Towards a green economy

of functions within a three-tier system of governance which could help deliver green city strategies more effectively. In addition, international bodies and bilateral networks can help enabling developing country governments to invest in green cities by providing finance and by helping with technology transfer.

■ The national/state level creates the general conditions under which the economy works and for example, has a strong focus on social security; ensuring national policy on water; supplying infrastructure of national importance; and ensuring design standards by implementing general building regulation. In the context of a green economy, national government can set a price on carbon (carbon tax), create markets for clean technologies (carbon pricing, regulation, tax breaks), fund or enable major infrastructure investment (smart grid) and set minimum standards. Besides financing, the national level should also employ preferential policies to enable green cities.

■ The metropolitan/regional level includes the entire functional city-region, even though there is often a non-alignment between political boundaries and urban development. Metropolitan governance directly addresses three of the five principle categories of environmental performance (health, hazards and high quality urban environments) with a responsibility for a wide range of functions such as strategic planning, regulating waste disposal and water management, overseeing regional banks and land banks, ensuring skills training matches targets for the regional economy, promoting green transport infrastructure and operations, and setting specific building standards regarding flexible use, additional green targets and climate change adaptation. Increasingly, it is also the metropolitan level that addresses the transfer

of environmental costs and sustainable

consumption with targets regarding carbon reduction. In these cases, strategic actors such as publicly owned utility companies able to invest long-term or integrated, multi- modal transport agencies facilitating the greening of transport have proved to be extremely beneficial.

■ The local/municipal borough or district level operates for areas that might include between 100,000 to 500,000 residents and is responsible for implementing policies developed at other spheres; managing green objectives; implementing food and resource management in close consultation with residents; overseeing local policing; and providing input on socio-economic development for other spheres.

5.4 Planning and regulation

While the large proportion of informal practices makes planning and regulation less relevant in some cities in developing nations, they are the most common

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policy instruments that shape urban development in more complex and mature political environments. In these instances, they range from strategic and land- use planning to building codes and environmental regulation. Besides regulating for desired environmental outcomes, they help to kick-start green innovation and create demand for green products at various levels.

To maximise synergies across different urban sectors, integrated planning that combines land use and urban development with other policies and cuts across the urban functional region of cities is critical in achieving greater environmental performance.

The recently

launched World Bank Eco2 Cities programme, for example, demonstrates why planning, finance and infrastructure imperatives are inextricably linked in a low-carbon world (Suzuki et al. 2010). This programme argues for a one-system approach to: “realise the benefits of integration by planning, designing and managing the whole urban system.” On a practical level this implies that all cities need to understand their urban form and the nature and patterning of material resource flows through the urban system.

The intersections of infrastructure and the dynamics, resilience or vulnerability of urban form are crucial. As described previously, it is not untypical for poor people to live without access to various infrastructure networks in the most climate-vulnerable areas of a city (Moser and Satterthwaite 2008). Possible impacts on urban form and resource flows need to be considered when planning infrastructure investments, especially given the enormous sums required for capital expenditure in rapidly urbanising areas. More than anything else, urban sustainability will depend upon how these sums are going to be allocated.

A combined understanding of urban form and resource flows helps isolate effective actions to achieve greater overall resource efficiency. It also forces a longer-term horizon for understanding trends, the most strategic intervention points, and how to weigh up trade-offs between various spaces of an urban region. If it is based on sound data, it will hold the potential to provide a shared basis for understanding what is going on in a city, where it may be leading and what needs to be done to change the efficiency of the overall system (Crane, Swilling et al. 2010). It is only when this kind of analysis and political discussion becomes commonplace, that one can achieve a broad-based commitment to effective long- term strategic planning.

The recent UN-Habitat Global Report on Human

Settlements seeks to bring planning back to the centre of urban development debates (UN Habitat 2009), reinforcing the idea of strategic spatial planning that focuses on a “directive, long range, spatial plan,