The tale of two Trumps means sustainable city leaders must spin their own story

History may not repeat itself but, as Mark Twain reputably put it, it often rhymes. Leaders of cities that are working towards achieving greater sustainability can be forgiven for mumbling to themselves: “Here we go again.” Four years after Donald Trump left the White House, he is back with a raft of policies that appear to threaten the long-term viability of urban life.

The president will take the United States back out of the Paris Agreement that has committed its members to work towards limiting rises in global temperatures that will impact cities particularly heavily. He has taken sweeping measures to reduce immigration and repatriate some migrants that will impact employers in many US cities. He may claw back some measures under the Inflation Reduction Act that has poured millions of dollars of public money into clean energy investment.

It is easy and comforting to remember that cities proved united and resilient against the first Trump administration, both within the US and without. Four years ago he withdrew his country from the Paris Agreement and made a host of noxious remarks about migrants but city leaders continued to push out measures aimed at reducing pollution such as ULEZ in London and a hike in parking taxes on SUVs in Paris.

But Trump 2.0 may be more threatening than the first version. Previously he brought in professional government servants to provide efficiency but one by one they fell out with the president as his policies left a bad taste in their mouths. He has learned from that, bringing in loyalists such as former FOX News host Pete Hegseth, former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as intelligence chief despite voicing pro-Russian views, and Robert F Kennedy, an anti-vaccinator, as Health Secretary.

Furthermore, his administration has the support of an oligarch of multi-billionaires: Mark Zuckerburg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest person. This might not seem to have anything immediately negative for cities, but it is a sign that Trump is less likely to be forced to change course.

Cities United

Leading city voices such as the C40 Cities have broadcast their intended resilience. As Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor and co-chair of the lobby group, has said, their work has only become “more urgent”. He has committed to strengthen collaboration with state and city partners across America to maintain the core commitments of the Paris Agreement, while showcasing how investing in environmentally friendly technologies can create economic benefits globally. His pledge was echoed by Brandon Johnson and Kate Gallego, mayors of Chicago and Pheonix, respectively.

Photo by Ethan Spratt on Unsplash

While American city leaders continue on their drive towards urban sustainability, this could be the time for Europe to shine. In response to Trump's decision to withdraw, European leaders meeting at the Davos forum strongly reaffirmed their commitment to upholding the Paris climate accord and its goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

European cities have often been at the forefront of action on sustainability, backed by the resources of the European Union. The EU Cities Forum in Krakow in June could act as a rallying point for cities of all sizes that want to make meaningful progress towards sustainable urban development. Four years may seem like a protracted period to endure but urban sustainability has a history going back decades, one must rely on the hope that the positive trends of the past will repeat themselves — or at least rhyme a little.

For city-dwellers, ‘their’ parts of London can feel close at hand despite being far away

Back in the early 1990s when I used to take an regular train from London to Plymouth, my eye was always caught by a piece of graffiti on the southern wall of the station as the train pulled out of Paddington: “FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE”. This was in the days before mobile phones with their accessible cameras, so I have no record, and the words have been permanently erased following one of the station’s many refurbishments.

As a journalist on my first job at a newspaper some 200 miles from my adopted home city where I went to university, this phrase, slogan, or verse — I had no idea then of its origins — summed up my mood as I put on my Sony Walkman or dived into a book, to emerge some three hours later in Devon’s naval city. Although London was far away in my mind’s eye, there was a direct line between the platforms at Plymouth station and Paddington with little of interest in between. (I have since stumbled across an explanation which makes for an endearing story).

This memory resurfaced as I was thinking about how an individual’s locational conception of a city such as London with an extensive public and private transport infrastructure is formed by their own personal journeys. Someone living near a station at the end of one of London’s long Underground lines, such as the Central, Piccadilly, and (now) the Elizabeth, might commute into their job in the West End, City, or Canary Wharf. During the winter they will probably leave home and work in the dark.

For those travellers, their London will be the entry gate of their Underground station, the exit at their destination station, and the urban landscape between there and the door of their employer’s office, but perhaps also a local coffee bar, sandwich shop, and pub. That is their London, and they know no other part of it other than the area in which they live (and home may indeed be in Essex, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, or Surrey).

Because the majority of their journey will be underground or speeding along embanked cuttings through the city’s industrial backside, they will know nothing of the lives of the millions of fellow Londoners living and working just above them in suburb after suburb. They will be aware of them, of course, just as they are aware of the House of Commons in Westminster and the 02 in Greenwich because they have seen news on the television. But ask someone about The Miller pub in Southwark or the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith — to pick two personal favourites at random — and they will have to pull out their phone and search for both.

Of course, this mental map of London can be extended as they make exploratory journeys, so that each person’s mental image of the city will morph and bend over time. If they go to see shows in the West End, then they will learn where Leicester Square and Soho area (the latter not as wild, sexual and crime-riddled as it once was). But its ambience will still be relatively alien to them. The same applies if they go to see their football team play.

