Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Colin Tetrault: Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Thank you very much for having us here. My name is Colin Tetrault. I am the Senior Policy Advisor to Mayor Greg Stanton, for the City of Phoenix. As Dorina very graciously said, I am a graduate of the School of Sustainability at ASU, and we are here today–yes, thank you very much. We are going to–we are here today, have a fantastic moderated discussion about urban sustainability, and how apropos to where we’re sitting, a beautiful opportunity with two of our thought leaders, one from an international and architecture and design background, and the other a visionary leader bred and organic, here from the City of Phoenix.

I’m gonna go over some of our basic thoughts and overview, and logistics for our discussion, and then we’re gonna get right to it. The way that this is gonna work, we are going to have a moderated discussion for about 25 minutes. We are then going to, with note cards, if they’ve not been passed out already, those individuals volunteering with note cards, please raise your hands. Excellent, right in the back, thank you very much. We will then field questions for about 15 minutes via note cards, so feel free to fill them out, pass them to the ends of your rows. They will be collected and brought up to me. We will then open it up to those individual questions. Without further ado, I’ll go ahead and introduce our two fantastic guests, Mr. Bill McDonough on the far end of the stage, is an international leader and thought leader in architecture and urban design.

He is the father of one of the seminal tomes, Cradle to Cradle. Has anyone heard of this small book? I understand last night, lamentably, I was unable to attend, but gave quite a rousing and inspiring speech at ASU. Mr. McDonough also serves on the Global Institute of Sustainability Board for Trustees. To my right, is Mr. Greg Stanton, Mayor of the City of Phoenix, the fifth largest municipality in our nation. Formerly a Councilman in the Attorney General’s Office – thank you, exactly. Mayor Stanton ran on a premise of sustainability permeating all aspects of the city internally and out, and is aggressively moving towards that, and seeks to define Phoenix as a local area for sustainability, growth, entrepreneurship, and development as well.

With that, what we’re going to do now is turn it over to our two guests. I’ll start with Mr. McDonough, and then Mayor Stanton as well. We’ll open it up to a five-minute, open-ended conversation and discussion about what your thoughts are on urban sustainability, the future of urbanism here, experience within a large municipality. Then we’ll move into our discussion. Sound good gentlemen? Excellent, Mr. McDonough.

William McDonough: Good morning everybody. Sorry I’m a bit hoarse, so I might have to work through that. I think we’re at a very exciting moment in the future of cities. Last week, I was meeting with the Chinese. I work with the Chinese government on future cities, as well as venture capital and clean tech. Beijing is about to double in size in five years. It’s going from 25 million to probably 50 million in five years. It’s a headlong rush into the future. It’s very frightening to me because you can’t do a lot of thinking while you’re doing something that big. You do need to really think these things through. The one example I think I’d like to point out is the City of Wuji, near Shanghai, is going to–they’ve invested $10 billion in that city to have it prepared for infrastructure for the future. Instead of building, what we’re gonna do is create a venture fund.

We’re gonna imagine the future city, and then we’re gonna put forward the characteristics of that city, being a sustainable place. Then we’re gonna fund the ventures that are needed to create the technologies to create that city. Then we’ll get to work on building the city. I think this is an important idea because if we simply come and look at what we’ve been doing, and then try and do it less badly, we aren’t rising to our occasion because being less bad, as I pointed out last night, is not being good. It is being bad, just less so. What I’d like to see with cities, especially someplace like this, would be how can you use the stimulus of creative people in a world of endless resourcefulness? We should look at the gifts that you have, certainly sunshine, but also look at your water as an asset, and how can we use that?

When I see these lots, I’ll just finish quickly, all I see immediately in my mind, but I can’t help myself, my job is to render things visible. We are designing right now, greenhouses, lightweight, inexpensive, that can produce up to 15 times more productivity with less than two percent of the water, no herbicides, no pesticides. We’re saying, “What if a city could grow all of its own food? What does that look like?” Guess what, it looks like the future. It’s something you can do because as Leibnitz said, famously, “If it is possible, therefore it exists.” Our job now is to make it exist, so that everybody in the world can see that it is possible. Thank you.

Mayor Stanton: That’s a tough act to follow right there. My goodness. Well, I just want first to say it’s an honor to be on the stage with both of these gentlemen. As you know, Colin Tetrault is my sustainability advisor. His job is to not only execute what I promised during the campaign, but to continually challenge me to make sure that we are doing all that we can at the city. Don’t take past norms as the example, but instead, push forward. Go beyond what we’ve done in the past. He’s doing a great job, so I just want to publicly say thank you to Colin. Bill, I wasn’t able to attend the talk last night, but I did receive a lot of the Tweets that people were sending out. My friend, Taz Lumin, said that you were the Lady Gaga of sustainability. No higher praise could be had.

McDonough: My children will be glad to hear that.

Stanton: Congratulations. What you just said, I think a lot of us can relate to. Beijing is gonna be doubling in size. They’re experiencing hyper-growth. Our community, over the last 30 years, in the United States of America, has been the community of higher growth, and our–I don’t want to say unwillingness, but frankly, what you just described, our inability to really take time to think through what that meant because we were just growing, growing, growing, growing, mostly on the outskirts of town, in often very unsustainable ways, as the book, Bird on Fire has documented for us here in this community, a book that’s challenging us to do better moving forward.

