Cities and Sustainability

A new approach

Daniel Hoornweg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317193357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Desarrollo sostenible

Cities are the most likely actors to design and bring about lasting sustainability. An agreement among the world's larger cities is possible, and likely a necessary but insufficient condition to achieve sustainable development.

Cities and Sustainability explores the ways in which cities are both the biggest threat to sustainability, and the most powerful tool to get us to sustainable development. Employing an innovative methodology to a complex issue, the book proposes new metrics and approaches that assume cities as fundamental in the search for sustainability. Providing population projections for the world's larger cities and a hierarchy of sustainable cities, the author develops two new tools: (i) a cities approach to physical and socio-economic boundaries, and (ii) sustainability costs curves. These tools are designed to be implemented in a multi-stakeholder, integrated partnership that truly maximizes the benefits of cities in the quest for sustainability.

Applying the tools outlined in the book to case studies from Dakar, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Toronto, this volume will be of great relevance to students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in urban and city management, climate change, and environment and sustainability more broadly.

1 Searching for sustainability – the urgency of an effective approach

This century’s broad demographic and geopolitical trends are reasonably well known and set the landscape for the United States to likely remain the dominant military power. India will eclipse China as the world’s most populous country around 2022; China, with an aging population, may see an economic decline, similar to Japan and much of Europe; Australia, Canada, New Zealand and most of Europe will decline slightly in terms of global influence; and Africa will experience the fastest and largest growth in cities, economies and relative global impact, especially in the second half of the century.

Access to resources, especially water, food and energy, will continue to be critical. Energy for cities and transportation will remain a key priority, particularly in light of the shift to low-carbon alternatives. Larger (primary) and mid-size (secondary) cities will be tasked with the shift to low-carbon energy sources while increasing resilience in light of a more changeable and extreme climate, and probably more concerns with security, including cyber-security and population migrations and declines. Sustainability and sustainable development will remain crucial objectives.

Introduction

Suppose a group of well-intentioned professionals were asked to advise a rich patron, a government, a powerful agency, or maybe a corporation, to ‘suggest an effective way to help move humanity toward sustainable development.’ Maybe the leaders of China, India or the USA called, or the United Nations Secretary General and World Bank President had friends over for dinner, turned to them and said ‘We could use your help.’ How should the group respond? How could such a ‘big deal’ be defined, negotiated and monitored?¹

This book provides a response to the question of how we might achieve sustainability, and, from that, sustainable development. An applied science approach (bio-physical and social) integrated within a multi-stakeholder partnership is proposed. Only a partial or ‘shadow agreement’ is suggested, but hopefully this would serve as the start of a global process that leads to comprehensive sustainable development.

The process for a planetary ‘deal’ proposed in this book involves the world’s largest cities. An argument is made why cities are the most likely actors to design and bring about such an agreement. An agreement among those metropolitan areas with five million or more residents by 2050 (about 120 ‘Future Five’ cities) is possible, and is likely a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve sustainable development. Each city is viewed as a unique system as well as collectively within a ‘system-of-systems’, and more broadly within local and global ecosystems and economies.

Countries will continue to negotiate international agreements, e.g. trade agreements, Rio+30 and COP25+. The city-centric effort described here would not supplant those efforts. Rather, cities with their unique characteristics of immobility, complexity, system dynamics, anchors of economic development and crucibles of culture, offer an alternative approach to negotiating global agreements. By focusing at the city-scale, issues become clearer, and a more pragmatic road map to sustainability emerges.

A practical methodology to define sustainable development and move the world’s largest cities toward that goal is both possible and urgent. A systems approach is needed, where a significant part of the overall system (the world’s largest cities) is analysed. In any possible future sustainable development agreement cities must be engaged in a meaningful and monitored way. By introducing sustainability into this limited system, the belief is that this could be sufficiently comprehensive to eventually bring about sustainability in global systems. The challenge facing humanity for the next 35 years is enormous. Everything we have done to this point pales in scale. However, when work is at hand, every carpenter, and engineer, knows that having the right tools is one of best indicators of success. This book proposes tools that might help build a more durable, equitable and sustainable society.

A key priority for sustainable development is to provide, and follow, a methodology to enhance the sustainability of long-lived urban infrastructure. This key infrastructure forms the ‘bones’ of sustainable cities. The methodology of a ‘bones’ focus when applied to the world’s larger cities can underpin a global agreement on sustainable development.

