Can We Have Sustainable Coastal Cities?
By Barry A. Costa-Pierce

By 2015, the United Nations Population Division estimates there will be 27 mega-cities of 10 million or more people, and most of these cities will be located on the coast. By 2025, the world’s urban population will increase to 5.1 billion people, equivalent to the entire human population on planet Earth in 1930. To sustain these people, experts
project a 500 percent increase in global economic and manufacturing activities and a 300 percent increase in global energy consumption.
Coastal oceans are among the most heavily used and modified areas of the United States. Coastal areas only make up 10 percent of the nation’s landmass, but about 54 percent of Americans live on the coast. By 2025, the U.S. Department of Commerce predicts that nearly 75 percent of Americans will live in coastal counties.

Human activities in the urban coastal zone deliver sewage, solid wastes, refuse (marine debris), sediments, dust, pesticides, and hydrocarbons to coastal rivers, estuaries, and oceans. It is estimated that about 80 percent of all marine pollution originates from land-based sources and activities. Assessing the delivery of land-based sources of
pollution to coastal oceans and developing ways to mitigate and rehabilitate the impacts of cities on coastal ecosystems is a major global research effort. The research community has found that cities have some very interesting ecological characteristics that need to be considered in planning for sustainable cities:

• Cities have lots of spatial diversity—an urban mosaic —with many vacant lots in the urban cores.
• Cities have many small parcels with many managers.
• Cities have many remnant patches of nature—they are very fragmented natural systems.
• Cities have “leaky” water and nutrient cycles with high rates of infrastructure failures.
• Cities produce a “witches’ brew” of contaminants that mix, producing secondary products that are little known environmentally.
• Cities are centers of germ production, dispersion, and mixing.
• Cities have large periodic hydrological and contaminant pulses with storm events.
• Cities affect local temperatures by serving as heat islands that retain heat through pavement and buildings in uneven ways.

Sea Grant’s Urban Coasts Priority
America’s shorelines are being “loved to death.” There are high demands for recreational, business, and residential developments near the water. Communities must balance economic and environmental values, and manage the impacts of development, nutrient runoff, and waste disposal, while maintaining the integrity of coastal ecosystems. Some cities with vibrant urban coastal communities, especially in Europe, have realized that their economic destiny is tied not only to business innovation but to an intact, functioning environment teeming with not only economic but also environmental goods and services.

The National Sea Grant College Program has created a national thematic priority on “Urban Coasts” (see www.seagrant.noaa.gov/themesnpa/pdf/urbancoasts_ main.pdf), which is incorporated into the 2006–2010 Strategic Plan for Rhode Island Sea Grant. It is Rhode Island Sea Grant’s belief that the 21st century marine economy will not be driven by the tired, old, polarizing debates of “jobs or the environment.” Sea Grant believes that prudent government and industry investments in the knowledge-based coastal economy that incorporate wise stewardship of the environment will pay off handsomely. Opening up closed beaches, restoring coastal parks with public access, improving water quality to reopen shellfish beds, restoring fisheries, and reclaiming marine ecosystems and habitats are just as important economically as attracting new pharmaceutical or insurance companies. There are many brilliant people who could be attracted to a place that promotes up-front and unabashedly its marine assets and modern infrastructure, its unique place-based traditions, its sustainable urban development policies that insure environmental stewardship, and its very high quality of life.

Cities have a unique ecology in which humans are dominant. Understanding urban environments and their associated coastal ecosystems is one of coastal science’s last great frontiers. The big challenge is to bring coastal science to the city, to join it with the social ecology, planning, and policy sciences and urban and landscape architecture fields, and to involve urban planners and policy-makers from the outset.

The huge human demand on the Earth’s freshwater and marine resources could lead to massive losses of biodiversity and the complete dismantling of the remaining intact coastal ecosystems if we defer the necessary urban planning and innovative natural and social science and engineering wisdom needed to ensure the sustainability of cities for both nature and millions of people.

Sea Grant Moves to the Renaissance City
There is a strong rationale for the increased involvement of Rhode Island Sea Grant in Rhode Island’s urban coasts. Rhode Island is one of the most densely populated states in the nation. Urbanization in Rhode Island happened faster in historical times than elsewhere, and we have been through many cycles of urban change that other states are
just entering or have little experience with. We are a small “living laboratory.”

In 2005, Rhode Island Sea Grant returned to the upper Narragansett Bay region, with plans to develop a new program, featuring its unique research, education, and outreach approach we call “Science for America’s Coasts.” Our partners in Sea Grant’s urban coasts efforts are the URI College of Continuing Education, located in Providence, and the R.I. Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC). In the future, we plan to explore additional partnerships with Brown University, Johnson & Wales University, and Roger Williams University—all of which are located in the Providence metroplex.

Working with CRMC, Rhode Island Sea Grant/URI Coastal Resources Center (CRC) are now facilitating the Metro Bay Special Area Management Plan (SAMP) process, which encompasses the Cranston, East Providence, Pawtucket, and Providence waterfronts. The goal of the SAMP is to enhance the economic, environmental, and social policy within the urban coastal area. Rhode Island Sea Grant’s strategic expansion into the Providence metro area Urban Coasts & Communities is not new: Over 20 years ago, Rhode Island Sea Grant/CRC assisted CRMC in the development of the Providence Harbor SAMP that helped guide urban development while managing and protecting the area’s natural and coastal resources. Today, the cities of upper Narragansett Bay have enjoyed robust economic growth and cultural renewal, and new attention is being paid to the area’s open space and the urban coast.

This issue of 41°N focuses on the challenges that Rhode Island Sea Grant and others have been addressing along an “Urban Coasts and Communities” theme. Please visit seagrant.gso.uri.edu/metrosamp for Sea Grant’s efforts in the Metro Bay area.

For more information:
• Center for Sustainable Cities, University of Southern
California, Los Angeles, Calif. www.usc.edu/dept/geography/
ESPE/academicreports.html.
• Collins, J.P. et al. 2000. A new urban ecology. American
Scientist 88(5):416–422.
• International Centre for Sustainable Cities, Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada. www.icsc.ca.
• Institute of Ecosystem Studies. Urban Ecology: The Baltimore
Ecosystem Study. Millbrook, N.Y. www.ecostudies.org/
IES_urban_ecology.html.

—Barry A. Costa-Pierce is Director of the Rhode Island Sea
Grant College Program and URI Professor of Fisheries and
Aquaculture.