As we’re going through these brutal economic times as we have where our community–the great recession, the worst economic times since the Great Depression, and of course, our community has been hit harder by this than almost any other American community because we probably didn't take the time to really think through what we were doing during our period of hyper-growth. Just as this is a moment in time for cities around the world, I would also argue that in our community, this is a moment in time. Have we collectively learned some lessons? I ran a campaign, and I’m gonna govern as a optimistic mayor. I believe in this city and I believe in the people. I believe we can get it right, but it’s not gonna happen automatically because people in this audience, I know so many of you are gonna continue to challenge me and the city to do it right.

As the economy improves, and it looks like it is improving, thank goodness, that we don’t just go back to the same old, same old, hyper-growth on the outskirts of town, subsidizing suburban sprawl, a lot of the mistakes I think that we’ve made in the past. One lesson we have to learn is number one, what can the city do? As one of the leading employers, as one of the largest entities in this community, we should be doing all we can do on solar and other sustainable programs, public transportation, adaptive reuse, etc., but also the use of these empty lots as demonstration projects, kind of conceptually, what is possible. I know Colin and our Economic Development Team are working closely with some of the large land owners, to effectively say, “Whatever culture has existed in the past, kind of this hyper, private property rights ethos that’s existed in our community, get over it.” When you have a large parcel, particularly in the center city, that’s just not an investment, you have a responsibility to the people of this community.

If you’re not gonna develop it in a responsible way in the short term, hand it over to responsible folks that are gonna use it in very positive ways moving forward. Obviously, the Sunflower Project was a good example, a good first start to show that you can, in a temporary basis, use land like that. We’ve got a lot of great activities, a lot of exciting things. I don’t want to step on my own headline, but at State of the City, in about 30 short days, we’ll be making some major announcements about what we’re gonna be doing on some of these super high profile empty parcels in our city. Also culturally–I was talking to Bill earlier, you know, we’ve got to make sure that what you–you’re already here, but we want so many more of you, meaning people from around the country, feeling that Phoenix is a city that gets it.

I hate to use that cliché, but you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re a sustainability entrepreneur, and you want to test your theory, Phoenix is a place to do it. We’re open-minded. We want you to be successful, so just like Silicon Valley has been known as the place for tech, we want Phoenix, in spite of our poor choices in the past, maybe because of that, come to our community and test out your ideas, your thoughts about how we can do it better. That’s one of the messages I want to get across today. I look forward to today’s discussion.

Tetrault: Gentlemen, thank you very much. I think you both bring up some very interesting points about urbanism, development, and the utilization of land within large urban epicenters, Phoenix, Beijing. They’re very closely related in a multitude of aspects.

With that, and the fact that we are sitting on a lovely transformed temporary parcel of vacant land, where we have two thought leaders in the world of sustainability, and excellent constituents and thought leaders here in our audience, I’d like to talk a little bit about what you view as the future of pieces truly of vacant land that are both publicly–so say from a municipal or governmental perspective, but also privately held. Where do you see these are going and how do they work into the urban fabric and environment? Mr. McDonough, I’d like you to start first.

McDonough: Well, I think the–since as I said last night, design is the first signal of intention, that if you looked at your land, I would never think of it as vacant. I would always think of it as full of opportunity because if you say vacant, you think vacant. No, everything is an asset. Then once you start to map that, the city could do marvelous things. I do this with big companies, but you could just say, you know, “We’re gonna solar power our city.” What city in the world should be solar powered? {Audience: Phoenix!] This is brain death, I’m sorry.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this one out. When we solar powered our part of that project for Google, when Google put solar collectors all over the Googleplex–we do master planning with them–you know why they did it? Well, the money, well, it cost about $500,000.00 more per year to do it that way. You know why? Google makes a million dollars per engineer. They’re reaching out to the whole world for the best engineers in the world. When you want to get–they’ve already taken Stanford, Berkeley, and Cal Tech–they’re gonna be looking at ASU. They’re saying, “Come to us because look at us, we’re Google.” All they need is on engineer to come because it’s a solar-powered place, and watch what happens. Think about where the values are. If you imagine that and said, “We’re a solar-powered city,” just say, “Of course you are; otherwise, you shouldn’t exist.”

You’re a city that knows how to use its water over and over and over again, in ways that purify it. You shouldn’t have sewage plants. That costs cities money. You should have nutrient recycling systems. The Chinese and the Moroccans control the phosphate in the world. You each need four grams of phosphate a day. Where is it gonna come from? Morocco, are you kidding, when you’re throwing it away every day? Where’s the city that knows how to design about the future? Where are the rocket scientists when we need them? You are a space station, get on with it.

Stanton: The issue of empty parcels in Phoenix, Arizona, we all travel around the country, and you know, that issue is generally unique to us, to have the vast amounts of empty space in the heart of the city, obviously, including where we’re sitting. You go up and down Central Avenue and you see some mega-parcels. I think we’ve all been guilty in the past of having thought of those parcels as either empty or having a permanent development on that, and nothing in between. It’s only very recently that we started to–people in this audience certainly have been the thought leaders and the advocates for appropriate temporary uses.

Let me be absolutely clear, and I know I’m preaching to the choir when I say this, there is nothing anti-private property for the long-term owner of that parcel, to have an appropriate temporary use that brings a lot of excitement and energy, and activity. In fact, I would argue that those long-term holders of that land, these investment companies that are holding this land for so long, can get not only tax advantages by doing it the right way, but also the goodwill of the community, so that when they come in for whatever zoning they may want, they may actually have an easier time. It’s good long-term strategy, so I would actually argue that allowing appropriate temporary uses of these empty parcels and private property rights are actually consistent with each other, not in opposition.

