Working together towards a healthy city for all

With recognition of all the advantages to humans and other beings provided by forests, wetlands, meadows and other natural places, the City of Kingston helped to bring together people to co-design and create a "forested city". The facilitated co-designing conversations, specifically meant to create consensus on both the need for development of housing/businesses and the need to do so in an ecologically minded fashion, result in changes to building incentives and codes which facilitate less stressful and cheaper development, the planting and sometimes conserving of many more terrestrial and water habitats, the decentralized capture of rain and stormwater by the land, market driven greener building choices and, most importantly, the creation of a City where folks work together rather than against each other. At first working with the willing and good intentioned Developers, Govt. employees, businesses, ecologically focussed organizations and general community, a mandate for creating a thriving city for both humans and the other beings is organically cultivated and created. As this effort succeeds, those more skeptical join the process. Working in this way becomes the de facto approach to how to make tough decisions and grow the city. The result of these conversations is the City supports and benefits from:

• growing the number of folks who understand, value and work to increase and improve this modified and intentional approach to community decision making
• a commitment to a shovel worthy rather than shovel ready approach to development
• installation of not just grey infrastructure but also, and preferentially, nature based systems infrastructure to support the development or retrofit of housing and businesses
• the growing of bio-diverse hedge rows as part of the development and retrofit processes, thus utilizing land typically not used by for buildings with the concurrent creation of huge swaths of biodiverse habitat and ecological corridors
• actively supporting community planting and stewarding of: biodiverse hedgerows, Miyawaki style forests, food forests, foraging forests, native meadows, wetlands and ecological corridors
• the increase in the market for nature based solution and related labour and expertise (labour best done by humans rather than robots) which helps to offset the loss of jobs due to automation brought on by AI and robotic innovations.
• increasing food sovereignty as restaurants and homes take advantage of the increase in locally grown edible plants, nuts and fruits that come as part of these initiatives thus also lowering costs and minimizing pain caused by geopolitical changes to supply chains
• the improving relationships with the farmers and towns proximate to the City who now view the City as a place where farmers can easily work closely with the restaurants and local supermarkets to supply and sell the kind of foods that can be grown locally
• Increasing seed sovereignty due to people learning to: harvest, store, plant and care for locally grown seed. This work substantially minimizes costs for some of the plantings while providing meaning and employment to some of the City and surrounding areas' inhabitants
• Increasing the use of compost and mulch by inhabitants thus lowering the costs of transportation, storage and disposal of this valuable resource
• supporting the growing of plants by children as a means of passing on this type of knowledge and the benefits that come from working with and really getting to know the natural environment around them
• the lower cooling and heating costs due to the cooling effects of the dramatic increase in evapotranspiration and shade
• lowering stormwater management costs as less of the water from large weather events is diverted into the sewer system and/or washes out roads and floods buildings
• the decrease in mental, physical, emotional and spiritual illnesses by increasing peoples' connection to the land, improving their micro-biotic health and the calming effects of easier access to nature
• the decreasing exposure and lowered costs to mitigating pollution through the increased use of phytoremediation, mycoremediation, bioaugmentation and biochar applications to cleaning up particularly toxic sites
• an increase in the native beings able to live proximate to humans without having to compete with them
• a minimizing of Kingston's negative effects on the surrounding land, lakes and waterways with a concurrent increase in the watershed's health and ability to support tourism, recreation and businesses reliant on these lands and water bodies

In 2045, despite the myriad of societal, environmental and technological changes buffeting the world, the City of Kingston is a place where people live in community not only with other humans but with its other inhabitants as well. The people of Kingston have built on the above approaches and can now work through even tough issues without the conversations devolving into negative forms of conflict and the often concurrent corruption and cynicism. Kingston shares its expertise with other communities and is able to integrate folks from all over the world as the City grows. Most importantly, the residents of Kingston are proud of the future they have passed on to their children and grandchildren.