Futureproof City

Ten Immediate Paths to Urban Resilience

Barry D. Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000436150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Futureproof City creates adaptability and resiliency in the face of the unknown challenges resulting from technological change, population explosion, global pandemic, and environmental crisis. A paradigm shift is urgently required in the means of conceiving, delivering, and managing city development to create better places to live. This book brings to the fore many new solutions currently being proposed and piloted globally, identifying ten key areas affecting the physical fabric of our cities where governments, planners, investors, and the individuals responsible for shaping lives can refocus their understanding, priorities, and funding in order to more effectively utilise the limited financial, natural, and time resources available. It will be key reading for every policy maker and professional working in sustainability, development, technology, health and welfare, investment, and risk issues in cities today.

1
Putting Wellness First

Re-evaluating Human Priorities in the Context of Health and Happiness

DOI: 10.4324/9781003112488-2

Urbanisation has always perhaps occurred as a result of the human desire to improve life opportunities, primarily through wealth accumulation. But evaluating those improvements in financial terms alone has led to imbalanced allocations of space, access, and activities in cities. The COVID-19 epidemic has brought into close focus the need for a change in priorities and alternative modes of behaviour and urban living that are necessary to create cleaner, safer, and healthier places for all; places that make people’s lives better and happier. Finding new ways of evaluating human progress and measuring how well our cities then meet people’s true needs becomes an essential step towards their improvement in both acting as a first step in preventative care provision and in efficiently allocating limited funding under the weight of burgeoning urban population growth.

Crumbling Values

“Nine-tenths of our happiness depends on health alone. With it everything becomes a source of pleasure, whereas without it nothing, whatever it may be, can be enjoyed.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life, 1851

What Is Progress?

It has been a longstanding and well-understood fact that healthy, happy populations are more productive and reduce the massive costs of healthcare and social services (Bloom and Canning, 2008; Oswald et al., 2015). Yet, dirty, polluted, inefficient cities have been created globally in the name of progress, prioritising economics above health and creating wealth rather than happiness. Measurements of progress have been universally structured around Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (Oswald et al., 2015), but what in fact is progress and how should it be measured? Unsurprisingly, it is not easy to find a clear definition because it is not an entirely objective concept (Schepelmann et al., 2009). It cannot be addressed solely by data-driven economic indicators since the subjective comes into play when considering the likes of health, well-being, happiness, quality of life, civilisation, and cultural perception. A country’s GDP is the most commonly used national accounting indicator today. It forms the basic framework for the System of National Accounts (SNA), the internationally agreed standard set of recommendations on how to compile measures of economic activity as first published by the UN in 1953, with a standardised methodology that enables international comparison anywhere in the world (Wesselink et al., 2007). However, it is designed to measure just the value of production, not wider economics, so how is it that such a narrow measurement of progress has come to dominate the direction and aspirations of the world today?

The concept of GDP first arose during the Second World War as an assessment tool based on the needs of maximised war production; a means by which to gauge economic activity, investment, and employment during that time. First published in the US in 1942, its emergence was a signifi-cant and important measure, and subsequently became adopted as a simple indicator of national achievement in the post-war years, where its usefulness was perhaps particularly to be trumpeted in the Cold War against the threat of communism in which the US was entrenched. Promoted to stress the benefits of capitalist economics through that era, its legacy has been to shape the global value system into the twenty-first century at the particular disregard of wider considerations of human progress associated with socialist values. The current climate and environmental emergency, resource depletion, wealth disparity, and social disorder have all been driven through the myopic goal of GDP growth. The National Accounts of Well-Being published by the New Economics Foundation in 2009 pointed out that GDP ‘obscured other vital parts of the economy: the core economy of family, neighbourhood, community and society, and the natural economy of the biosphere, our oceans, forests and fields’ (Michaelson et al., 2009). More tellingly, way back in 1968, Robert Kennedy gave his famous speech at the University of Kansas, in which he stated that:

Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armoured cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities … and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet [it] does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials … it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

(Kennedy, 1968)

It has for some time been the case, even before the COVID-19 pandemic brought health issues to the forefront of everyday living, that a reconsideration of what is used to define progress and how that is measured has been urgently needed across global societies. Financial systems have their place, and especially GDP, but that should be within a broader range of principles and metrics that prioritise wellness and social prosperity over and above individual and economic factors in reshaping living places. Affordable housing, safer streets, cleaner air, and less stress within a fairer society model are what people really want and what they really need. The first Path to Resiliency is therefore a shift in appreciated values of what is really important in life, and must highlight the true worth of long-term security, health, and happiness above all other matters (Wilson, 2018). It must focus on “Putting Wellness First”.