The approach developed in this book is built on the following key components:

• Start with the world’s largest cities (those expected to have populations of 5 million-plus by 2050);

• Include all of these cities (about 120);

• Define sustainability locally for each city, based on planetary boundaries, global development goals and local conditions;

• Estimate sustainability potential and cost for all new large-scale long-term urban infrastructure within, and mainly serving, these cities;

• Base the above initiatives on an urban systems approach following a hierarchy of sustainable cities with ongoing open-source publication of key information.

Figure 1.1 A cities approach to sustainability.

A cities perspective

From a cursory perspective, sustainable development is easy to define as development that meets the needs of today without limiting the ability of tomorrow’s generations to meet their own needs. This implies a measure of equity to future generations. But sustainable development is more complicated than this, or certainly more difficult to achieve than such a short definition seems to imply.

Sustainable development is the nexus of wealth generation, economy, equity, environmental degradation, urbanization, well-being, culture, creativity, and local and global governance. To a large extent, sustainable development is driven by cities, the way they are built and managed, and the way people live in them.

Wealth and equity

Beginning around 1800, the world has undergone an unprecedented increase in wealth. In just 200 years wealth increased from about $200 per capita (with less than 1 billion people and an average life expectancy of around 40 years) to more than $6,500 per capita today (with more than 7 billion people and an average life expectancy of 78 years). This massive growth in wealth, however, has not been uniform, and not without cost.

Last year, people living in the Democratic Republic of Congo had an average income of $220. For the entire year. That’s less than a dollar per day for more than 60 million people. Meanwhile, in Bermuda, residents made about $107,000. Bermuda may be an anomaly with just 60,000 residents; however, Norway, with 5 million citizens, had a per capita income of almost $100,000 in 2015.

In 2015 there were 1,826 billionaires with a combined wealth of $7.05 trillion (about $4 billion each). The 62 richest people alone have more wealth than the poorest half of the world’s population combined. The wealth of the world’s richest one per cent of population is about $110 trillion (or 65 times the world’s poorest half of the population – more than 3.5 billion people).²

Environmental degradation

At the start of the Industrial Revolution the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ was about 280 ppm, roughly the same value for 11,000 years during the Holocene, and the end of the last glaciation. In 2014 atmospheric CO₂ concentrations surpassed 400 ppm for the first time in the last 600,000 years; they are increasing by more than 2 ppm per year and are not likely to plateau before reaching 500 ppm. Even though aspirational targets aim for a maximum 1.5°C increase, humanity should plan for a 4°C warming this century (see World Bank, ‘Turn Down the Heat’, 2014 – a lower value is still possible; however, prudence suggests preparing for at least 3°–4°C warming). Massive planetary changes will be associated with this climate perturbation.

Schoolchildren around the world can recount the extinction of passenger pigeons and the threat to buffalo, rhinos, tigers and whales. The loss of biodiversity is the greatest threat to the planet and humanity. Rockstrom et al. (2009) call for a biodiversity loss not to exceed an extinction rate of 10 per million species per year (the current rate of extinction exceeds 100 species; pre-industrial loss rates were 0.01–1 per million species per year). This planetary boundary was updated by Steffen et al. (2015) to maintain a biodiversity intactness index at or above 90 per cent.

Localized pollution, especially in cities, was a constant condition during the last two centuries. Cholera, smog, waste dumps, hazardous waste sites and destruction of local waterways as well as thalidomide, lead poisoning and vehicle emissions are by-products of industrialization and its associated increase in wealth. These wastes are often most concentrated in urban areas.

Urbanization and cities

Inextricably linked with industrialization and wealth is urbanization and the growth of cities. The pace of urbanization worldwide is still increasing (in concert with increased resource consumption and pollution such as greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions). In 1800, the world was about 5 per cent urban. By 1900, urbanization was increasing quickly in most industrialized countries, yet the world was still less than 15 per cent urbanized. In 2008 the world passed the 50 per cent urban mark and the pace of urbanization is still increasing.

In 1950 there was only one city with a population of more than 10 million (New York). Today, there are 27 ‘megacities’, and by 2050, when most of Asia will have urbanized, there will likely be 50 or more cities that are home to least 10 million people. The last wave of urbanization will be in Africa. By the end of this century, 17 of the world’s 25 largest cities may be in Africa, each with more than 25 million residents, and the world’s 3 largest cities, Lagos, Kinshasa and Dar es Salaam, with more than 70 million.

Urbanization and cities present a paradox. On one hand, urbanization and its associated increase in wealth is the main driver of local and global environmental degradation. For example, if including Scopes 1 (local), 2 (directly imported) and 3 (embodied) emissions, cities, or, better stated, the people living in cities, are responsible for more than 80 per cent of global GHG emissions (Hoornweg, Sugar and Trejos Gomez, 2011). On the other hand, well-designed and managed cities provide the highest quality of life for least amount of resource consumption. Sustainability in the latter half of this century is much more likely if cities grow even larger and urbanization proceeds faster in the next few decades.