At the same time, some Londoners, perhaps those who always lived in a housing estate in a poorer part of the city or whose mobility is limited by age or disability, will know the streets in their local area in detail and use those facilities intensively but will never make the journey into central London or another borough. Again, drawing on my time in Plymouth, I came across an old woman in rural Devon who had never in her life been to Plymouth: “Why would I want to?”

Mappa Londinii

Over time, a Londoner or regular visitor to the city will build up a mental map of London — their own version of the A-Z Street Atlas that was once the ubiquitous travel aid for the capital. It will include their home and work but also perhaps their own or children’s schools, their friends’ homes, cinemas and theatres, pubs and restaurants, and venues for day-out trips.

This internal map will become their own personal travel guide, as their London morphs to account for the different times that the journey requires. A friend’s home that they normally take 20 minutes to walk to will appear equidistant in their mind as a cinema 20 minutes away by tube even though the latter is some four miles away.

Far away destinations such as Richmond in the southwest with its parks and sports events or Greenwich with its naval and observatory museums in the southeast will appear as elongated strips extending out to the fringes of each “map”, but areas that never seem worthy of a visit will be invisible.

Destinations on new or improved lines, such as the Elizabeth and the six lines that now make up the Overground will bring locations onto people’s maps. Travelling the 11 miles from the Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush to its counterpart takes just 30 minutes on an Overground Mildmay train, compared with almost an hour by car and making far away so much closer at hand.

There is a real reason for suggesting this shift of vision — and one that applies to all major cities — to get a better understanding of the multiple centres that make up London, from Ealing in the West, to Thamesmead in the East; and from Croydon in the south to Barnet in the north. Gaining knowledge about other suburbs will make those far away physically feel closer at hand. And that way lies greater understanding and enhanced knowledge which in the long term will mean more cooperation about the issues that make them all Londoners.

Urban metamorphosis: the constant shifting of the meaning of London

What does the word London mean? The answer will depend on a whole number of factors: whether they are a Londoner or not; what they are thinking about when they answer; whether they are referring to the past, present or future; and through which lens they are using to view the metropolis. These are just four variations but there are many, many more.

This year I want to explore how London is perceived as a city and how the very idea of London has morphed dramatically over time and can vary wildly between different people at any given time given their status, attitude and personal prejudices. All cities will have these multiple layered histories that lead to multiple interpretations. But I will contend that there is something about London that is different.

Let’s start with some basic physical facts. As a legal entity, London’s boundaries sit around the large mass of land around the Thames Valley that makes up the Greater London Authority and the 32 borough councils within it. That is the legal jurisdiction that gives the familiar “squashed square” shape seen frequently on leaflets, posters, and keyrings and maps such as this one from the City of London, the city’s tiniest borough. Inside these limits reside a total of 8,945,000 people in London from Croydon in the South to Enfield in the North and from Heathrow airport on its western edge to a country park just outside the M25 to the East.

Source: The City of London Corporation Our role in London

But those boundaries can be very blurry and can shrink or expand. Someone living on the southeastern edge of Bromley may talk about living in Kent, similar to how some on the London/Essex borders pick the latter as their county. And in the northwest of outer London some in areas such as Harrow will still locate themselves in Middlesex, a county that has not existed since 1965 — although the name proudly lives on in the county cricket club.

The reason for this amorphous psychological border is that up until 60 years ago the County of London only extended through around 14 of today’s boroughs (although it was made up of 29 smaller boroughs many of whose names live on as suburbs). In other words, on the 1 April 1965 “London” went from being a little over 117 square miles acres to occupying 607 square mile or five times the land area.

The further one travels back in time, the smaller London becomes as the population revolution and population explosion that fuelled the city go into reverse. Eventually one gets back to Roman times and the founding of Londinium. Why is that relevant? Because the ancient boundaries of that Roman city, later preserved by the London Wall, map neatly on the area now known as the City of London.

The City itself may only have 8,600 permanent residents but is one of a handful of financial centres that are so large they can be referred to by their host city alone: New York, Tokyo, and London. Even after the growth of the financial outpost at Canary Wharf, when bankers, analysts and journalists talk about London they meant the hoards of institutions that filled the one square mile area of the City.

And London as a physical institution may be on the march again as the new government has laid out an agenda of using parts of the Green Belt that has successfully prevented urban sprawl for the last 90 years. Ministers make a valid point that over those nine decades the quality of the green pleasant land has deteriorated thanks to informal use and has become anything but green.

So far the housing, communities and local government ministry has said it wants to target what is calls “greybelt” land and allow councils to change green belt boundaries when they could not otherwise meet housing targets. If the plans come to fruition, London will extend its reaches both into new land and into people’s mind. It may only be a marginal change and another of the constant shifting of London over the decades, centuries and millennia.