth to create four regional scenarios: Trend, Grow the Same, Do Things Differently, and Grow Differently.

3. Make Your Scenarios Plausible

This is perhaps one of the trickiest issues in scenario planning theory. I believe all scenarios should be plausible, meaning they really could occur, even if the expected likelihood is small. This is a critical distinction from utopian planning, which is much less concerned with real-world plausibility. This does not mean a good set of scenarios should play it safe and remain confined to, say, a range of options currently accepted in local policy debates. To the contrary, effective scenarios are often constructed to specifically illustrate futures that are quite different from today, in order to broaden our understanding of what could happen. But sometimes scenarios make implausible assumptions; for example, modeling all growth for a city or region as occurring within transit oriented development (TOD). The defense of this type of scenario is that it is just a “what if” exercise. But it is implausible that no growth could occur anywhere else, even if there is a strong shift toward TOD.

Although such an extreme scenario might be interesting for the analyst, it will likely be immediately dismissed by stakeholders who hold real power. The effect of implausible scenarios is to give the impression that scenario planning is an irrelevant academic exercise that has no place in decision-making. The best scenarios, therefore, balance potential dramatic change with plausibility.

4. Focus on the Issues, Not the Tools

Plenty of planning organizations have caught the scenario bug, and then immediately asked their technical modelers to create—or write an RFP for—a new tool they “need” to create scenarios. Focusing on the digital tools first puts the cart before the horse, since there is a diverse array of technical approaches to modeling scenarios. Agencies that work on tools without figuring out the substantive focus of their scenarios often end up with tools that don’t answer the right questions. My book’s chapter on digital tools reviews a wide range of models that can be used for scenarios, stressing the importance of fitting them to the project, not the other way around. Equating scenario planning with the tools can shift the focus away from the underlying conceptual approach of scenario planning, which is often quite different than conventional forecast- or vision-led approaches known by the agency’s staff. Effective scenario planning exercises begin with a focus on the issues and scope of the project, then move on to decide on the suite of tools needed to bring it to life.

5. Collaborate, Collaborate, Collaborate

Although planning professionals generally understand the ethical and practical importance of participation, they can be tempted to avoid the real work it takes to truly collaborate. The truth is, most agencies can “check the box” of participation without allowing much substantive input into their projects. The problem with this approach is that it undercuts the potential power of the scenario method. As I argue in the book, the aim of planning is not simply to generate analytically rigorous and visually arresting plans, but to actually impact decision-making. To do that, the diverse stakeholders who hold power to shape the city must be meaningfully engaged in the project, and be provided with opportunities to shape the scenarios and learn from the results. After all, creating the right number of well-named, plausible, and appropriately modeled scenarios is not enough to make an impact if the key decision makers are not at the table all the way along.

Robert Goodspeed is an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of collaborative planning, urban informatics, and scenario planning theory and methods. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners and serves as a board member of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s Consortium for Scenario Planning.

Photograph: Courtesy of Robert Goodspeed.

At a recent rally in front of Baltimore City Hall, activists sang, chanted, and otherwise voiced their view that the city’s major nonprofit institutions weren’t “paying their fair share” of property taxes.

The gathering came as the City Council explored renegotiating an agreement under which 14 nonprofit universities and hospital systems voluntarily pay the city a total of $6 million per year. Those payments are in lieu of the estimated $120 million they would owe if they were not exempt from taxes on their real estate holdings.

The voluntary agreement doesn’t expire until 2026. But with state lawmakers considering a plan to allocate $4 billion in new school spending in Maryland by 2030—including $329 million from the city of Baltimore—leaders in that city are eyeing nonprofits as a potential source of additional revenue. And they are not alone. Other cities, under various fiscal pressures, are also seeking to collect more revenue from payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs), a tool used broadly in the Northeast and Midwest.

In Boston, home to the largest and most lucrative PILOT program in the country, incoming City Council President Kim Janey used her inaugural address to announce the formation of a committee that will reconsider the terms of the city’s decade-old PILOT guidelines. And newly elected New Haven, Connecticut, Mayor Justin Elicker campaigned on the promise of asking Yale University to increase its annual contributions from $11.5 million to $50 million on property worth roughly $6.6 billion within the city limits—a nearly fivefold increase, but still a fraction of the taxes a non-exempt property owner would owe. New Haven, which has one of the highest levels of tax-exempt property in Connecticut, has long struggled with finances and is facing a $50 million budget gap.

“I will be having very lively conversations with the university, because I think that the vast majority of New Haven residents feel like Yale can be doing much more to contribute to the city,” Elicker said upon taking office in January.

