Conceptualizing Sustainability through the Lens of Urbanism

Over the course of my time as an urban planning student, I found that I became more interested in the ways sustainability overlaps with urban planning. With my growing interest, I began to look for different types of media that delve into this topic more. Through my searching, I came across the podcast “The Green Urbanist” on Spotify. “The Green Urbanist” is centered on urbanism, urban planning, and sustainability, with guests from around the world speaking on these topics. It was started by Ross O’Ceallaigh in 2020.

In recent years, podcasts have become a popular platform to share and consume information on a variety of topics. Personally, podcasts have been a good way for me to engage with new information while completing different tasks throughout my day. As a student, I found that academic articles about topics relating to my major are often very dense and hard to read. This can make it hard for people to understand and digest these topics, especially for those who are not actively engaged in an academic setting. For me and many others, listening to podcasts is a much easier and effective way to understand topics and learn information. For aspiring urban planners, students, and anyone else who is interested in urbanism and sustainability, a podcast like “The Green Urbanist” is an excellent way to become more educated without feeling discouraged because of dense academic articles. 

In February of 2023, I spoke to Mr. O’Ceallaigh of “The Green Urbanist” about himself, the origins of his podcast, and the importance of urbanism in our daily lives. You can find our conversation below. 

Could you introduce yourself with your name, what work you do, and anything else you’d like to say about yourself? 

“I’m Ross O’Ceallaigh. I’m originally from the West of Ireland but I live in London right now. I studied as a planner in my undergrad and then I did a Master’s degree in urban design. I’ve recently in September, after what feels like many years away from study, gone back to do another Master’s degree in sustainability and ecology that I’m doing here in the UK part-time. So I’m very interested in planning and urban design and urbanism and sustainability and everything that goes with that.

“I worked for a number of years as an urban design and planning consultant in London and across England. For about the past 18 months, I’ve been working for a charity called Design South East. We basically try to improve the quality of the design of new developments and places in the southeast of England. My role is running training programs, so I try to help planning officers in local authorities to upscale in design. I don’t know what it’s like in the US, but in the UK, planners don’t really get much design training as part of their education, but of course they have to be able to assess design as part of their role. And so I think there’s a lot of challenges that come with that – not feeling confident to say what’s in good shape with architects, or to know how to push for really good quality design – so we try to help them bridge that gap and upscale in their careers.

“In terms of the “Green Urbanist” podcast, that’s something I started in 2020 in the summer during one of the lockdowns when I was at home and I found myself with lots of free time. I had been learning [about] myself, reading, and trying to find resources about sustainable urbanism, because I came to realize it was really important, but I didn’t know enough about it. So I just decided: OK, if I make a podcast, then that will give me a structure for learning and sharing that learning with people, and would give me an opportunity to interview loads of interesting people. Now, I have sort of more than 60 episodes and I’ve had the chance to talk to amazing experts in the fields of architecture, planning, ecology, and all sorts of things, and it’s been really fascinating.”

For someone who is unfamiliar with the idea of urbanism or is still learning what it is, how would you define it in your own words? Someone could go look up a definition themselves, but to learn about the topic from someone who has been working in the field, hosts such a topical podcast, and regularly talks and communicates with other experts in this area of work, is that much more effective of a lesson.

“Yeah, it’s a really good question, and I think sometimes we forget that people who don’t work in this field don’t necessarily think about planning and urban architecture that much, because people are just living their lives. I think what’s really important to realize is that the way our towns and our cities are built, and the way their plans are designed, has a really fundamental impact on the kind of life we can live in terms of how healthy we are, how happy we are with our lives, and also how big our carbon footprint is and how sustainably we can live. An example is if you’re living in, we’ll say, a suburb very far out away from where you work, that means you’re driving a lot and you’re taking away time from socializing and exercising. Also, there’s a carbon footprint associated with this compared to that of someone who’s living in a dense European city who can walk and cycle everywhere. It’s a very different kind of lifestyle.

“Urbanism, for me, encapsulates all of that in the sense that it’s the study of how cities and urban places work, and how people interact with them. I think that includes architecture and transport, but also things like ecology, social connections, psychology, and community. It’s everything. I’ve heard someone say that cities are almost as complex as the human brain. We can never understand what’s going on in cities entirely; they’re just so complicated and that makes it a really fascinating and important thing to study.”  

With the University Climate Ambassador program at the Global Climate Pledge, we have university students from across the United States working on making sustainable changes on their campuses. We have various focuses such as waste and dining, sustainable investments, net zero emissions, and renewable energy just to name a few. Are there any connections to these topics you have identified regarding urbanism? 

“University campuses are really interesting because they’re basically like little–well, often quite large–towns in themselves, set within an often larger city or region. You can do really interesting things and experiment in universities because they’re large and they have that critical mass of people. But they also have quite a high level of control because you have one landowner, you have a central person or group of people who can control that, and so you can do quite a high level of planning and master planning on a university campus that impacts thousands of people, all the students and staff who use it.

“Something that’s interesting to think of is circular economic principles within a campus, because it can start to form a kind of closed-loop system. So for people who are unfamiliar, a circular economy is a concept that is becoming more and more important within urbanism, but also beyond that. So if you think about right now, we live within a linear economy where we tend to extract resources, turn them into products, use them, and then throw them away–sort of from resource to waste. A circular economy would divert things away from becoming waste and reuse them again and again.

“So on the university campus, there might be things like if you need new facilities: you can reuse existing buildings that are there, or you sort of gently take them apart and reconfigure and reuse the materials in places. But also [with] things like food, where some universities have food growing spaces or they have open space that could be used for food growing: you could be doing organic food growing, and then that could be used in the cafeteria, and then any food waste can be composted and put back into the vegetable growing area. That’s something that they do at the university that I’m studying at the moment, the Center for Alternative Technology in Wales. They’re quite a special place and they have a very rural campus, so they have the space to do stuff like this. They grow their own food and then they use it in their cafe, which is very cool. I think with the campus, it’s also things like rainwater capture and reusing that kind of thing, because you usually have quite large buildings in a university campus and so you have a lot of roof space that could be then capturing rainwater, storing it, and using it to flush toilets; making good use of those resources. There are so many things you can do in that situation.”

Are there any books, films, podcasts, etc. you recommend to someone interested in Urbanism and Sustainability? 

“Yeah, absolutely. I think two quite general ones spring to mind. There’s a really good book that I read years ago which is good for a general audience which is called ‘Happy City’ by Charles Montgomery. That is a really book that breaks down urban design for a layperson and uses loads of good examples in case studies of why good design is important, but also [covers] what ‘good’ looks like, real-life experiments, and things that went well and things that didn’t work. That’s a really good book and it’s written very well. In terms of a movie, there’s a really good documentary called ‘The Human Scale’ which is narrated by a man called Jan Gehl, who is a Danish architect and urban designer who has been influential in putting the human being back at the center of planning and making places much more [at the] human scale rather, than at the scale of the motor car, which is moving much faster. That’s a really good movie as it shows you how to make places where people have a good community life, where they interact with each other, and where they feel comfortable and safe and all that kind of stuff. That’s really nice in terms of sustainability more specifically.”