There’s no attempt to do adverse possession, or whatever ethos has made some of these private owners to almost afraid to do it. At least in our office, we’re going to be your advocate. We’re going to be approaching, and we already have approached some of the major land owners and said, “Let’s use it for appropriate–for a two, or three, or four-year period, whatever it may be, and not just for a single use.” Some of these larger parcels, we could actually subdivide and allow demonstration projects, not only for food, things like VermiSoks–I don’t know if Miguel Jardine is here–urban gardens, art areas, food trucks. I mean there’s lots of great opportunity that can exist.

We’re gonna be totally open minded to that, so I think Bill, what you just said is exactly right, that the empty parcels, which so many people in the audience have said, “Hey, if they’re not gonna develop, tax the heck out of them, so that they’re forced to develop.” Well, maybe there’s an alternative that is actually better for the community, which is great, short-term uses. Oh, by the way, this issue doesn't just exist on North Central. Those are the highest profile, but you go to the south side of town, and you see lots of empty parcels, and you go to east side, west side, you know, this city unfortunately is full of them, and kind of leap-frog development has for too long, been part of the culture and ethic of this community. We have to get this right.

Tetrault: Gentlemen, thank you very much. Next, Mr. Mayor, I’ll start with you. We’d like to talk about the role of governance and decision making within the role of sustainability, as it particularly pertains to an urban fabric. What role do you think that the city or region, municipalities, our state, what kind of role do we play in furthering and advancing the conversation particularly around urban sustainability? Where do you come in?

Stanton: Well, first off, as a city, we play multiple roles. As a city, we need to first and foremost look in the mirror and make sure we are doing everything we can to be a sustainable entity. We’re a large employer. We use a lot of energy. Obviously, 14,000 employees, we need to make sure that we’re doing everything. Next stop I’m going to after this, you’re gonna read about in the paper tomorrow, is an announcement of a large solar array at Sky Harbor Airport, where there’s a lot of empty land near the runways that could be used for solar. That car rental facility, you can have solar on top of it, so we’re making steps in the right direction, so challenging ourselves, making sure we, first and foremost, we’re doing right, and we’re a leader in this area. Secondarily, incentives, you know, we give incentives, and some incentives that I think we shouldn’t have given, but we have.

We should be using the economic tools n our toolbox to incentivize sustainability, green building, etc. When I ran for office, I said we should be–we shouldn’t get out of the game of incentives. Instead, we should be smart about incentives, building a great downtown. If you bring highway jobs to this community, which we so desperately need–our average wages are so far below the national average–we should be in the business of giving you an appropriate incentive. If you help fulfill our green sustainability goals, we should be in the incentive business. We do have an appropriate regulatory impact. I’m sure Bill will talk about sometimes if you have to regulate, that may be a failure of the system. That being said, there is an appropriate role for us to regulate building codes, adaptive reuse, that we can use our tools, and then also be cheerleaders.

I mentioned that I–part of marketing our area as a place where sustainability entrepreneurs want to come, we can’t just talk about it among us friends. We have to go out and market ourselves in that way nationally and internationally, to be an appropriate cheerleader. Then obviously, a convener–we should bring–there’s a lot of private companies that are doing right in sustainability. We need to make sure that they get appropriate credit and use our marketing tools to get the word out, and bring them together so that other companies can learn from them, and that we can learn from them as a city, as well.

There’s many, many things that the city can and should be doing to use the force of government, and the incentives that government can provide to do right by this issue.

Tetrault: Excellent, thank you. To follow up on that for you, Bill, is perhaps a point of thought in consideration. What the Mayor stated of regulation potentially being a failure of the system, I’d be interested on your thoughts on the international perspective within urbanism, how this applies of regulation versus empowerment, and kind of the wellspring of the people owning, empowering, and directing this forward. What are your experiences within this regard of how structures, cities and municipalities function here, what’s worked, and where do you see the future of other places, but perhaps also Phoenix as well?

McDonough: I think the most impressive work in cities is not necessarily one place, but it’s a fractal combination of lots of initiatives. I think the ones that I find most productive start with places like Curitiba, Brazil, where the fundamental protocol in the city is how do we love our children? That’s it. You start with that. Is it loving your children to leave places looking like this? Would you do this at home? If you look at what they did, for example, they couldn’t get the garbage out of the [inaudible 00:21:29], so the Mayor said, “Well, we can’t trucks in there, and we need–these people need sanitation, so if you’ll bring out all your stuff and put it in the right bins, we’re gonna pay you with mobility. That’s what we can give you.”

They built a factory with Falvo. Now they have the finest urban mobility system in the world, and everybody can go around. When they got to food, they said, “Don’t build in the floodplains because you can get flooded. If we turn these into urban gardens, and we make organic food, and if you have no job, you can get a free bus rides to the gardens, work there for the day growing organic food, and take home all the food your family could need, so your children will have safe, healthy nutrition, no cost to the city.” When it was time to have a library, instead of building a mausoleum for books downtown, they decided to build little libraries within twelve minutes of each child. When they get there, they get access to the worldwide web.

This is a way of thinking. This is a way of being. When you work your way out from the children, you’ll understand what this sustainability stuff’s about. I think that from the regulatory perspective, the government can show the benchmarking of success from around the world and say these are the kinds of things we want to replicate ourselves, and you can show the examples. You’re not just sticks. What we need are governments that understand the concept of carrots big enough to use as sticks. How do we attract these companies you’re talking about? With something so beautiful, you can knock them on the side of the head and say, “Smell the coffee.”