The relationship between nonprofits and cities is complex and occasionally contentious. Colleges, hospitals, and other organizations provide valuable services and benefits at little or no cost to cities, from health care to student housing. They are also often major economic engines. To acknowledge the fact that they rely on city services and infrastructure, many agree to make these voluntary payments. While it can be tempting to ask for more, experts caution against bringing nonprofits back to the table too frequently or too soon after an agreement has been reached.

“Cities should not be trying to renegotiate PILOTs on a regular basis,” says Adam Langley, associate director of tax policy and data initiatives at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “It’s an issue of credibility and trust between the local governments and nonprofits.”

Langley cowrote a Policy Focus Report and Policy Brief on PILOTs with Lincoln Institute Resident Fellow Daphne Kenyon. The two say the long-term nature of most PILOT agreements, which typically cover a span of five to thirty years, helps provide a predictable revenue stream for cities and a known budget number for nonprofits. But there are some cases when it makes sense to revisit PILOTs before the specified renewal date. In 2011, for example, Providence, Rhode Island, was facing a $110 million budget deficit and possible bankruptcy. After Mayor Angel Taveras raised taxes, closed some public schools, reworked labor contracts, and suspended cost of living adjustments for public pensioners, he successfully negotiated PILOTs worth an additional $48 million over 11 years from the city’s seven largest nonprofits. “Everyone was taking a hit,” says Kenyon. “So within that context, revisiting a multiyear agreement would be more sensible.”

In Boston, the urge to revisit the current agreement is dictated less by a crisis and more by concerns about the role of “community benefits” in the funding formula. The city’s PILOT model asks nonprofits that own property worth more than $15 million to pay 25 percent of what they would have paid in real estate taxes. But it allows them to cover up to 50 percent of that payment with services that directly benefit residents of the city, such as scholarships, cultural events, preventive medical care, and the development of safe, affordable housing.

While giving credit for community benefits is considered a best practice because it acknowledges that nonprofits provide services that would otherwise not exist or would come out of city budgets, it’s also a primary target of Janey’s inquiry. “Some of our nonprofit partners use ‘community benefits’ in a loose way,” she recently told reporters.

Even if cities negotiate new agreements, there is no guarantee that nonprofits will pay. In fiscal year 2019, Boston requested a total of $109.1 million from nonprofits including schools, cultural institutions, and hospitals but received only $86.7 million—$34.2 million in cash and $52.5 million in community benefits. (In the first year after the guidelines were enacted, nonprofits contributed $21.9 million in cash and $21.9 million in community benefits.)

The difference in the amounts requested and received has to do with the voluntary nature of the payments. “This is not a tax assessment,” says David Thompson, vice president of public policy for the National Council of Nonprofits. “It’s not legally or constitutionally required. This is an ask.”

For her part, Janey sees the shortfall in collections as another reason to reexamine the structure of the program. “We’re leaving millions of dollars on the table that could be invested in our schools and housing and our roads,” she has said. “But we also need [local nonprofits] to do their fair share and contribute their full amount in terms of the PILOT.”

Kenyon and Langley suggest that it’s valid to ask whether the benefits counted as contributions are actually ones the community wants and needs. They also say a decade is a reasonable amount of time to go back and assess a PILOT program. But the process works best, they say, when officials approach it in a collaborative spirit.

“Public shaming is sometimes used to try to compel nonprofits to make contributions,” says Langley. “I don’t see a lot of evidence that’s an effective strategy.”

Instead, they recommend communicating respectfully, justifying the amount of a requested payment, and, when possible, earmarking PILOTS for public services consistent with a nonprofit’s mission.

Thompson agrees. He suggests officials approach nonprofits as partners and ask for contributions related to specific budget needs that directly affect the organizations. For example, an institution located in a high crime area might help pay for an increased police presence in the city. Or a city might put PILOT payments from a university toward improvements to public parks located near campus, as happened in Worcester, Mass.

“Nonprofits are problem solvers in our communities,” Thompson says. “It helps if you come with an approach of, ‘Can you help us? We propose increasing spending, but we also encourage you to solve this with a mission-based activity.’”

Liz Farmer is a fiscal policy expert and journalist whose areas of expertise include budgets, fiscal distress, and tax policy. She is currently a research fellow at the Rockefeller Institute’s Future of Labor Research Center. 

