Making services and amenities accessible within a short walk or bike ride from people’s homes is essential to a climate-resilient future.
Seated in Space Age plastic chairs, millions of visitors aboard the Ride to Tomorrow skimmed past stainless steel models of midtown airports, high-speed bus-trains, mile-high skyscrapers, moving sidewalks and underground conveyor belts. The popular General Motors exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Park forecast a gleaming fantasy future of prosperity and endless possibility, with “plazas of urban living rising over freeways.”
“What is to come, through the fair’s eyes at least, is wonderful,” marveled science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in an August 1964 feature in the New York Times.
Looking back at the ‘60s vision for the future from the vantage point of today, it seems clear that we were hoodwinked by a big, beautiful, ingenious marketing ploy. The same people who were selling us Impalas, Sting Rays and Rivieras were imagining our cities not for us, but for cars. But what they didn’t plan for was climate change, even though there were ample warnings of how the automobile-centric present and future would alter the planet irrevocably. It’s not too late for a dramatic course correction.
If there was one New Yorker responsible for moving those cars off the lots, it was Robert Moses. In 1953, as construction coordinator and parks commissioner of New York City, chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and president of the Long Island State Park Commission, Moses won a $25,000 prize in the General Motors Better Highways Contest for his essay “How to Plan and Pay for the Safe and Adequate Highways We Need.” That winning essay set him squarely on a path to remake New York City.
While Moses spent the ‘60s successfully overseeing the construction of the Throgs Neck and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge — a linchpin linking a network of highways including the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Staten Island Expressway and the Belt Parkway — he was ultimately thwarted in his attempt to make New York a car-centric capital.
While Jane Jacobs and other critics who argued that the Power Broker’s projects upended community cohesion, displaced people and demolished buildings, they skipped past one fundamental fact: climate change. By stopping Moses from slicing through Washington Square and the West Village to build a proposed expressway, Jacobs and her supporters not only saved the soul of New York City but, arguably, prepared it for a more climate-resilient future.
Then as now, carbon dioxide gases were warming the Earth. The fossil fuel industry certainly knew it, and in 1965 — alerted by President Lyndon B. Johnson himself — even Congress knew it.
As Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes recently concluded after conducting an exhaustive investigation to find out when concern about warming really heated up, “We discovered a universe of discussions by scientists, by members of Congress, by members of the executive branch. The more we looked, the more we found.”
Even Ruth Reck, a young physicist hired by GM Research Laboratories in 1965 to study physical chemistry, found strong evidence that CO2 gases were heating the planet and could trigger melting ice sheets and sea-level rise.
But the warnings of Reck and others were dismissed as car-centric neighborhoods and cities grew — in New York, across the country and throughout the world. “Model” cities like the utopian Brazilian capital of Brasilia, which was designed to replicate the futuristic contours of an airplane and to project progress, power and efficiency, were built without even the most minimal sidewalks or mass transit system.
By stopping Moses from slicing through Washington Square and the West Village to build a proposed expressway, Jacobs and her supporters not only saved the soul of New York City but, arguably, prepared it for a more climate-resilient future.
Today, as our world grows steamier, soggier and stormier, Brasilia represents all that’s gone wrong with that monolithic concrete and steel model. Like cities across the globe, and particularly in the Global South, Brasilia today is chaotic, sprawling and scrambling to find enough water and other resources.
Meanwhile, New York, Paris and London — cities that long pre-dated cars — are considered among the world’s most sustainable. According to the IESE Business School of the University of Navarra’s Cities in Motion Index, which in 2025 evaluated 183 cities across 92 countries across factors including governance, mobility, sustainability and technology, New York City ranked second after London. It’s walkable and has an efficient transportation system — key elements to urban climate resilience.
Already, half the global population lives in cities. By 2050 — the year that world leaders at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris set as the target for “net zero,” when all greenhouse gas emissions should be equal to the emissions removed from the atmosphere—an estimated seventy percent of some 9.8 billion people projected to inhabit the planet will be urban dwellers.
To put those numbers into greater perspective, Yale geographer and leading climate scientist Karen Seto estimates that “urban expansion will result in building a city equivalent in size of New York City every eight days for the next 35 years.”
Not only is the number of cities soaring, but their size is exploding. In the next 25 years, the number of the world’s megacities — those with populations of more than 10 million — is expected to shoot up from 44 to 67.
