Mark Alan Hughes is a Senior Adviser to Mayor Michael A. Nutter and the City’s first Director of Sustainability. He will write a regular column for Philly.com's Green section.

“The greenest city in America.” That’s the ambitious goal that Mayor Nutter has set for Philadelphia.

The attention and energy focused by this goal is our opportunity to reposition and repurpose Philadelphia as a city of the future and with a future.

For the first time in a century, changes beyond our control (primarily rising energy prices) are increasing the value of our assets. Big changes in the world are turning slogans into realities:

Think globally, act locally

The greenest building is the one already built

The cheapest energy is the energy you conserve

These realities all favor cities and regions like Philadelphia. Our dense and durable stock of housing, infrastructure, and amenities is well-positioned to compete and prosper in a carbon-constrained future.

To be candid, much of this derives from our backwardness. Atlanta and Phoenix boomed over the last fifty years following a supercharged but unsustainable trajectory that has left them vulnerable to energy spikes and climate change.

Meanwhile, our walkable, bikeable, and transit-rich City surrounded by productive land and water resources was effectively abandoned by the second half of the 20th Century, a world where home and work could be separated by 40 or 50 miles and sources and markets by 1500 or 5000 miles.

We were obsolete in that world. By 1950, we’d built an urban infrastructure capable of housing 2.5 million residents but have steadily lost population from that peak year. If today it sometimes feels like we’re missing a million people, it’s because, in a way, we are.

All that is changing before our eyes, as other cities scramble to reinvent themselves to become the place we already are. But just because compact settlements like Philadelphia and its surrounding counties have enormous advantages for conserving energy and climate resilience, doesn’t mean we can relax.

Solutions are not self-implementing. Sustainable solutions especially (since they require a commitment to the future) require game-changing leadership. That started when the Mayor stated his “greenest city” goal.

Now it’s time for next steps. The Mayor’s goal is not to build just the greenest city government but the greenest city in America. And that means that we have to build new partnerships with citizens, communities, and institutions throughout the city and region.

Sustainability is neither a fringe issue nor a luxury for affluent cities like San Francisco. Sustainability is the core mission that will determine a city and region’s vulnerability to energy prices and climate change, our capacity to compete in national and global markets, and our commitment to providing all residents with opportunity in a prosperous future.

That’s a tall order and we have formed a new partnership with the region’s nonprofit, corporate, and public leaders to realize the Mayor’s goal of making Philadelphia the greenest city in America. At the Eagles’ home opener, the Mayor announced the City’s first ever Sustainability Advisory Board. The 21 members are drawn from across the region and from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors.

The SAB will serve as a leadership group helping the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability define our strategies and goals, communicate those goals to our constituencies across the region, and serve as a forum for sharing information and advice. The new Board provides tangible evidence of the range of support for the Mayor’s green challenge.

Last month, the City’s Sustainability Working Group brought together over sixty members from two dozen City agencies to begin crafting the plan that will guide our work over the next seven years, from now through 2015.

Working with the SAB and our hundreds of external partners and constituencies (through both conventional consultation and a dynamic web-based collaboration that will be unprecedented in Philadelphia), we will release this plan in just six months.

The plan will present our organizing goals and the initiatives we design to meet those goals. They will be extremely ambitious, as they must be to meet the Mayor’s challenge.

People often ask me about my “vision” for a sustainable Philadelphia. I’m a bit too Quakerly to offer that up. Instead, let me offer what I hope we’ll all think and feel about our City in the year 2015.

For fifty years, Philadelphia has felt obsolete for living in the present and future. A fine old relic of the past, perhaps, but no match for Denver and Portland as a place to live now and in the future.

By 2015, I expect that to turn all the way round: people will walk (and bike and trolley) the green streets of Philadelphia on their way to work and school and play, and will feel that this is exactly the kind of City that the present and future demands.

What was old is new again. Working together, we can make that 2015 vision a reality

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A version of this essay first appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News on 9/9/08.