One of the things we’re doing now, for example, the pension funds and the sovereign funds that invest out there, are marshalling–we got about $7 billion identified to take on the brownfields of America, which have collapsed in value. If we can get the utilities to give 20-year contracts on solar power, which is a peaking power, which you lose a lot of, hello–and if you can deploy that with your local citizens in an economic way, which you can, we can produce right now, right here, about an eight and a half percent return for all your citizens, if they want to invest.

After Wall Street socialized risk instead of leaving it in the private hands where it belonged, now that we don’t have our retirement funds, wouldn’t it be interesting if a municipal bond can return four-plus percent is there tax-free, what about a solar fund in Phoenix, that returned about eight percent, based on utility contracts that are for services we know we need, like electricity, hello. I think we use the tools of commerce, and the intelligence of governance, and we love those children, but not to death. We love them into life. We get the city alive. We get to work with the next century, instead of all this detritis of the last one.

Tetrault: Bill, you touched on a point in your last statement there about public-private partnership, essentially, and I think that’s where our next question is gonna go, and this is gonna be for the Mayor to start. Municipalities all over the nation, and arguably, all over the world, have especially been hit hard during our economic downturn. In the face of that, how do we, as an organization, the city, we as constituents, how do we handle that and where do we go, down a more sustainable trajectory in the face of that.

Stanton: With public-private partnerships? Okay. Well, the reality is I know everyone in this audience agrees the City of Phoenix can’t do it alone. I look to what we’re doing with ASU. I mean ASU is, I guess, a public-public partnership, but I mean Phoenix needs to find our very best partners, so with ASU, we get not only the best thought leaders. In my case, I get a great staff member, who is gonna be a leader in this arena. We get the opportunity to do demonstration projects that otherwise wouldn’t have been done, and we get an institution that is fully committed, and they challenge themselves, and therefore, they challenge us as a city to do all we can. Bill just mentioned some of the financing mechanisms.

The City of Phoenix, in order to put solar at Sky Harbor Airport in the way we are announcing today, can’t do it without industrial development authority, can’t do it without, in some cases, APS fronting the capital, but they get a guarantee buyer in the City of Phoenix, which may be a little bit above market, but it’s green, so it’s worth it. We need to show leadership in that regard. Some of the non-profits that are represented in this audience, we have to turn to them for our best ideas, and in some cases, for execution. What you and I are working on with regard to temporary uses of some of these large empty parcels, it’s not gonna be the City of Phoenix that’s going to manage that day-to-day to make sure that those empty parcels come to life.

We’re gonna be turning to our private partners, in many cases, our non-profit partners to be the ones to execute. They’re gonna have to guarantee certain performance to us in order to hand over a three-year term, if you will, to them, but we have confidence that they can, and we’ll have to find the right private partners to execute, so it goes on and on and on, in terms of our need to have the appropriate partners at the table, ones that can really deliver, and ones that are gonna challenge us to do more.

Tetrault: Bill, would you mind following up on that, and maybe expanding on your last statement of public-private partnerships, where you’ve seen some of the best success internationally, and here in the United States, and perhaps some things that we, the Mayor, myself, and everyone here in the audience can consider as well, for future opportunities with public-private partnership opportunities?

McDonough: I think he did an over-arching frame condition, like endless resourcefulness, and the idea that you need income to have growth. You can’t have growth without income. Right now, a lot of your growth has been defined by asphalt, which is in our lexicon, two words, assigning blame. If you became a photosynthetic city, people could start to rise to that occasion. I think the examples I would give you, we’re doing an experiment right now in China. We designed a factory there–it’s very large–we need 15 megawatts of power.

It turns out there are six laws and twelve regulations in the way of renewable power in our factory. Fifteen megawatts, that’s all the solar power at ASU, by the way, in one building. The government said, “You can’t do this because you’ll set precedents, you know, six laws, twelve regulations.” We said, “Well, what if we don't call it a precedent? What if we call it an experiment? What if the exchange is we’ll find you where the six laws are in the way, and we’ll show you how the regulations can be recrafted because this can happen.” That’s what we’re doing. We just had to change the language. If you look–and I’m gonna get into sort of a good things for the kids. The kids like this. This is poop stories, okay.

Toilet to tap, there I’ve said it–now in the United States, toilet to tap, can San Diego deal with this? No way, yuck, can’t talk about it, so they put the water back and then pull it out of wells a couple miles later, oh, that’s better. Sydney, Australia, suffering from immense drought, could they deal with toilet to tap? No, yuck, forget it. Okay, who dealt with this in think world? Public-private partnership, anybody know? Singapore, you know, what they did? They said, “Oh, Malaysia could cut off our water any day, and we’d dry up.” They created new programs called New Water–New Water. Who wants old water? Think about it–genius.

The technology’s there, it’s called H20, this is not very hard. We have reverse osmosis, we have forward osmosis. This, we can do, and they’ve done it. Think about the city as the water city, instead of the desert city. Turn that thing around. This is where we figure it out because otherwise, you shouldn’t even exist. You have the opportunity to do public-private partnerships on the intelligent future use of water, and you need it, which means you have to do it first, which means you become a stimulus for the markets and for technology to solve this problem for your children, and give that as a gift to the rest of the planet. That’s endless resourcefulness, not just of the water, for example, but the solar energy, which are endless. It’s also the endless resourcefulness of your mayor, of your citizens.

