The previous two chapters have shown that much of our planet’s economic, social, cultural and political life plays out in cities, including urban and suburban places, dense urban cores and satellite cities, and expansive metropolitan regions (chapter 2). Cities directly and indirectly account for most of the world’s energy and material consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste generation (Seto et al. 2014; Baynes and Musango 2018; International Resource Panel [IRP] 2018; Kaza et al. 2018). The impacts of this resource consumption and waste and emission generation span the globe and typically have negative effects on the environment. The scale of urban impacts depends on how cities work: how we produce goods and services; how we plan, design and build; how we live, feed, work and travel; and how – and who – governs these urban areas. Reimagined urban futures that address how cities evolve and work and who participates and benefits are needed to avoid the looming environmental and climate crises.


Cities have the potential to radically alter current trends of accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and social stress. To see how cities could be part of the solution to these collective challenges, this chapter will offer a multidimensional, flexible and comprehensive vision of an urban future that addresses efficiency and economic organization, the built environment and governance for urban planning. This vision is based on three dimensions of integrated action for urban transformation. These are not blueprints for urban change, because priorities and implementation timescales may vary. But they focus on rethinking current political and economic structures, institutions, policies and behaviours, and moving towards more environmentally sustainable, resilient and socially just futures for both the Global North and the Global South. In short, these dimensions disrupt embedded ideas about cities and urban life.


4.1 Cities as opportunities: using local turning points to avoid global tipping points


As highlighted in the sixth Global Environmental Outlook, the global environment is facing a crisis driven by population growth, demographics, socioeconomic and cultural dynamics and behaviour, technological development, urbanization, and climate change (United Nations Environment Programme [UNEP] 2019). Cities – or more generally urban regions – around the globe (chapter 3) and patterns of urban life have a major influence on this crisis. In a rapidly urbanizing world, we must accept that cities will increasingly play a key role in ensuring an environmentally sustainable and inclusive planetary future. This chapter explores how they can also catalyse global turning points and provide opportunities for sustainable, healthier, low- carbon, resilient, inclusive and just ways of living.


Ensuring cities can take advantage of appropriate levels of responsibility and implement sustainable and equitable transformative actions means addressing a number of challenges:


66 GEO for Cities


v the ideologies of unlimited growth that define current economic systems;


v accelerating environmental degradation and climate change;


v ingrained everyday practices, with social inequalities that cut across age, gender, economic status, race and ethnicity, caste, religion, ability and other forms of difference.


Success or failure will be profoundly influenced by how much we consume, where and how often we travel, what we save or add to the waste stream, and widespread expectations of continually expanding consumption. For transformative change, cities must grapple with a series of challenges: decoupling energy and material consumption from the economy and aligning them with planetary boundaries; responding to the complexities of urban systems; working across scales to design comprehensive solutions; reorienting economic structures and incentives; and redirecting policy and cultural practices based on consumerism and accumulation to focus on meeting basic needs and ensuring quality of life and well-being for the planet and people.


The diversity of cities and urban regions – and their institutions – means there is no one-size-fits-all set of solutions (World Climate Research Programme 2019; Bai et al. 2018; see also chapter 2). Rather, success depends on the co-production of knowledge and potential solutions across a wide range of cities to support local capacity- building, participatory urban governance, unbiased facilitation, open communication and accountability (World Climate Research Programme 2019; Solecki et al. 2021). Social learning has the potential to maximize potential co-benefits, minimize trade-offs and handle undesirable outcomes of approaches implemented at different temporal and spatial scales (Ensor and Harvey 2015; Fisher et al. 2016; Lindsay 2018). Finally and crucially, cities need sufficient stable funding from global sources and national and state governments to meet challenges on the ground. The scale of these funding requirements will stretch the fiscal capacities of even the wealthiest countries under favourable economic conditions, let alone middle- and low-income countries during economic downturns or crises, such as the multidimensional crisis created by COVID-19.1


Windows of opportunity that arise during crises can transform business-as-usual practices that are not considered sustainable. Yet as of May 2020, only 4 per cent of the $7.3 trillion for COVID-19 recovery plans was allocated to “green” productive investments with mid- to long-term returns (defined as investments with the potential to reduce greenhouse emissions) (Hepburn et al. 2020, p. S363). A United Nations Environment Programme report that assessed fiscal spending of the fifty largest economies during 2020 confirmed that efforts indeed have fallen short to accelerate a “green recovery” as 18 per cent of recovery spending – of about $14.6 trillion dollars (excluding the European Commission commitments) – or 2.5 per cent


1 Although some crises may present opportunities to accelerate positive transformation, as explored in the Cape Town Resilient Pathway case study in chapter 5.


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