Cities are complex adaptive systems that often exhibit attributes more akin to natural ecosystems. Like animate entities – a mouse or a whale, for example – cities adhere to scaling laws. If the ‘demons of density’ can be overcome, such as traffic, pollution and crime, cities would naturally evolve to larger conurbations as greater economy can be delivered with fewer resources. Flow in cities also follows nature’s evolved hierarchies. People flowing through a street, for example, have an uncanny resemblance to streams, fish and birds.

Cities and global governance

States and nations are mostly a political, cultural or ethnic construct. The rise of today’s collection of states can be traced to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). Less than a quarter of today’s 200 or so countries existed with their current boundaries and governance structures a century ago. Yet every one of the world’s largest cities has been continuously inhabited for more than 200 years. Cities being immobile are largely defined by geography, trade and the flow of resources.

Canada provides an interesting perspective on the relative roles of cities and countries in global and regional geopolitics. In 1867, when Canada was created through the British North America Act, more than 80 per cent of Canada’s population of 3.6 million was rural. In distributing constitutional powers, provinces were seen as key, mainly for resource development and protection of territorial borders. With heavy losses in the First World War and growing industrialization, Canada surpassed the 50 per cent urban mark in 1921 (one of the earliest in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]-member countries to reach this milestone). Montreal was the largest city in Canada up until 1970, when it was surpassed by Toronto due to benefits of the Auto Pact and separatist frictions in Quebec.

Canadian cities played important roles in developing international associations. Metropolis was first headquartered in Montreal (1985); so too ICLEI in Toronto (1990). Vancouver hosted the first Habitat Conference (1976) and Greenpeace started in Vancouver (1971). Toronto also served as chair for the C40 from 2008 to 2010, and now hosts the Global City Indicators Facility and World Council on City Data. Canadian cities consistently score high on liveability compared to international peers.

Despite Canada’s international reputation as a global resource supplier, Canadian cities contribute an unduly large share of the Country’s GDP (about 80 per cent).³ The relatively small constitutional role for Canadian cities and few local finance tools are a source of consternation for municipal representatives.

City representatives often feel short shrift in political power vis à vis their national (and regional) representatives. Many countries provide disproportionality large influence to rural voters and governments. Much of this has to do with the organic (apolitical) development of cities. Large cities are also almost always divided into many local jurisdictions. In countries like Australia, Brazil and Canada, this was purposeful. Cities were sub-divided to help ensure that their political power did not exceed their regional and national counterparts (moving the capitals away from Sydney, Rio de Janeiro and Montreal or Toronto highlights this well).

Cities leading sustainable development efforts

As early as the fourteenth century an autonomous grouping of cities in Northern Europe convened the Hanseatic League to promote and protect trade within the region. The Hanseatic League was largely replaced through the emergence of local nations, especially Sweden, Germany and Prussia. Today’s nations negotiating for collective agreements can be traced back to the unsuccessful League of Nations. The League was replaced by the United Nations, yet systemic challenges remain.

The world’s 197 participants in the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) are disparate. Side arrangements such as the China–US agreement on GHG emission reductions, or G20 proposals, will continue to emerge. Countries can also opt out of an agreement. Another approach may be possible. Cities, which can be more pragmatic (non-mobile) and less political (the projection of power generally extends only to certainty of resource availability), can enter into ongoing ‘applied sustainability’ negotiations.

By selecting a target date, say 2050, cities can work collectively toward maximum future sustainability. This agreement would not be sufficient for global sustainable development; however, it is arguably a pre-condition. The approach, based on applied science and open-source metrics, is sufficiently robust to warrant consideration (and support from the engineering community, among others). The tools and framework to move the world’s largest cities toward sustainable development are presented in the following chapters.

The proposed city-based sustainable development ‘deal’ is less an agreement between participating cities than it is a suggested methodology for ongo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Searching for sustainability – the urgency of an effective approach
• 2 Sustainable development for cities and citizens
• 3 The urbanscape – why cities are at the core of sustainability
• 4 Cities defining sustainable development
• 5 Widening concepts – a cities approach to planetary boundaries
• 6 Market concepts – sustainability cost curves
• 7 Towards effective agreements on sustainable development through cities
• 8 The path forward
• 9 Afterword – The Buenos Aires Accord
• Annex
• Index