Vancouver’s dynamic young mayor, Gregor Robertson, wants Vancouver to be the North American hub for green jobs and sustainable industry, and to “capitalise on what is now globally a seismic shift toward a green economy”.

Robertson envisions the city attracting new green businesses that will “thrive as they roll out their goods and services toother cities that are still playing catch-up”.

Those “other cities” in North America racing to be the world’s greenest include Toronto, San Francisco, Portland, Santa Monica, Austin and Chicago. However, according to The Vancouver Sun, Vancouver is still well behind Reykjavik, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Amsterdam when it comes to its shade of green. London, Sydney, Barcelona and Bogota are also in the competition.

Robertson recently enjoyed a sweet victory with the initiation of bicycle lanes on a major city bridge. While most of the local media, business groups and politicians denounced the plan predicting it would pave the way for his defeat in the next election – the new lanes did not disrupt traffic, and the public respond enthusiastically.

For one – and two-family dwellings, Vancouver already has the greenest building code in North America. New home owners now stand to save up to 30% on their energy bills, use less water and have healthier places to live.

Host to the Olympic Winter Games in 2010, the city has constructed a nine-block ‘green” Olympic Village, where 10,000 athletes will stay, which will become environmentally friendly apartments after the games. Half of the buildings will have green roofs, providing insulation and reducing the energy needed to heat or cool them.

Environmentalist David Suzuki, who warns that climate change could eliminate ice skating, cross-country skiing and low-elevation downhill skiing by 2050, has partnered with Vancouver to reduce the size of the 2010 Games’ carbon footprint.

The City’s aspiration to become the greenest in the world may be what makes Vancouver the most future focused, particularly in light of the intensifying climate crisis. The realisation that our lifestyles are not just injurious to the Earth, but literally suicidal, grows apace.

In Vancouver, all developments issues, all policies and all actions may soon be viewed through the lens of this looming crisis.

Long arguing for the inevitable decentralisation of political power, Professor Warren Magnusson from British Columbia has promoted the idea of ‘radical municipalism’: that global cities will open the political life.

Radical municipalism may well be one of the strategies that gives Vancouver – indeed cities and towns throughtout the world – a fighting chance to adapt to and address climate change, when the larger political entities, provinces, states and nations are too slow to act decisively.