So how could measuring societal progress be done better? How can “Putting Wellness First” be measured instead of GDP? There have been a large number of advocates proposing alternatives that incorporate environmental and social aspects into the mix, with many also warning of the dangers of using one tool alone. One such tool is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which is predominantly used in measuring sustainability through more inclusive types of economics. It considers environmental and carbon footprints, impacts to existing resources, and the long-term impacts of pollution and environmental loss (Bagstad et al., 2014). Interestingly, whilst global GDP has increased more than threefold since 1950, economic welfare has actually decreased since 1978 according to GPI estimates, which extrapolated datasets from 17 countries containing 53% of the global population and 59% of global GDP (Kubiszewski et al., 2013). A further statistical composite is the Human Development Index (HDI), which is used by the United Nations Human Development Report (UNHDR) and utilises life expectancy, education metrics, and per capita income indicators to measure a country’s development. Other useful indicators frequently referenced include Ecological Footprint, Biocapacity, the Gini coefficient, the Index of Economic Freedom, the Global Peace Index, the Global Competitiveness Index, the Environmental Protection Index, and the Life Satisfaction Index, the last of which comes out of the area of subjective well-being (SWB) and measures self-esteem, well-being, and overall happiness with life, and is utilised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the UNHDR, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the New Economics Foundation (NEF), to name but a few.

Over the past few years, many countries and organisations have started to launch their own initiatives to measure well-being. For instance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a club of the world’s wealthiest countries, has developed a “better life index” as part of its Better Life initiative of 2011 (OECD, n.d.). An interactive Web-based tool, it underlines how prosperity is determined through the 11 topics of civic engagement, community, education, the environment, health, housing, income, jobs, life satisfaction, safety, and work-life balance. In fact, the organisation has already gone on record as having identified that per capita GDP is not even a good means of assessment of productivity progress, since important aspects of economic activity, such as household production, constitute between one-third and one-half of all valuable economic activity and are not accounted for (Veerle, 2011). Meanwhile, the World Bank understands that the value and importance of societal trust in market function as a component of wealth and well-being is not assessed through conventional means and could be over 20% of the value of all goods and services produced by businesses (Hamilton et al., 2016). There seems to be strong consensus that GDP just won’t do.

The expression “Gross National Happiness” (GNH) (European GNH Institute, 2018) was coined as far back as 1972 by Sicco Mansholt, one of the founding fathers of the European Union (EU) and the fourth President of the European Commission (European GNH Institute, 2018). GNH includes an index which is used to measure the collective happiness and well-being of a population, and even forms the philosophical basis that guides the government of Bhutan, whose GNH Index is instituted as the very goal of government in the Constitution enacted in 2008 (Royal Government of Bhutan, 2008). The Bhutanese government established four pillars of GNH measuring sustainable and equitable socio-economic development; environmental conservation; preservation and promotion of culture; and good governance (Royal Government of Bhutan, 2009). Following up on the moves taken by Bhutan, a World Happiness Report has been published annually by the United Nations since 2012 in order to rank countries based on a wide variety of data, the most important being the life evaluations taken from the Gallup World Poll (Gallup, n.d.). As such, it predominantly utilises the aforementioned “subjective well-being” to evaluate progress. Gallup suggest that its poll is the most comprehensive and far-reaching survey in the world, connecting with over 99% of the world’s adult population (Gallup, n.d.). Interestingly, Bhutan has not topped the list to date. So what makes us happy?