Tetrault: Bill, I’m absolutely inclined to agree with you, that I think there is an absolute wellspring, an endless depth of resourcefulness here in the City of Phoenix, here within our state, and here within our Valley, so that’s where our next question is going to lead us. I’ll ask the Mayor to comment first. What is the role, Mr. Mayor, of stakeholders, of our citizens, of those of us all sitting here in the audience looking at us up on stage? What role and voice do we have within this process of crafting a more sustainable future that we will all share? Then Bill, I will ask you to follow up on areas of participatory governance and feedback, perhaps on a more global context as well.

Stanton: Well, I think the most important role of the citizens is to, number one, vote and participate in the electoral system of course. Number two, push your leaders, myself included, and especially, to follow through what we said we’re going to do. Challenge us. Three, probably the most important one is we need your ideas. The reality is, is that if you wait for government to come up with the ideas, you’re still gonna be waiting. You need to elect leaders that are willing to listen, willing to take chances, willing to take a few risks on the behalf of the folks that supported, in my case, my election. I need your best ideas.

The form it’s gonna take is gonna be multiple forms. I’m gonna obviously formalize leadership in my office. I have a Sustainability Advisor, so I wanted to – Colin’s office is just a couple doors down from mine, and he and I interact regularly. I’m gonna have a Sustainability Advisory Committee, which sort of sounds boring, but we’re gonna put exciting people on it. Stacey, thank you–my chair, Stacey Champion, Talonya Adams are a couple of a my chairs, and many of you are going to be tapped to serve on that, and that’s really gonna serve as my formal ideas factory about things the city should be doing and thinking about. But, many of you, for various reasons, won’t participate in that. We still want you to participate as well, so communicate regularly with my office. Use social media. I’m listening; I really am listening. I read those Tweets. I read those Facebook messages. I read those emails that my office gets.

The other thing we’re gonna be doing soon, it’s no surprise to anyone that the mayor that I most admire in Phoenix history was Terry Goddard, someone I worked for, for a couple of years when he was Attorney General. He was a real change agent in the City of Phoenix. One of the things I think he did probably better than any other mayor before or after, was get incredible amount of citizen involvement through the Phoenix Futures Forum. Hundreds and hundreds, and probably thousands of people came to the table, and they stayed at the table because they thought that the mayor was really listening, that it wasn’t just for show, it really was substantive. I can’t tell you the number of leaders that are involved, to this day, that got involved in the city because of those Futures Forum. We’re gonna be doing a very similar thing with regard to the Phoenix General Plan.

If you don’t know this, we have to vote on a General Plan in about two years, and we’re formulating that plan now. We probably haven’t done, in my opinion, a particularly good job of formulating that plan, up to this point. Well, that’s gonna change. We’re gonna have a massive public process, a massive public input process because that General Plan isn’t just gonna be a zoning document. It’s gonna be a vision statement about what we want to be the future of our city. We expect that the ideas on sustainability are gonna be a big part of that document. You’re gonna see–it’s not gonna be exactly the Phoenix Futures Forum, but it’s gonna be the same concept, where we’re gonna bring hundreds and hundreds of people to the thought process, the decision-making process, the input process, and then we’re gonna vote on this document in about two years.

Tetrault: Excellent. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Bill, your thoughts?

McDonough: That sounds like fun.

Tetrault: Would you like to come back and participate? We’d be happy to have you.

McDonough: That’s what we need. I remember the first city I worked with on sustainability issues was Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chattanooga had a civic heart attack, okay. You might be having one, too. It made them stop, and they got declared worst air quality in America–number one, they beat LA. They weren’t too proud about it. You had to have two shirts to go to work. They had their headlights on at noon. That’s how bad the air was, headlights at noon. When you wake up, when you go, “This is insane,” right, so they brought everybody together. We worked through a process. It was unbelievable, and you should see the city now.

It is so beautiful; people are so proud, and they should be. I remember when the industrialists, and one of our first meetings, before the Earth Summit, and this gentleman from the back of the audience said, “Mr. McDonough, this is all very interesting, this sustainability stuff, but I have only one question. How long is this gonna take?” I said, “It’s gonna take forever. That’s the point. It’s gonna take all of us. That’s the point.” I think getting everybody together is a good idea, but if you get together to talk about old stuff, if you get to talk about how many liabilities you have, and how you want to be less bad, I don’t know that the children are going to get that excited about this.

I think you ought to figure out how to–your General Plan, get your kids involved. That’s what I would do. Then I think you’ll be amazed what will happen. You’ll be really amazed. You need to put some stakes in the ground. You really need to put some stuff out there. I work with huge corporations. I’m on Wal-Mart’s External Advisory Council, the Senior Advisory of that company, and we are going to make that company the world’s largest, two million employees, 100 percent renewably powered. We’re doing it. Where people come and say, “You can’t do that,” we are. “Gee, you’re doing it.” Why can’t we do it? We’re gonna make money, of course, and why, because these are their customers. The first job of business is not lowest possible price, the first job of business is do not kill the customers.

Let us support the people in this country with jobs, doing all the things we need, instead of not having the jobs because we sent everything overseas, and don’t demean the Chinese for wanting to rise to their occasion. No, what we say to them now is–see, I was born in Japan. In 1947, if you said we’re gonna have a Japanese auto plant bigger than any other in the world in Canton, Mississippi, you think we would have gone, “Oh, yeah, sure. We’ve given them a war, they can’t make cars, come on.” Yet, we’re getting tax breaks. You want the world’s biggest auto plant? Okay. How about the world’s largest urban transit factory? I don’t know, but I can tell you, the Chinese got 350 super trains in three years. They went too fast, they lost a couple, so they have 348. How many have we got?

