Article | Summer 2007
Grad Fellow Alum Leads NYC Sustainability Initiative
When Graduate Fellow alum Rohit Aggarwala (2001-02) was tapped by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to be the first Director of the Mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, he went from studying history to making it. Aggarwala spent the past year crafting PlaNYC 2030, the most sweeping plan to enhance New York's urban environment in the city's modern history. Targeting five key dimensions of the city's environment-land, air, water, energy, and transportation, the Plan outlines a 127-point roadmap for making New York City sustainable by 2030.
A striking aspect of this forward-thinking initiative is the powerful role that history plays in justifying it. According to Aggarwala, understanding how the city ended up where it is today-both for good and for bad-is crucial to grounding any of the proposals his agency makes. This approach is apparent from the first words of the PlaNYC report: "Thirty years ago, a plan for New York's future would have been futile." The document absorbs lessons from the city's decay in the 1970s and charts its economic, infrastructural, and demographic transformation, stretching back as far as the 19th century.
Few people know this history as well as Rohit, who, as a PhD student in History at Columbia University, wrote his dissertation on how New York eclipsed Philadelphia to become the country's leading city. But although PlaNYC gets much of its inspiration from Aggarwala, he insists that these historical references are not an "aesthetic choice" he made because he happened to like history. "An understanding of where we come from is something that I think a lot of people in New York City government recognize is important for understanding where we're going to go," he says. "So much of what we do is either building on or, in some ways, still making up for, decisions that were made in the past. The fact that Robert Moses is an ever-present persona in the discussion about New York City's transportation policy, New York City's development policy, speaks to the fact that history matters."
Although Rohit has ventured far from academia, the tools and knowledge he acquired as a student have had a lasting impact. When asked what he has taken away from Columbia that that he applies at City Hall, he responds without hesitation-"virtually all of my education at Columbia." With four degrees from Columbia-BA (1993), MA (1998), MBA (2000), PhD (2002), Aggarwala has had a long and varied Columbia career. From an undergraduate course on the design and maintenance of a habitable planet, where he was first exposed to the concept of climate change, and his senior thesis on transportation policy to his dissertation on the history of New York's economic development, these influences clearly come together in PlaNYC.
For Rohit, a large part of history is about advancing the discussions that are taking place in the public sphere, not just worrying about the past. "It's about being intellectual but also being relevant," he explains. "An historian is someone who's not just engaged in the past but engaged in human endeavors." Before going back to school for his PhD, he worked in the U.S. Department of Transportation under the Clinton administration and was a transportation policy adviser to Assemblyman Samuel Hoyt in Albany. Unlike most of his peers, after earning his doctorate, he took a job in the private sector working for McKinsey & Co., a global management consulting firm. "I think we'd all be better off if there were more historians in business and government," he says.
In the rollout of PlaNYC, Rohit continues to engage with the academic community, working with advisers and researchers on issues such as climate change, transportation, and land use. Talking about the critical role that Columbia research is playing in shaping policy, he notes, "Once the facts are there, you can help change the debate. If you compare where we are today on the public discourse on climate change versus where we were a year ago, the really interesting piece from my point of view on that is that a year ago, we were still having a debate over whether it was real. Now we're just having a debate about what to do about it." In addition to being a research base for PlaNYC, Columbia is working with the city on an institutional level, committing to meet Mayor Bloomberg's challenge to reduce its carbon footprint by 30 percent over the next 25 years.
PlaNYC derives its strength from such partnerships, not just with the academic community, but with the private, public, and nonprofit sectors as well. Mirrored in PlaNYC's wide range of influences and stakeholders is Rohit's own education and career. Both illustrate the benefits that cooperation and dialogue between these diverse spheres can bring to ensuring the sustainability of the world, starting with New York City.
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