of total spending is expected to enhance sustainability (UNEP 2021). However, if correctly designed, accelerating green investments in the coming years could promote environmentally sustainable and resilient urban change while reducing inequities within and across generations (Hepburn et al. 2020; Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development 2020; Solecki et al. 2021).2


Cities are part of a continuum of a globalized but site- specific built space. As such, they need a coordinated and coherent vision of the future to guide transformation pathways, with flexible agendas, plans and coordination agreements. While this vision can be implemented in different ways, the selected pathways must recognize key aspects of cities: social and cultural diversity; social, environmental and spatial interlinkages; complex teleconnections; and capacity constraints on urban governments and civil societies to develop and implement policy. Institutions and urban residents must be willing to adapt to changing circumstances and understand that cities exist within larger organizational and governance systems. Action plans need to be tailored to varying degrees of local autonomy and democracy, and where possible include and empower all types of city residents as key actors. To be successful, transformation pathways for sustainable, resilient and just cities must overcome polarizing views between and within cities in terms of economic, political and social structures, cultures and institutions, patterns of injustice and exclusion, and everyday practices (Biermann et al. 2016; Swinburn et al. 2019; UNEP 2019; Delgado Ramos 2021).


4.2 Future cities: three dimensions of integrated action for urban transformation


Despite their diversity, cities have underlying similarities that allow them to be collectively reimagined and ultimately transformed. Building on these similarities while recognizing diversity, the task is to design integrated transformational pathways and practices with the power to deliver desirable outcomes on climate, environment, human health, well-being and equity. To be part of the solution, future cities must then address key arenas of urban life and collective action: environmental, economic and social sustainability; physical and community resilience; and just, inclusionary and multispecies governance. This latter entails both human and more- than-human rights to the city (Shingne 2020), as well as what has been termed a nature-positive approach that promotes a “new relationship between people and nature” to protect and restore natural habitats, promote a better built environment, safeguard the diversity of life, and halve the footprint of production and consumption (UNEP 2020a; World Wide Fund for Nature [WWF] 2020; Locke et al 2021).


2 In the meantime, temporal actions to cope with COVID-19 impacts that are becoming permanent in a diversity of cities, reveal that investments are not only possible but necessary. Small investments in, for example, the expansion of outdoor terraces, bike and pedestrian spaces, and urban green space already have had meaningful effects in cities such as Paris (which added 29.2 km of new bike lanes), London (25 km), Brussels (24.9 km), Berlin (24 km), Toronto (25 km), Bogotá (76 km), Mexico (22 km), and Melbourne (12 km). In Barcelona, in addition to 12 km of new bike lanes, more than 1,300 new outdoor terraces have been created by converting parking spaces around the city (Kraus and Koch 2021; Nikitas et al. 2021).


Cities are both blamed for and burdened by critical environmental challenges, some of which may persist for many decades to come (as is the case with chemical pollution and plastics, discussed in chapter 3). Moreover, while ongoing economic globalization may continue to drive economic and population growth and urban expansion in some cities, other urban regions may be hollowed out as their economic base becomes obsolete or moves elsewhere and populations shrink, leaving a legacy of abandoned neighbourhoods and stranded pollution hotspots (chapter 2).


Yet cities can catalyse transformative change through innovation, education, employment, economic diversity and economies of scale, as well as entertainment and cultural interaction (Bai et al. 2018; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018; Vardoulakis and Kinney 2019; Solecki et al. 2021). Integrated approaches take advantage of the cross-cutting nature of urban dynamics to be forward- looking while addressing a wide variety of legacy challenges (including environmental degradation, economic hardship and wide-ranging social problems). This strength provides a basis to reimagine, redesign, remake and rebuild in ways that contribute both to justice, equity and inclusion and to environmental sustainability, resilience, adaptive capacity and climate change mitigation.


This chapter describes this vision in terms of three primary dimensions of integrated action for urban transformation with the potential to recast cities as solutions rather than problems. Cities are complex dynamic systems and there is no perfect way to partition their activities, problems or related policy prescriptions. The three dimensions focus on flows of energy and materials; urban form (land-use and activity patterns); and behaviours of the individuals and institutions that orchestrate urban life. The dimensions were selected because they lie both at the heart of how cities work and how we can – and should – reshape them to address the pressing needs of the planet.


v Dimension 1: Net-zero3 circular cities: altering energy and


material flows to significantly reduce natural resource extraction, and achieve near net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution and waste.


v Dimension 2: Resilient & sustainable cities: changing urban form to protect vulnerable urban places and populations from environmental degradation, the impacts of climate change and extreme events, including associated disasters and everyday hazards.


v Dimension 3: Inclusive and just cities: inculcating individual, collective and institutional behaviour and governance frameworks that include all urban residents, urban nature and biodiversity, while considering justice across generations.


3 The laws of thermodynamics actually limit the possibility of net-zero schemes for material and energy recovery, which in turn constrain the potential of circular economies (due to the entropic nature of the economy itself; Georgescu-Roegen, 1971 and 1975; Giampietro y Funtowicz, 2020). For instance, ‘zero-waste’ is, strictly speaking not possible. In the area of carbon emissions, the use of the term net-zero emissions does apply from an accounting viewpoint as it allows us to aspire a zero outcome when we subtract carbon captured, for example, by land and water ecosystems, from current carbon emissions. But even if a zero-carbon goal is achieved, it does not necessarily limit environmental degradation and ecological justice. In other cases, the use of net- zero may lead to misleading understandings; for example when buildings are termed net zero energy, this refers to operating energy, and does not account for embedded energy in materials. Thus the net-zero concept must be used with care, despite its positive message.


Cities that Work for People and Planet


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