If you think about it, what we want is probably they can build factories now for a tenth of what we can build them, so don’t send us the products, send us back the factories because then we can take the products that we make here, and we can make them so they go back into our factories, you see. If we have no factories, we have no jobs, so let’s put some stakes in the ground. Solar power city, every molecule of water is valuable, every child is valuable, you put those stakes in the ground, then you do the General Plan, not vice versa.

Tetrault: You know, Bill, I see you coming out with a new corporate tagline for Wal-Mart, Low Prices Always, and not killing customers as well. That’s good.

McDonough: Save money, live better.

Stanton: Well, Chattanooga may have had a civic heart attack. I think the culture of our community, not the people in this audience, but I think writ large, is sometimes to be too quick to dismiss bad news, and so when a book like Bird on Fire comes out, there are too many people in the economic development world sort of say, “Oh, he just overstated the case; it’s really not that bad.” Or when the Arizona Republic does a series on air quality, too many people in that world sort of are quick to dismiss it, saying, “Oh, it’s really not that bad, they’re just dramatizing it.” Maybe instead of a civic heart attack, this community needs to do more civic soul searching–and doing soul searching and being willing to accept criticism and a commitment to get it better isn’t the opposite of optimism.

In fact, I would argue it’s consistent with optimism–is be willing to accept appropriate criticism when people find things you’re not doing well, to accept the challenge and to do better. That, and being optimistic for our future is actually one and the same. My challenge to some of the corporate people I deal with is don’t be too quick to dismiss when challenges come out to the way we’ve done business, and the fact–you don’t have to accept everything, but have an open mind about whether or not we can do things better moving forward. As you’ve said many times, rightfully so, so right by our children.

Tetrault: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. What I’d like to do now, and we have some brilliant people here in the audience, it’s time to hear your voice. You’ve been very gracious in providing some excellent questions, and it’s time to hear from you. This first one, Mr. McDonough, I’ll ask you to discuss this first. As you’ve talked about 348 high-speed trains in China as opposed to 350, where do you see the expanding next evolution of public transportation, of mobility, if it is on a global perspective, that might relate here to Phoenix?

McDonough: Well, there’s obviously all the high-tech techniques, and marvelous things like Light Rail, and optimizations like that, but one that intrigues me the most frankly, right now, is how to bring the children into the mobility system with the grandparents. I’m very worried, the company that I formed with some friends, we have just, believe it or not, been given a license to the new–the first private telecommunications channel in China. It will be for the children. I’ve been honored with the ability to select the content. The reason I’m excited about this if you look at a bus load of Chinese children today, what’s the one thing they have in common? They have no family.

This is third-generation single child law. They have no aunts, no uncles, no cousins, and neither do their parents. Think about it. As a design issue, we need to connect the generations. We need to connect people again in families. Why are social networks so important today, because this is family-making, and it’s very important. If I were in a place like Phoenix, when you look at things like suburban sprawl, straight up, and I’m not negative about anything– I think everything’s an asset. We just have to optimize right away. If we keep doing what we’re doing, right, that’s insanity, to expect a different result, so we should just do something new.

What I worry about is that the children and the grandparents have been separated by mobility, and our urban design, based on the car. What if we used the car like homeopathy, to heal the relationship between the grandparents and the children? I’m 61; I can still drive. When I’m 65, I think I can still drive. What if we had a place that celebrated mobility and said, “With our communications, GPS, face time, you know, what if the grandparents became the mobility system for the children?”

What if we could have–you use your Smartphone and you say, “I’m here, I want to get a violin lesson,” and a volunteer, who loves children, you know, who is bonded and a secure, trusted person can take that child to the violin lesson and tell the stories because we don’t have the stories anymore. What is your story Phoenix? You need to figure out your story first, then we can talk about mobility.

Tetrault: Mr. Mayor, what do you think are–as we, in a valley, we are a regional entity, and transportation exists, not only here within our city, but within a regional context as well. What is the next evolution, or some of the next crucial steps that we should consider, and that Phoenix can help lead on when it comes to transportation and infrastructure?

Stanton: Excellent. I want to follow up with what Bill just said because that is one of the great under-reported issues facing our community. I look at this audience, and you’re all too young to qualify, but we are an aging community. A lot of the issues that you are passionate about, proper development along the Light Rail line, more urbanized development, that and supporting our aging population are one and the same. When I just ran for mayor, the issue about the aging of the community, whether the city is ready for the aging of this community, almost never came up. I brought it up a couple times, but it was never asked.

It’s not an issue that’s on the public’s mind, but it should be. The answer to the aging of our community isn’t building more senior centers, although we should. The answer is making sure that all of our systems are supportive of mobility for the aging population. When you advocate for Light Rail, I know virtually everyone in this audience is a huge advocate for Light Rail. It’s not just about young ASU students that want to live a more urban lifestyle. In the future, as we continue to age and more and more of our population won’t be able to drive, but still want to be able to get around, that Light Rail is gonna be a lifeline for those folks.

The walkability of our city isn’t just a cool thing to get exercise. In the future, it’s going to be a lifestyle for a lot of our older population that don’t have a choice. I was a champion for the under bridge at 24th Street and Camelback. It was heavily criticized, saying, “No, that’s way too expensive. What are you doing in a showcase area?” Hey, I know that for a lot of our senior population, and our disabled population, getting across 24th Street and Camelback in one light cycle, traffic light, was virtually impossible. You took your life in your hands, literally, and so it was a way to–a demonstration project to show we could make pedestrians, put them on an equal plane as our vehicle traffic.

