(3) social inclusion and multispecies justice as core areas for advancing sustainability.


Together, these dimensions cut across city and regional land uses and sociotechnical systems alongside biophysical features and ecologies; power relationships, governance systems and institutions; energy, materials and information flows; and cultural practices, social behaviour and multispecies interactions.


Shared understanding, commitment and desire for deep, strategic and substantial urban change to tackle interconnected environmental and development challenges are needed to transform the vision into a reality in cities around the world.


Making progress towards environmentally sustainable, just and inclusive urban transformation requires pathways to build urban circularity, achieve deep decarbonization, design for urban resilience and support social inclusion and justice in cities. Injecting a justice perspective across all these pathways is crucial to ensure that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.


Designing and implementing pathways towards environmentally sustainable and just outcomes requires simultaneous strategies to overcome the deep-seated lock-ins that prevail in many cities, particularly in relation to their political economy, business-as-usual urban planning approaches and at times exclusionary and technocratic governance models.


While most cities pursuing transformative change are only achieving a fraction of the potential outcomes required to ensure that urban development is headed in the right direction, many such experiences show that the successful restructuring of fundamental processes of governance can eventually achieve and sustain these transformational outcomes in the longer term.


The pathways presented in this report are often complex, and they must be so if they are to solve the interlinked problems of social equity and environmental sustainability. An overarching lesson is that it is unrealistic to expect any one actor to play a transformational role alone. Working together is the key.


To achieve these transformation pathways, several important actions will need to be taken, including:


v Designing urban infrastructure for more equitable, resilient, and environmentally sustainable living, production and consumption: Because urban infrastructure is long-lasting, it can ‘lock-in’ and shape resource needs and service inequities for decades to come.


v Investing in mechanisms for cross-sectoral and multi-jurisdictional collaboration, governance, and


implementation: Systemic, transformative action requires cross-sectoral integration as well as coordination between jurisdictions both within urban and peri-urban regions and between local, subnational, and national authorities.


v Seeking equity and justice across all local environmental action and programming: Equity and justice should not be seen as sectoral considerations to be addressed as an afterthought. They require strategies to shift the multiple structural drivers of inequity that are commonly found in cities. For example, in the case of informality, the everyday activities and livelihoods of ordinary women and men need to be recognized and supported, rather than viewed as a burden.


v Building reciprocal rural-urban linkages: A range of flows and interactions between urban and rural areas can serve as entry points to develop interventions with reciprocal benefits. These include the two-way movement of people, capital, information, nutrients, ecosystem services and more.


v Incorporating insights from data and science into decision-making processes: Many of the insights needed to guide long-range planning and transformational pathways require specialist expertise that often does not sit within local governments. Expert guidance is often needed, for instance, to gather, process and interpret the data required for material flow analyses, greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity baselines and resilience assessments, among others.


v Fostering inter-city exchange and co-learning: Most cities face a combination of challenges that need to be identified and resolved in line with their own development pathways, instead of implementing strategies that may have been externally prescribed. However, although urban agendas need to be adapted to their own contexts, geographies and histories, there is enormous value in sharing experiences with other cities.


As stated by Maassen and Galvin (2019):


“[r]eal world examples of deep urban transformations are hard to come by.”


Fortunately, there is a rich history of progress towards the changes we need. Collectively, we must identify what works and what does not, and come up with ethical principles for locally adapted solutions for transformative action from existing experiences and projected trends. Doing so will allow us to develop a collective knowledge and experience base on how cities, citizens, local authorities and their networks are co-producing pathways towards progressive and forward-looking urban agendas while inspiring others to do the same. The responsibility and opportunity to take on this challenge lies with us all so that everyone can live in the kinds of cities that we deserve.


Summary for city-level decision makers 11


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