Photograph: Baltimore is one of several cities seeking higher contributions from tax-exempt nonprofits in the face of fiscal pressures. Credit: Opacity via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

Por lo general, los proyectos de desarrollo de 5 hectáreas no tienden a llamar la atención nacional ni internacional. Pero en el caso de Quayside, un lote junto al lago Ontario, en Toronto, esto fue diferente. Hace dos años, Waterfront Toronto (la entidad gubernamental que supervisa el redesarrollo y la reconfiguración de una franja más amplia de propiedades junto al río Don que incluye a Quayside) incorporó a Sidewalk Labs como socio privado. Sidewalk es subsidiaria de Alphabet, empresa matriz de Google, y prometió invertir US$ 50 millones en el emprendimiento. La empresa parecía ideal para ayudar a hacer de Quayside un prototipo de vecindario de “ciudad inteligente”, y elaboró planes ambiciosos.

También causó bastante controversia, y por momentos pareció que la sociedad misma terminaría por implosionar. Al momento de esta publicación, esta amenaza parece haber desaparecido, al menos por un tiempo. Toda la fricción tuvo un resultado inesperado: Quayside terminaría siendo un prototipo mucho más valioso para la planificación de ciudades inteligentes de lo que se había pensado.

Esto no se debe a lo que se construyó (que, a la fecha, es nada), sino más bien a la manera en que el camino escabroso ha aclarado los problemas centrales de las ciudades inteligentes, que se deben resolver antes de que se pueda construir, no solo en Toronto, sino en cualquier zona urbana. Si bien es difícil encontrar un proyecto de ciudad inteligente que sea tan cabal como pretende ser Quayside, se están desarrollando muchos a escala más limitada, desde el “corredor de ciudad inteligente” de Kansas City, centrado en una línea de tranvía de tres kilómetros, hasta el programa LinkNYC (también de Sidewalk Labs), que reemplaza los teléfonos públicos de la ciudad de Nueva York por puestos estrechos habilitados para wifi.

Probablemente, el mayor problema que se debe solucionar es la privacidad. Esto puede resultar intuitivo, e incluso Sidewalk Labs declaró en la propuesta inicial estar al tanto y ser consciente de las preocupaciones acerca de la privacidad. Dicha propuesta incluyó muchas ideas de tecnología avanzada que se esperarían de una entidad conectada con Google, desde bicisendas con calefacción hasta robots autónomos para entregas. Muchos de los elementos que se propusieron dependían de que unos sofisticados sensores recopilaran datos y gestionaran la eficiencia para todo, desde la recolección de basura hasta el tráfico y la iluminación.

Si bien la propuesta de Sidewalk tenía en cuenta la privacidad, aparentemente la empresa recibió con sorpresa las críticas de que demasiada discreción quedaba en manos de proveedores tecnológicos privados. Sin embargo, alguien no se sorprendió: Ann Cavoukian, ex comisionada de privacidad en Ontario, prominente defensora de la privacidad que Sidewalk había incorporado al comité asesor, pero que renunció de inmediato.

Hoy, Cavoukian es directora ejecutiva de la consultora Global Privacy & Security by Design Centre, especialista en privacidad, y explica que reconoce el valor potencial de recolectar datos para dar forma a un vecindario o una ciudad. Pero, en esencia, cree que, en el contexto de la ciudad inteligente, garantizar la privacidad es una decisión a nivel de planificación que es mejor dejar para el sector público. “La tecnología, los sensores, siempre estarán encendidos”, dice. “No hay una instancia en que las personas puedan dar o no dar su consentimiento. No tienen opción”.

Defiende específicamente lo que denomina estrategia de “privacidad por diseño”, que “limpia” los datos cuando se los recopila. Por ejemplo, las cámaras o los sensores que recogen datos de tráfico también podrían detectar números de matrícula. Si se hiciera como indican Cavoukian y otros defensores de la privacidad, sencillamente no se recolectaría ese nivel de datos personales. “Se sigue obteniendo el valor que dejan los datos [totales]”, dice. “Pero no corres riesgos de privacidad porque los datos se desidentificaron”. La esencia de la privacidad por diseño es que prioriza el interés público por sobre el uso privado de datos; Cavoukian señaló como modelo el Reglamento General de Protección de Datos de la Unión Europea, que protege estrictamente la privacidad de los individuos y, desde que se implementó en 2018, ha obligado incluso a las empresas tecnológicas más grandes a realizar ajustes.

Sidewalk Labs propuso recolectar grandes paquetes de datos en una especie de “custodia”, y alentar a los proveedores privados a anonimizar los datos. Para los críticos como Cavoukian, esto postergó las decisiones sobre privacidad hasta un punto tardío en el proceso: luego de planificar e implementar; más que un punto de partida, son una acotación. Según una encuesta, el 60 por ciento de los residentes de Toronto que conocían el plan no confiaban en la recolección de datos de Sidewalk. Ambas partes siguen ultimando detalles, pero por ahora hemos acordado que los datos recogidos por sensores se tratarán como un activo público, y no privado (Sidewalk Labs no respondió al pedido de entrevista).

