As U.S. cities compete for the title of “Greenest” and vie to attract green industry, Portland State University is launching an initiative to use the city as a laboratory for sustainability studies. Portland was recently named America’s most sustainable city for the second year by SustainLane. PSU hired noted Dutch urbanist Wim Wiewel as its president this year, and the city as laboratory may be the first fruit of his administration.

While I was looking this up online, I came across a link to Paul Hawkin’s great piece on cities as environmental assets. Here’s a key line:

Urban migration represents a kind of collective wisdom, and how we configure our cities will be critical to our survival. Regardless of the myths about living close to the land, cities are where human beings have the lowest ecological footprint. It takes less energy, wood, material, and food to provide a good life for a person in a city than in the country.