Figure 2.5: Effects of urban planning lock-ins


Urban


Centered on competiti- veness,


growth and order


planning lock-ins


Encourages the status quo


Curriculum promotes


Focused on international rankings and aesthetic visions


Largely fail to:


Tools and ideals of certain global north cities


Favour dominant racial, cultural or religious identities


Incorporate


environmental and equity considerations


of the public interest. This is especially the case in ethnically divided or post-war cities, where these visions can result in the creation of “ethnocratic” regimes (Yiftachel 2009).


While business-as-usual visions can and have been amended to include environmental sustainability principles, this piecemeal approach is usually insufficient and is often detrimental to ecosystems. One example is the inclusion of sustainability concepts, to boost competitive visions through “smart” transport solutions, such as the promotion of electric cars. These “adjustments” may help decrease air pollution in cities, however, the continuing promotion of car ownership and use in cities fails to address congestion and perpetuates inequity, safety issues and inefficiency. In contrast, a transport planning vision based on the universal provision of high quality public transport, which prioritises safe and reliable accessibility for low-income settlements, and disincentivizes private car use, offers the kind of planning shifts capable of disrupting the “high-consumption” cultures of many cities (see chapter 4).


Failure to imagine more transformative visions of equitable and environmentally sustainable cities, exposes many inhabitants to the darker side of the “world-class-eco city” aesthetic, a ‘sustainability-adjusted vision which often


exacerbates existing social and spatial inequalities. For example, based on several case studies in boroughs of New York, Gould and Lewis (2017) demonstrate how urban greening initiatives, justified in terms of promoting environmental sustainability, have often lead to the displacement of marginalised groups and individuals, deepening social and environmental inequality in the city through a process referred to as “green gentrification”. Greening, without taking into account social resistance movements and without insisting on policies that promote equity, surrenders consideration of social justice (for example, the right to housing) to market forces (Checker 2011; Gould and Lewis 2017).


The persistence of city visions based on maintaining order, growth or competitiveness result from a variety of processes. These include the dominance of urban planning curricula that have largely failed to consider citizen priorities and the worsening ecological, social, and economic crises. Most planning curricula continue to promote tools and ideals that rely on the experiences of certain cities perceived to be successful, still largely located in the Global North (Porter 2010; Sudaresan 2019). But a key factor is the adoption and support of such visions by well-connected urban and global actors, with a strong


Urban Dynamics for Environmental Action 29


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