This is–I mean I don’t want to belabor the point. I already have; I apologize, but you get the point. This is an issue that we have to come to terms with as a community, and it really isn’t in our public lexicon right now. To the question, what’s gonna happen in Light Rail? Short term, in the President’s budget, he put three more miles in Mesa. We’re gonna pick–assuming he gets re-elected, hopefully the Congress will pass that. I hope every major candidate that’s debating in Mesa tonight commits to support the Mesa Project, so it’s a bipartisan support for the expansion of Light Rail to the east. We’re gonna pick up a lot of people. Even though it’s in Mesa, we who live in Central Phoenix or care passionately about Central Phoenix, we have a huge interest in the success of Light Rail, writ large, and we want to pick up as much traffic as we can. We should all be supportive of what’s going on in Mesa.

In the future of Phoenix, of course, the northwest extension is critically important, figuring out how we jump over I-17 to get to Metro Center, my old neighborhood, where I grew up, where my dad took the bus everyday to work from Metro Center. We have to figure that one out, and of course, one of the hot issues in the campaign, and something that we are working diligently on with the support of Congress and Pastor we’ve got to come up with a design, the appropriate design for Light Rail into South Mountain Village, where there’s such a heavy public transit ridership already. Those folks deserve Light Rail, not just from a transportation perspective, but I know so many people believe in sustainability because sustainability is important from a social equity perspective and so is providing Light Rail to our friends in South Mountain Village. Those are gonna be my priorities in the short run for getting transportation done.

Tetrault: Excellent. Thank you, gentlemen. We’re gonna do about one or two more questions here. We’ve talked a little bit about adaptive reuse, cradle to cradle, cradle to grave. Mr. Mayor, I’ll have you start with this, as it’s germane to our own backyard here. Directly behind us, and this is a great question from the audience is–correct me for my poor pronunciation, [inaudible 00:48:07] House, is that right? It’s a city-owned property, and a local historic–it’s on the local historic property register. What is the role of historic preservation in the greater concept of sustainability? What do we do with our beautiful historic structures here in Phoenix, and how do we leverage those moving forward?

Stanton: Well, I think as Bill has mentioned many times, we were probably guilty, not that long ago, of looking at our older buildings, sometimes designated historic, sometimes historic buildings that aren’t officially designated historic but should be, as obstacles and not opportunities. I think we are changing that mindset here in the city, and we’ve got some great demonstration projects. The A.E. England Building on the ASU downtown campus, which is now used by so many wonderful civic functions, including mayoral debates during the course of the campaign. What a great asset for this community.

I see Michael in the back, what he’s doing to preserve the warehouse district, and kind of holding the line against either tearing down or inappropriate redesign and reconstruction of the warehouses, you know, we’ve got to get the warehouse district right. Many of them are designated historic. Some haven’t been, but should be. What an incredible opportunity that we have just south of downtown. It’s part of downtown. That is a great future opportunity for our city. We have to take the city–the buildings that are in city ownership, that are not being used appropriately, and put them into production.

Why not use–I should take a tour of that building while I’m here. Why not–we need incubators. I want to have a sustainability incubator. I want to have a healthcare incubator. They’re all the rage for a reason, because it brings the creative minds together. The city ought to–we have so many buildings and floors of buildings that are either underutilized or not being used at all. Why not allow–we’d have to do it through appropriate RFP process, but allow the creative minds to utilize those facilities, put them into production as incubators or other things. We need to be totally open-minded about–I hate to use the word giving away, but if they’re unused now, they’re not being–let’s put those buildings into production in an appropriate way. Let’s take advantage of those opportunities.

Tetrault: Bill, I’d like you to comment on this with your work in Beijing especially. When we’re talking about Beijing doubling in size, how does cradle to cradle, this thought of historic preservation, adaptive reuse and protection, come into play in a place like this. Phoenix has seen explosive growth, where we do have a lovely historic area here in the downtown core, but as we move to our periphery, we have tract homes. How is this going to play in with the effective Beijing, where you have explosive growth moving at unprecedented paces? What is adaptive reuse? Are they doing it? Where is their opportunity?

McDonough: Well, from a personal perspective, I’m really sad to have to say that in China they are destroying so many historic places in the search for the future that I think we’re gonna miss these places. The thing to remember, as Gertrude Stein pointed out, is the thing that history teaches, which is that history teaches. It’s good to have history if you like learning things. It does send us signals. I would say there’s two things to think about from a mayoral opportunity perspective. One would be–like in Beijing, what we’re saying that they should consider is that if you want to build a new building outside Beijing, in the sixth ring, which we think should not be a big highway, it should be a giant green park. I call it the green dragon.

I think it should be something big enough to be seen from outer space, like the Great Wall, and it should be a place full of life and mobility and movement of all different kinds and [inaudible 00:52:12], and to be water purification and food-growing systems like this, and quite delightful. If you want to build next to this beautiful thing, which would be commercially funded, you would have to go into the old city and mine it for your water and your energy. I’m saying every one of these buildings should have a giant meter on it, one simple meter, and we should do it per capita, how much water, how much energy being used per capita.

