Cities 6 Conclusions

Cities are where some of the world’s most pressing challenges are concentrated: unsustainable resource and energy consumption, carbon emissions, pollution, and health hazards. But cities are also where hope lies.

They are magnets attracting hundreds of

millions of rural migrants in search for economic opportunities. The net effect of urbanisation on poverty reduction has been effective at the global level. Although urbanisation has been accompanied by increased pressure on the urban environment and the increase of the urban poor, these problems are not insurmountable.

As the nations of the world explore more sustainable development trajectories, this report argues that cities can and should play a leading role in greening economies – in

both developed and developing

countries. There are clear opportunities for national and city leaders to exploit urban areas to reduce carbon emissions and pollution, enhance ecosystems and minimise environmental risks.

Greening cities can also produce a set of wider

economic and social benefits. First, as well as lowering per capita carbon emissions, densification as a central green city strategy tends to enhance productivity, promote innovation, and reduce the capital and operating cost of infrastructure. Densification can also raise congestion and the local cost of living, but green city strategies and interventions to subsidise housing costs can help to mitigate these.

Second, in most countries cities will be important sites for the emerging green economy. Cities’ basic offer of proximity, density and variety delivers productivity benefits for firms, and helps stimulate innovation and new job creation – for example in high-tech clusters, as are already emerging in urban regions like the Silicon Valley. Much of a green economy is service-based, and will tend to cluster in urban areas where consumer markets are largest.

Third, social considerations can be fully integrated into the design of green cities. An emphasis on public transport, cycling, and walkability, for example, not only contributes to road safety and community cohesion but also works in favour of the urban low income class who rely on these transport modes much more than other segments of society. The consequently improved access to jobs, education and

medical facilities, clean energy, safe drinking water, and sanitation may hold the key to lifting the urban poor out of poverty altogether.

Greening cities is not cost free. There are tradeoffs and switching costs, creating both winners and losers. Consumer preferences are not always green. Cities may face financial, structural and technological constraints. And fragmented governance may lead to perverse outcomes of policy, if action is not carefully joined up between different spatial levels. The “rebound effect”, where energy-saving innovations actually raise total energy consumption, illustrates how many of these issues come together.

These factors suggest it is critical to look at both national and urban policy levers; and at the conditions that will enable cities in different parts of the world to make the transition to green economy models. In practice, green cities will require a coalition of actors across public, private and civil society sectors – and multilevel governance models that allow these actors to come together effectively.

Numerous instruments for enabling green cities are available and tested but need to be applied in a tailored, context-specific way. In contexts with strong local government it is possible to envisage a range of planning, regulatory, information and financing instruments to advance green infrastructure investments, green economic development and a multitrack approach to greater urban sustainability. City governments need to coordinate policies and decisions with other levels of government, but more importantly, they need to be equipped with strategic and integrated planning capacities, including the capacities to choose regulatory tools and economic incentives to achieve locally appropriate green city objectives.

In poorer cities, the building up of such capacities is important, as is their access to financial resources for investing in the various sectors of green cities. Here it may be more prudent to adopt a more pragmatic and minimalist approach, which primarily commits municipal sectors such as water, waste, energy and transport to a limited number of overarching strategic goals. These are the major areas where the support from national governments and international organisations is needed.

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