La propuesta de Toronto fue controversial por otros motivos. Destaca el hecho de que buscó supervisar mucho más que el terreno original de 5 hectáreas, y tentó con la posibilidad de ubicar una sede central canadiense de Google en la costanera de la ciudad, como parte de una estrategia que otorgaría a Sidewalk laxitud sobre 77 hectáreas de propiedades con potencialidad lucrativa. Esta propuesta se rechazó, pero incentivó un debate útil acerca de las ciudades inteligentes y la igualdad.

Jennifer Clark, profesora y jefa de la Sección de Planificación Regional y de Ciudades en la Escuela de Arquitectura Knowlton, Facultad de Ingeniería de la Universidad Estatal de Ohio, estudió las labores de ciudades inteligentes en todo el mundo. Es autora de Uneven Innovation: The Work of Smart Cities (Innovación despareja: el trabajo de las ciudades inteligentes), que publicó Columbia University Press en febrero de 2020. Ella explica que las empresas tecnológicas y las entidades gubernamentales o de planificación llegan a estas colaboraciones con perspectivas diferentes. Dice que las empresas como Sidewalk Labs, que se dedican a las nuevas tecnologías en la ciudad, “vienen de una orientación particular de pensar quién es el ‘usuario’. Piensan mucho a partir de un modelo de consumidor, y, en esencia, los usuarios y los consumidores son lo mismo. En las ciudades, los planificadores no piensan así. Los usuarios son ciudadanos”.

Del mismo modo, las empresas que diseñan tecnología pensada para hacer que una ciudad sea “inteligente” buscan un modelo de ingresos que no solo financie un proyecto determinado, sino que termine por demostrar que es rentable; esto orienta la naturaleza de sus productos y servicios prototípicos, que, con el tiempo, se podrían aplicar en otras partes. Clark destaca que un elemento poco debatido en el fenómeno de las ciudades inteligentes es la “implementación despareja”. Se espera que Quayside y el redesarrollo más amplio de la costanera donde se encuentra generen como resultado propiedades de alto valor, que utilice y frecuente un sector demográfico atractivo para las empresas.

“Se presupone que, si se hacen estos distritos de desarrollo urbano, se experimenta con el modelo, se logra un buen modelo, y luego se lo implementa de forma extensiva, entonces hay igualdad”, dice Clark. Pero en la práctica, suele “no haber un camino para eso”. Sean cuales sean las innovaciones que surgen, tienden a repetirse en contextos demográficos similares.

Lo que suele subyacer a esta dinámica es una especie de desequilibrio de poder. La parte privada de una sociedad de desarrollo suele estar muy bien financiada y tener la posibilidad de ofrecer incentivos económicos y, por lo tanto, básicamente, establecer los términos; la parte pública puede tener menos recursos y ser menos sofisticada en la evaluación o implementación total de la tecnología de vanguardia. Pero Clark observa que, en este caso, la historia de Quayside (que menciona en su libro) podría ser un tanto distinta.

“Toronto tiene antecedentes de organización y desarrollo comunitarios”, destaca. “Y allí las organizaciones comunitarias poseen un conocimiento complejo de las prácticas de recolección de datos que se propusieron”. Así, puede que el retroceso en la privacidad y el modo en que se resuelva sean la verdadera ventaja duradera, en particular si se resuelve de un modo que los demás puedan emular.

En esencia, el resultado que quiere Cavoukian es un modelo replicable, que ofrezca pautas para la tecnología y las reglas que esta debe acatar. Ahora está trabajando con Waterfront Toronto, y guarda la esperanza explícita de que Quayside (ya sea con Sidewalk Labs u otros socios al mando) se pueda convertir en una réplica de las versiones de ciudad inteligente orientadas a la vigilancia que están tomando forma en zonas urbanas con tecnología avanzada, desde Shanghái hasta Dubai.

“Queremos ser los primeros en mostrar cómo se puede hacer y ofrecerlo como modelo”, dice. “Queremos una ciudad inteligente con privacidad”.

Rob Walker es periodista; escribe sobre diseño, tecnología y otros temas. Su libro The Art of Noticing (El arte de darse cuenta) se publicó en mayo de 2019.

Imagen: Renderizado de sendero peatonal interior en Quayside, un desarrollo de ciudad inteligente plani cado en la ribera de Toronto. Crédito: Picture Plane para Heatherwick Studio para Sidewalk Labs.