5.1 From lock-ins to transformative pathways


The fundamental changes needed to achieve the vision and dimensions presented in chapter 4 require a shared understanding, commitment and desire for profound, strategic and substantial change to tackle interconnected environmental and development challenges through the notion of “transformation”. In recent years, urban practitioners, policymakers, local authorities and communities, social movements and activists, think tanks and academics alike have shared thinking in this direction.


However, planning for such transformation is a massive challenge for cities, where policy and investment changes often occur incrementally and where systemic changes often require decades of consistent leadership, investment, and aligned effort. Change might typically begin with an inspiring project, a new policy, a new knowledge partnership, or an active coalition. Over time, these important first steps may become catalytic efforts towards the development of a transformation pathway, involving multi-faceted, articulated, sustained and scaled up efforts, leading over time to transformative changes at the city scale and beyond.


This chapter showcases some of the impressive efforts that cities have made in starting transformative processes to turn visions into actions that make a difference. The pathways and cases presented here are not intended to illustrate the best or only way to create transformative change, as no city has yet reached this ambitious goal. Rather, they offer key principles and practices of policymaking, planning, multilevel governance, citizen participation, technological development and other crucial elements that together pave the way for transformative change. It is important to recognize that in most cases, the outcomes achieved at the city level represent only a fraction of the potential transformation a city needs to produce to achieve social and environmental justice and the environmental sustainability objectives called for in GEO-6 (United Nations Environment Programme [UNEP] 2019). The real-world examples reviewed throughout this chapter point towards the successful restructuring of fundamental processes of governance that can sustain and eventually achieve these transformational outcomes in the longer term.


As shown in Figure 5.1 and discussed in chapter 2, designing and activating pathways towards sustainable and just outcomes requires simultaneous efforts and commitment to tackle deep-seated lock-in processes relating, in particular, to the political economy of cities, outdated urban planning approaches and exclusionary governance models. This shift requires addressing difficult trade-offs, working in an integrated fashion across visioning, planning, budgeting, procurement and operations, and confronting existing power structures and balances. It also requires improvements to be made in terms of technology and infrastructure, with specific emphasis on valorizing existing knowledge and low-tech approaches and on equitable access to new technology and related materials and product designs. Additionally, just transitions to urban


96 GEO for Cities


sustainability require changes in the education and training of urban professionals and managers, and changes in consumer preferences and behaviours.


This is no small task, which explains the tendency towards inertia in many cities, even as they adopt ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and other sustainability targets.


The importance of tackling these lock-ins should not be underestimated, as they mark the difference between current and desired outcomes and are key to counteracting natural resource extraction, carbon-intensive development, and environmentally damaging practices – the impacts of which are described in chapter 3 – all of which worsen social inequalities. In other words, once lock-ins have been overcome, transformative pathways are much more likely to succeed.


The term “pathways” describes the different ways in which institutions and city-makers create the enabling conditions, deliberative forums, policies, planning routes, markets, technologies, products and consumption choices that can achieve transformative results.


The establishment of a transformative pathway often begins from a single entry point: v Sometimes the process starts with the implementation of innovative policies;


v In other cases, transformative pathways occur through changes in the organizational and governance structure of urban institutions.


In some cases, pathways are led by the collective action of citizens and civil society organizations. A number of bold city actions that, over time, bring about the major environmental, resilience, equity and social justice changes described in chapter 4 are examined below. Moving towards this vision and these dimensions involves changes in socioeconomic, political and technological systems, as well as fundamental changes to culture, collective decision- making and individual behaviour.


Pathways might initially be triggered by forward-looking city strategies, reactions to local or global shocks, adaptations to chronic stresses or a combination of these factors (Levy et al. 2017). However, without paying careful attention to the multiple dimensions that enable pathways to become systemic and transformational, opportunities to advance the vision and dimensions described in chapter 4 can be missed. Focusing on each of these three dimensions, this chapter examines the entry points, opportunities and precedents that these pathways can build upon. Each pathway contains case studies used to demonstrate how it might be shaped, based on a large amount of empirical evidence of success and trade-offs.


While real-world examples of significant urban transformations are not always easy to identify, the examples in this chapter aim to show how transformative pathways are being crafted in practice and why they


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