Much of that growth is occurring, chaotically, in the sultry Global South — in cities like Dhaka, Bangladesh and Lagos, Nigeria, where glossy, costly high-rise centers stand surrounded by vast, sprawling, congested, polluted shantytowns that gobble up land and resources. These economically and ecologically marginal, often low-lying areas typically lack running water or sanitation and are particularly vulnerable to flooding and storms.
Rather than piling upward, most of this growth — except in parts of China and South Korea, where high-rise construction predominates — sprawls inefficiently and unsustainably outward. Take Lagos, for example, which in 1960 had a population of 760,000. Today, an estimated 16 to 20 million people inhabit an area that stretches uncontrollably across 450 square miles — mostly in informal settlements that lack running water and sanitation. By 2050, 30 million people are expected to live in Lagos, making it one of the fastest and least sustainably growing cities on Earth.
Seto maintains that “one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce urban emissions is to have higher density housing located closer to amenities and needs, like shopping and jobs.” Zoning and design that encourage co-location (also known as the “15-Minute City), where services and amenities are accessible within a short, shade-lined walk or bike ride from people’s homes, are not only essential to a climate-resilient future but to the strengthening of communities’ fragile social fabric.
Five years ago, to address rush-hour gridlock and air pollution, and improve livability, Paris embraced the 15-Minute City. This design approach has, within just a few years, transformed the City of Light, which now has 746 miles of protected bike lanes and once-empty office spaces repurposed for housing, co-working, gyms and shops. From Cleveland to Melbourne to Ottawa, other sprawling cities are moving toward the 15-Minute model.
At the same time, newly planned cities like The Line, a linear urban community currently under construction in Saudi Arabia, which will stretch 110 miles upon completion, are conforming to these 15-minute model principles. Indonesia, which is in the process of moving its capital from congested, polluted, rapidly sinking Jakarta — a city of 10 million squeezed into an area half the size of New York City — to Nusantara on the Island of Borneo, is upping the ante by aiming for a 10-minute city, where daily needs can be met within a short walk or bike ride away.
Yale geographer and leading climate scientist Karen Seto estimates that urban expansion will result in building a city equivalent in size to New York City every eight days for the next 35 years.
In the early 17th century, when the Dutch first settled Manhattan, they developed streets based on existing paths and land contours before more systematically laying out roads. On Pearl, Beaver and Stone streets, for example, residential, commercial and even agricultural areas coexisted.
Driven by a desire to divide populations based on class, ethnicity and race, zoning that segregated land-use became the norm across the country. Over time, schools, churches and stores began to be located farther away from where people lived. This trend accelerated a reliance on cars, and the intensification of carbon footprints. These days, across much of America, people think nothing of jumping into their cars and driving for fifteen minutes or more to pick up a quart of milk. It’s a design flaw that squanders precious resources, increases carbon footprints and contributes to social isolation.
The good news is that United States cities are rapidly moving toward adopting so-called “form-based” building and planning codes, which promote mixed uses, smaller setbacks, denser development, more varied housing types, and reduced parking requirements.
A recent study conducted by Seto colleagues Arianna Salazar-Miranda of Yale and Emily Talen of the University of Chicago, found that communities in the car-dependent South — where urban sprawl is at its ugliest — are leading the adoption of such codes, most recently, Orange County, Florida, home to sprawling Orlando.
Meanwhile in January, the New York City Council passed the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, the most extensive zoning regulations in sixty years. While the Zoning Resolution of 1961 — largely the vision of Mayor Robert Wagner and Robert Moses — paved the way for more cars and high-rises rather than housing, the new rules roll back restrictions that encouraged the construction of glass towers in high-density neighborhoods. Instead, they are designed to facilitate the building of more modest structures and encourage the conversion of underutilized buildings and the development of new mixed-use spaces around transit hubs.
Looking back at the ‘60s vision of progress, GM’s promises seem preposterous. Were we really gullible enough to believe that “technology has found a way to control the wild profusion of [jungles]” by first applying searing laser lights to cut through trees before steamrolling toward progress on a “factory on wheels” that would grind up jungle growth and lay the foundation for multi-lane “forest highways bringing to the innermost tropic world the goods and materials of progress and prosperity?”
By now, we should know better than to be distracted by implausible science fictions or duped by augmented future realities. While AI is enhancing data analysis of traffic patterns, energy use and zoning allocations, it’s also apparent that lessons for the climate future of cities are found firmly rooted in the past: compact, vibrant, urban areas with good public transportation systems and a profusion of cool, green, leafy spaces. Cities employing these centuries-old common-sense approaches to urban design that enhance walkability and social cohesion will lead us toward a more vibrant, livable and climate-friendly future.