Commuter car traffic on 14th Street NW in Washington DC by Jean & Oliver licensed under Creative Commons.

The best way to tackle office buildings’ emissions is by reimagining commutes. How I-277 in Charlotte, North Carolina could be redesigned or replaced. Rethinking the benefits of community input to adequately combat climate change.

Office buildings’ largest emission is the commute: Commuting is an office building’s main indirect source of emissions. Some estimate emissions from commuting contribute 15% more carbon than the total operating emissions of a given urban office building. As the COVID-19 pandemic changes commuting patterns, firms are examining how the trip to and from work may provide an opportunity to reduce emissions. (Anna Staropoli | Commercial Observer)

Charlotte’s uptown highway wall: Completed in 1988, I-277 in Charlotte, North Carolina cuts off the uptown area from the rest of the city and physically symbolizes the inequality integrated into our cities’ urban fabric. Advocates have proposed a few ways to lessen the negative impact of I-277 on adjacent communities, and there is mounting political will to act on these proposals on the local and national levels. (Ely Portillo | Charlotte Magazine)

Rethinking the benefits of community input: Complicated permitting systems and lawsuits slow much-needed infrastructure projects from becoming reality. Jerusalem Demsas argues that we need to rethink community input to allow projects that benefit people and the environment to come to fruition in a timely and cost-effective manner. (Jerusalem Demsas | The Atlantic)

The camouflaged Costco in Mexico City: Costco has 800 big box stores around the world but while most of them are boxes, the 525,000 square foot store in Mexico City is completely covered by a public park. The park includes sports courts and a green roof that are meant to be the extension of an adjacent park created from a landfill that was once a sand quarry. (Nate Berg | Fast Company)

Helsinki’s cold water heating solution: Cold seawater from the bottom of the Baltic could heat and cool Helsinki through underground heat pumps. Currently, most buildings are warmed through a district heating system which sources 75% of its energy from fossil fuels. To reach a city-wide goal of carbon neutrality by 2030, the 500-megawatt heating plant needs to be operational in about seven years. (Thomas Gualtieri and Kati Pohjanpalo | Bloomberg CityLab)

Quote of the Week

“People take for granted that rent is always going to go up. There’s so little political imagination about what could be different, and now I think that’s changing.”

Tara Raghuveer, a co-founder of KC Tenants in the New York Times discussing a growing tenants’ rights movement.

This week on the podcast, we talk about how cities generate wealth and can harness it for the public good with Diana Ramirez of Harris County’s Department of Economic Equity and Opportunity; Ben McAdams, a former Salt Lake County mayor and Congress member; Matt Prewitt, president of RadicalxChange, and Joel Rogers of the University of Wisconsin Madison.