disproportionately vulnerable to and affected by climate change and less able to relocate away from these areas (Satterthwaite et al. 2020).
Urban inequality is also becoming further entrenched through climate change mitigation activities, both in urban cores and peri-urban areas. For instance, emerging “green enclaves”, such as Masdar in Abu Dhabi, and upmarket green suburban estates that promote low-carbon urban living, often experiment with sustainability innovations such as ecosystem service schemes. However, they often do so without considering the affordability of housing, reinforcing existing inequalities. Similarly, improvements to local air quality and the installation of energy-efficient housing in certain neighbourhoods can have a perverse effect on urban wealth divisions as they can lead to increases in real estate prices. This is what some researchers have called “green gentrification” or the growing phenomenon by which environmental projects are contributing to the displacement of low-income – and often racialized – communities (Checker 2011; Gould and Lewis 2017).
A policy focus on pro-environmental behaviour and building design can help limit the environmental impacts of affluent lifestyles. When consumption patterns are included in greenhouse gas emissions accounting, affluent citizens contribute most to the climate crisis (Kartha et al. 2020). In Germany, for example, household income is a better predictor of carbon footprint than environmental awareness and behaviour (Moser and Kleinhückelkotten 2017). In wealthy urban communities, the many sustainability and climate change benefits derived from higher densities can be undermined by high levels of consumption (Meirelles et al. 2021; Paravantis et al. 2021). Greenhouse gas accounting methods that include both direct and indirect sources of urban emissions can help policymakers design solutions that deliver the greatest reductions, but new approaches and significant behavioural changes will ultimately be required to decouple economic growth and greenhouse-gas-intensive consumption in cities (Meirelles et al. 2021).
In light of these findings, organized groups, activists and academics are calling for the integration of a housing justice and global rights agenda into urban climate action plans (Rice et al. 2019; Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 2000; Habitat International Coalition 2021) (Global Platform for the Right to the City 2021). When inequality and climate change are inextricably linked, their solutions must also go hand in hand. Coordinated local, subnational and national policies are needed to address structural drivers of greenhouse gas emissions and the intersecting environmental crises. In turn, addressing urban inequalities presents a key opportunity for environmental sustainability. While business-as-usual urbanization disconnects ecosystem functions from urban structure, equitable cities can be engines for rapid positive change and have the potential to provide access to education, income, information, health care and culture, all of which can greatly advance environmental and most other sustainable development goals (IRP 2018). Reducing inequality can also help reduce consumption levels (Samaniego et al. 2014; Shin, Lees and López-Morales 2015).
26 GEO for Cities
Equitable and environmentally sustainable cities can generate resource efficiencies, promote ecosystem restoration, curb biodiversity loss and promote sustainable resource use, due to their population concentration and economic potential. Yet, we continue to build and govern cities in ways that perpetuate inequalities without properly considering the impact this has on finite planetary resources and the healthy ecosystems on which they depend (IRP 2018). In the following section, we examine some of the key forces that lock cities into environmentally unsustainable and unequal urbanization trajectories.
2.3 Unpacking city “lock-ins”
Despite increasing scientific evidence on the economic costs of inaction on the environment (IPCC 2014; IRP 2018; ADB, UNEP and UNECA 2019), the majority of cities and urban areas appear stuck on unsustainable “business-as- usual” models, defined by interconnected and deepening environmental and social crises. Notwithstanding the difficulties inherent to steering cities towards the net- zero, resilient, inclusive and just pathways outlined in chapters 4 and 5 of this report, this section analyses some of the key processes that hinder change or cause further deterioration. It does so by examining three key aspects of this problem, namely: the structural drivers or the political economy of cities that underpin unequal and environmentally unsustainable development practices; the dominance of business-as-usual urban planning visions and practices, including infrastructure systems; and the multiple governance webs within which cities operate. Together, they constitute city “lock-ins”.
2.3.1 The political economy of cities
The business-as-usual models discussed above are underpinned by a series of structural drivers that tend to lock cities and urban areas into environmentally unsustainable urban forms and development patterns. These lock-in processes broadly fall into two areas: economic structural drivers, and existing systems of power that cut across gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, migration status and other markers of difference. In different cities, these markers of difference intersect with vested interests to reproduce inequalities (Levy et al. 2017; Sultana 2020). As described below, both dimensions work together to perpetuate urban systems that maintain unjust distributions of the benefits of environmental initiatives and the burdens of environmental impacts, while deepening extractive urban development models (Agyeman, Bullard and Evans 2003).
A majority of cities and urban areas remain locked into pathways defined by resource-intensive development models, with little consideration given to natural resource constraints or environmental protection and vital, yet fragile, ecosystems (UNEP 2019a). Whether dominated by the service sector, manufacturing or raw material extraction, these development models tend to rely on continually boosting local and international production and consumption of individual and collective goods. These models are a far cry from the nature-positive and zero-
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