Even those not familiar with Abraham Maslow and his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” will still be able to inform us of what they consider to be their basic physical needs: the ability to breathe clean air, maintain reasonable health, eat and drink, find shelter, and clothe themselves. After that, our basic needs according to Maslow then focus on finding safety and security (McLeod, 2007). And yet even in the developed world, despite its GDP riches, providing those simple basic needs to the population has become challenging, where breathing polluted air and eating contaminated food and water have passed largely unnoticed for decades. A 2020 analysis of 12 US cities showed that millions of US citizens are facing rising and unaffordable bills for running water, with the combined price of water and sewage having increased by an average of 80% between 2010 and 2018. More than two-fifths of residents in some cities are living in neighbourhoods with unaffordable bills and risk being disconnected or losing their homes if they cannot pay (Lakhani, 2020). A global housing crisis is once more upon us, featuring homelessness, repossession, and unaffordable costs to large sectors of societies that are struggling to come to terms with a sense of their own values as to what is important. Are they happy?

Subjective well-being is being seen increasingly as the important tool in assessing progress in welfare and happiness terms, and governments now have more data and tools to systematically collect and analyse the considerations that make up Life Satisfaction. The most recent World Happiness Report focused on the aspects affecting life satisfaction from social trust and environmental factors. Having someone to count on, a sense of freedom to make key life decisions, generosity, and trust are all key issues and demonstrate that a good social environment operates to reduce inequality. The Report identifies that inequality of well-being is more important than income inequality in explaining average levels of happiness. Furthermore, life evaluation scores are generally higher for those living in cities than those in rural areas, and increasingly so for less developed economies. However, in the most well-developed countries, rural dwellers become increasingly happier than those in the cities, where belonging to a sense of local community becomes a key factor. Accumulated ‘positive mood experiences’ experienced in cities are related to being outdoors, in good weather, and within green space or the natural environment, and these are accentuated when undertaken as an activity with a friend or partner (Burger et al., 2020).

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ratified in 2015 currently form the benchmark for achieving holistic progress by the year 2030. They are assessed against 169 clear targets spread across 17 aspirational goals aimed at tackling nearly every facet of life under economic, social, and environmental development. Progress towards achieving the SDGs is published in the form of reports and accessed online via the ‘SDG-Tracker’ launched in June 2018, which presents data across 232 indicators from the UN and other international organizations (Ritchie et al., 2018). Meanwhile, the Sustainable Development Report assesses the progress of implementation across all 17 Goals through six SDG Transformations and publishes the SDG Index and Dashboards. Such a broad initiative has its detractors; however, since the SDGs are supposedly driving human well-being, how well do they actually reflect life satisfaction and wellness, and align with civic and environmental interests? There does in fact appear to be a significant correlation between the SDG Index and SWB scores assessed in the World Happiness Report, which appears to indicate that economic growth is an important early driver of well-being, but economic factors become increasing less important as development proceeds and that a more nuanced approach to civic development is required when trying to improve citizen well-being. Simply put, as countries get richer, their population’s sense of well-being stagnates unless continued economic growth is driven by sustainable concepts that can address improving environmental quality, reduced inequality, and improved welfare outcomes.

Environment and Wel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: A Clarion Call: The Urgent Case for Doing Things Differently
• 1 Putting Wellness First: Re-evaluating Human Priorities in the Context of Health and Happiness
• 2 Reconsider, Rethink, Redirect: Envisioning and Collaborating to Plan Resilient Living Places
• 3 Right Development in the Right Place: Mitigating the Challenges of Climate Impact through Land Management
• 4 Frames of Blue and Green: Adopting Green and Blue Infrastructure as the Fundamental Network to Plan Cities
• 5 Placing for Age: Adapting Urban Development for Diversity and Inclusivity
• 6 Think Fast, Think Smart: Incorporating Opportunities in the Digital Revolution
• 7 Empowering the Future: Transitioning to the Stored Energy Economy
• 8 Unleashing Urban Potential: Repurposing Streets to People’s Needs
• 9 Prosperity through Density: Accommodating Burgeoning Urban Populations
• 10 Both Safe and Dependable: Providing New Means to Quality Shelter for All
• Conclusion: Towards a New Mindset: Meeting the Needs of the Coming Urban Revolution
• Index