If you want to build a new building over there, that’s fine. You’ve got to go in there and find it. You take one of those buildings that using 200 units of whatever, and you cut that to 100. That’s real easy. Then now you build with 50. As the city doubles in size, it reduces its consumption of water and energy by 25 percent. Now you’re twice as big, and you’re using 25 percent less water. Why would you do that– because there is no more water, that’s why, you see? Then all of a sudden, the people are getting the benefit, taking the risk, are paying for it. We don’t have to dig up the streets and do the pipes over. We’re not adding, you see, we’re optimizing.

That’s very interesting, so we mine the past for the future, a very important idea. Second, I would say on building codes and things, we design all of our office buildings, and I can tell you, I just work with big companies, mostly. We’re just doing this because of good business. I find that very powerful. Commerce is the agent of change. It’s very high-speed. We have a Nike headquarters, Gap, and so on, and these buildings are all designed to be housing in the future. We can actually design office buildings to become housing in the future. Think about the great neighborhoods of historic buildings. Raleigh right now, all these companies that want to come to Raleigh, North Carolina, they don’t want to be in suburban office parks.

The people that work there, they all want to be downtown. They’re taking the old tobacco warehouses. That’s where all the new companies want to be. They don’t want to be out there in that thing. Yeah, take it, revitalize it, and then say new buildings need to be future-proofed, so they can adapt. Soho in New York is a neighborhood because those buildings are infinitely useful, from being factories to art galleries, to apartments, and those neighborhoods can be maintained because the buildings have great proportions, they have great bones. You see, this is the quality of life we’re talking about instead of a throw-away society.

Tetrault: As we wrap up, we have time for one more question gentlemen, and we’ve talked about this in a few different iterations. It revolves around our children, our future. I don’t know if everyone’s aware, but we have with us in the audience, some fantastic guests. If you are a student or someone under the age of 20, would you please yell very loudly. That’s fantastic. Could we have that again please? Exactly, or if you’re a child at heart, anyone care to try? Excellent. We feel some positive energy from this group this morning.

Well, we have with us, if I recall correctly, a group from Paradise Valley High School, the Crest Program, is that correct? Everyone–all of our budding and aspiring entrepreneurs and sustainability professionals are directly behind you. You’ve mentioned several times, and Bill, you–now with the opportunity in China to be the new father of a Sesame Street China, I’d like us to comment on what words of advice, as we finish up here today, with regards to sustainability, looking to the future, and we have your audience right here, raise your hands. There’s our audience. That ladies and gentlemen, is our future. What words of advice from a sustainability perspective, can you impart onto them, Mr. McDonough? Yes, this is the closing comment, pardon me.

McDonough: How many of you know about the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy is an uncle speaking on the internet to nephews, teaching mathematics and science. It’s a series of three and a half minute lessons that are now going all the way to string theory and advance biology. Let the elders be the uncles and aunts. Ask us questions. Tell us where you want to go. Tell us how we can help you. Thank you.

Tetrault: Mr. Mayor.

Stanton: During the campaign for mayor, some young students, both high school and college, came to visit me. These are Dream Act kids. You know Dream Act is sort of a–I guess for some people it’s a controversial thing. For me, it’s not. You’ve got to support our future and education is a critical issues. They interviewed all the candidates, and they came to tell me that I was their chosen candidate. They were going to work on my campaign for mayor. I said, “Thank you so much. You represent the future, and I’m honored that you would do it.” They looked at me and said, “Greg, we’re not the future, we’re the present.” I said, “Touché, good point.”

Those young people in the back, you’re not just the future, you really are the present, and when I talk in schools about sustainability and some of the easy lifestyle changes that can be made, nobody embraces it more than students, and nobody pushes their parents more than students to get it right. These young people soon will have choices. They’re gonna be going on to college, I’m sure, here or elsewhere. They’re gonna learn about other cities in the country, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. They’re gonna have choices, whether they want to have their lives and careers here, or they’re gonna want to choose to leave. Our greatest asset, our greatest asset is the people of this city.

We have to make sure that we retain the best and the brightest. We always talk about recruiting elsewhere, and we should do that well, but more important is that our best and brightest choose to remain here, and so getting this right, getting a commitment to sustainability, both in word and deed, getting arts and culture right, getting great neighborhoods right, getting historic preservation right, being a place where these folks, these young people choose to live, is–it’s gonna make or break us, long-term in the future. We are competing against these other cities.

We are competing internationally. I think we can all relate to what I’m saying in terms of we know young people that we wished had stayed here, but have chosen to pursue paths elsewhere. To the folks in the audience, the high school kids that are here, thank you for being here. Secondarily, we want to get this right, so that you choose to have your lives and careers here in Phoenix and make us a better city moving forward. Thank you so much. It really was a great event.

Tetrault: Bill, you had one follow-up thought?

McDonough: I just want to compliment the mayor for inspiring–being so inspiring to me, and obviously, hopefully to you, or you wouldn’t have elected him. I also want to just touch on this word sustainability. I’m a little worried about it because if I ask somebody, you know, what’s their relationship to their spouse, and they said sustainable, I’d say, “I’m sorry, that doesn't sound very exciting.” I think it’s our job here to say we are simple people, and our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just city, with clean air, water, soil, and power, economically, of course, equitably, of course, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed. We’re just gonna go have more fun than everybody else and make lots of resources available endlessly. Thank you.

Tetrault: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for coming out this morning. We would like to specifically thank Mayor Stanton and Mr. Bill McDonough for spending some time with us this morning, as well as the Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, along with all of our indefatigably working volunteers, you the community supporters, and especially you, the students, the high school students, thank you for coming here this morning. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much, and have an excellent rest of the day.

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The above transcript provided by Landmark Associates.