To Jalonne White-Newsome, the nation’s top environmental justice official in the Biden-Harris White House, the Brick City is a lot like the Motor City, where she was born and raised.

“We too have multiple industries like the oil industry and many others that have continued to contribute to the environmental contamination, the loss of life and the loss of quantitative life for everyone,” White-Newsome, a Detroit native, told a Newark audience Thursday on the first of a two-day conference on environmental sustainability. “And there has been an increase in gentrification, less affordable housing.”

But like Newark, Detroit has also been widely viewed as a city on the rebound in recent years. And, she added, “The more I learn about Newark, the more I sense a spirit from my hometown of Detroit.”

White-Newsome was the keynote speaker Thursday for the Newark Sustainability Unconference, a two-day event kicking off the creation of a citywide plan to ensure that the environmental health and well-being of its 300,000-plus residents can be sustained into the foreseeable future, even as it continues to develop and the local and global climates get hotter and more volatile.

The conference was held at Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hall, a Rutgers University-Newark building on Washington Street opposite Harriet Tubman Square park.

“Cooperative, collaborative community is what Newark excels at – and what we must employ to shepherd our urban environment into an ecologically sustainable tomorrow,” Mayor Ras J. Baraka said in a statement. “I have full confidence that this Unconference will produce a sound roadmap toward a wholesome and thriving future for Newark.”

The term “unconference” refers to a type of conference or large meeting whose agenda, topics of discussion or action plans are determined by attendees rather than by organizers.

Unconferences have become increasingly common in recent years, particularly in urban planning and public policymaking, with the goal of incorporating what residents and other local stakeholders want in a project or policy before it’s built or implemented. The hope is that the grassroots input will maximize transparency and support for the effort, resulting in the most widely embraced, most appropriate, and most lasting plans possible.

“For us, in order for anything to be sustained, it has to have all voices at the table, especially the most vulnerable,” Newark Chief Sustainability Officer Nicole Hewitt-Cabral said in an interview Thursday. “We could have just done a conference and said, here’s a keynote, here are the panels, this is what we’re going to discuss.”

Instead, Hewitt Cabral said, “We’re having a messier process where we’re creating tomorrow’s agenda in real-time.”

To create the agenda, on Thursday afternoon, the organizers set up three whiteboards, each with a heading that included several related sustainability topics or issues: “Green Space, Trees, Food Access, Gardens, Parks”; “Clean Energy, Air Quality, Extreme Heat”; “Clean Water/Flood, Youth, Waste/Recycling, Other.”

The 140 or so participants present for the start of the conference at noon on Thursday were invited to use Post-its to write down a more specific issue or project, with a brief description if desired, and stick it on the whiteboard to which it was most closely related.

On Friday morning, the organizers held three breakout sessions, each focusing on one of the three subject areas addressed by the whiteboards, with attendees elaborating on and discussing the projects or priorities identified the day before on the post-it notes.

The first session, starting around 10, involved the “Green space” heading and drew 30 participants seated at round tables in the building’s vast main hall. Hewitt-Cabral led the discussion, providing a briefing on some related city initiatives already underway.

One is a citywide tree planting program announced in April that aims to plant 5,000 trees over the next decade, or 500 a year, an annual target already met this spring, she told the group.

“We need thousands. We need tens of thousands of trees a year,” she said. So, she added, “How do we amplify that?”

She invited the participants to follow up or talk about their own priorities, and they passed around a microphone to one another to speak.

Habeebah Yasin, a Newark resident who works as a public administration program manager for the City University of New York, said she wanted to see measures put in place to ensure Newark’s anchor institutions contribute their fair share to the greening of the city.

“They could make a promise to plant more trees,” Yasin said. “I’m thinking of public institutions like Rutgers and the surrounding area.”

Jody P. Gazenbeek-Person made two suggestions: that real estate developers be required to create public open space and contribute a fee to help finance or maintain public parks.

“And the second thing would be for the people who want to create micro-forests on their properties, give them a property tax break,” he said.

As Hewitt-Cabral informed the group, a micro-forest — also known as a mini-forest, pocket forest, or Miyawaki forest, after Japanese ecologist Akira Miyawaki — is a densely planted, self-sustaining patch of plants and trees native to the surrounding region, intended to mimic a natural ecosystem in a limited space.

Gazenbeek-Person, a theater professor at Mercer Community College, has already helped green his neighborhood in Newark’s North Ward with a Love Your Block grant, a city funding source for residents.

One reason Newark is a so-called “heat island” that absorbs and radiates heat is its lack of open space combined with an abundance of buildings and other impervious surfaces, that is, concrete, asphalt or even artificial turf athletic fields that cover the ground.

So Tylor Price, who teaches environmental science in neighboring Belleville, said he would like to see the city create or enforce local land use regulations specifically for greenery.

“One thing I think we should start doing is really enforcing more zoning in regards to allocating more space for planting more trees,” Price told the group.

Since leaving the White House following President Donald Trump’s election, White-Newsome has worked as an environmental justice advocate and consultant. She said during her keynote address that she was impressed by Newark’s record of addressing environmental, social justice and other issues.

She highlighted the city’s inclusionary zoning ordinance to create affordable housing and the replacement of 23,000 lead service lines following drinking water contamination that White-Newsome related to the crisis in Flint, Michigan, her home state.

She urged attendees and organizers to create plans that did not rely on any single funding source; that could be carried out or carried on by local stakeholders if state or federal administrations changed; She also encouraged them to create plans that could be scaled up or down for bigger cities or smaller towns, or adapted to different regions.

White-Newsome told the gathering to create a plan that can “weather political shifts, weather the climate, weather historical context.”

“Your wisdom right here helps set the stage for what we do in the United States,” she said.

“So, I encourage you to reflect on how to structure a plan that serves Newarkers and also serves others.”

Nobody knows Jersey better than N.J.com. Sign up to get breaking news alerts straight to your inbox.

Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com