essay on sustainable cities

Essay on Sustainable Cities And Communities

Students are often asked to write an essay on Sustainable Cities And Communities in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Sustainable Cities And Communities

What are sustainable cities.

Cities that can meet their needs without harming the environment are called sustainable cities. They use less energy, water and resources. They also produce less waste and pollution. Sustainable cities are good for people and the planet.

Why are Sustainable Cities Important?

Cities are home to most of the world’s population. They are also responsible for a large share of the world’s environmental problems. Sustainable cities can help to reduce these problems and make the world a better place to live.

How Can We Create Sustainable Cities?

There are many things we can do to create sustainable cities. We can use renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power. We can also reduce our water consumption and waste production. We can make our cities more walkable and bikeable, and we can encourage people to use public transportation.

Benefits of Sustainable Cities

Sustainable cities have many benefits. They are healthier and more livable. They are also more resilient to climate change. Sustainable cities are good for business and the economy. They attract businesses and workers, and they create jobs.

250 Words Essay on Sustainable Cities And Communities

What are sustainable cities and communities.

Sustainable cities and communities are places where people can live happily without harming the planet. These cities make sure everyone has a nice place to live, clean air to breathe, and enough parks and green spaces to enjoy. They also use energy from the sun, wind, or water, which is better for the earth than burning coal or oil.

Why Are They Important?

Our planet is facing big problems like pollution and climate change. By creating sustainable cities, we can help solve these issues. These cities produce less trash and pollution, which means cleaner air and water for us and animals. They also help save energy and resources, making sure there’s enough for everyone now and in the future.

How Do They Work?

In sustainable cities, buildings use less energy because they are designed to get as much light and warmth from the sun as possible. Public transport is easy to use, cheap, and doesn’t pollute the air. People also have safe paths to walk or bike, making it easy to choose not to use a car. Recycling is a big part of life, with everyone helping to reuse and reduce waste.

Everyone Plays a Part

Creating sustainable cities isn’t just a job for mayors or government leaders. Everyone, including you and me, can help by saving energy, recycling, and choosing to walk or bike instead of asking for a ride in a car. When we all work together, we can make our cities better places to live, not just for us, but for all living things on our planet.

500 Words Essay on Sustainable Cities And Communities

Sustainable cities: a greener future.

Sustainable cities are designed to minimize their negative impact on the environment and ensure a high quality of life for their residents. They aim to balance economic development, social equity, and environmental protection.

Key Elements of Sustainable Cities

2. Green Spaces: Sustainable cities incorporate green spaces like parks, gardens, and green roofs into their urban design. These spaces provide recreational opportunities, improve air quality, and support biodiversity.

3. Energy Efficiency: Sustainable cities aim to reduce energy consumption by promoting energy-efficient buildings, appliances, and transportation systems. This helps combat climate change and lowers energy costs.

5. Waste Management: Sustainable cities implement comprehensive waste management systems that minimize waste generation and promote recycling, composting, and waste-to-energy technologies. This helps reduce pollution and conserve resources.

6. Sustainable Transportation: Sustainable cities promote sustainable transportation options like public transportation, cycling, and walking. This reduces air pollution, traffic congestion, and improves public health.

8. Community Engagement: Sustainable cities prioritize community engagement and participation in decision-making. This ensures that the city’s development aligns with the needs and aspirations of its residents.

1. Improved Public Health: Sustainable cities promote active lifestyles, clean air, and access to green spaces, which contribute to improved public health and well-being.

2. Reduced Environmental Impact: Sustainable cities minimize their environmental impact by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, conserving resources, and protecting biodiversity.

3. Economic Prosperity: Sustainable cities attract businesses and investment due to their high quality of life, skilled workforce, and innovative solutions.

4. Resilience: Sustainable cities are better prepared to face challenges like climate change, natural disasters, and economic downturns due to their focus on long-term planning and resilience.

Sustainable cities are vital for creating a more livable, equitable, and sustainable future for all. By embracing sustainable practices and policies, cities can reduce their environmental impact, improve the quality of life for their residents, and contribute to a healthier planet.

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Sustainable development goal 11: sustainable cities and communities.

Sustainable Development Goal 11, one of 17 goals that make up the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, provides targets and guidance for urban planning to support cities with growing populations.

Anthropology, Sociology, Biology, Health, Conservation, Social Studies, Civics

The Tower Bridge

The tower bridge is a symbol of the city to many locals and foreigners alike. The tower bridge was built in 1886 and crosses over the River Thames.

Photograph by Robert Bye

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 is about making “cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.” It is one of the 17 SDGs in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development .

In 2015, the United Nations (UN) adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development , a plan to promote peace and sustainable growth worldwide. One of the goals within the plan is SDG 11, which addresses urban development. The goal says cities should ensure access to safe and affordable housing, public transportation, and public green spaces. It states that cities should be resilient to natural disasters and protect those in vulnerable situations while also minimizing economic loss.

One sustainability target that is often overlooked is social sustainability and civic engagement . This includes actions individuals can take, like voting for measures that increase sustainability in their own city or for politicians who support these measures. People can also attend their city’s public forums to give feedback on sustainability initiatives. Taken as a whole, SDG 11 is a comprehensive and complex goal: creating sustainable cities that can withstand both climate change and unprecedented growth.

The Agenda for Sustainable Development , and the goals contained within it, are important because nations are facing new challenges as their cities grow in size and in population. The 2019 progress review of SDG 11 stated: “Globally, urban areas are expanding at a faster rate than their populations. Between 2000 and 2014, areas occupied by cities grew 1.28 times faster than their populations.” This means that cities are sprawling and becoming less dense. This leaves some urban residents without access to necessary infrastructure , like public transportation.

Environmental concerns are heightened in areas of urban growth as well. Air quality is worse in urban areas, and cities account for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions . Cities are also extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change , as a high number of urban areas lie along coastlines, which are prone to climate change –related natural disasters.

Many cities have already implemented sustainability efforts to meet SDG 11. Cities such as London, England, and New York City, New York, have passed legislation for congestion pricing to reduce air pollution. Congestion pricing is used to discourage people from driving by charging drivers higher tolls if they travel during rush hour or in certain high-traffic areas. Drivers of electric cars are sometimes allowed to travel for free in order to encourage environmentally conscious travel. Individuals can participate in this effort by choosing an electric car as their next vehicle or opting to walk or bike more frequently.

Though SDG 11 is primarily focused on government action, the initiatives need community buy-in from individual citizens as well as community leaders. For example, individuals can take actions such as fixing up their local parks, creating rooftop gardens, or participating in community composting programs to improve the quality of greenspaces and create additional ones in new spots. People can make small steps in their own neighborhoods to support sustainable cities on a world-wide level.

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GOAL 11: Sustainable cities and communities

Learn more about SDG 11

Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable:

There is a strong link between the quality of life in cities and how cities draw on and manage the natural resources available to them.  To date, the trend towards urbanization has been accompanied by increased pressure on the environment and accelerated demand for basic services, infrastructure, jobs, land, and affordable housing, particularly for the nearly 1 billion urban poor who live in informal settlements.

Due to their high concentration of people, infrastructures, housing and economic activities, cities are particularly vulnerable to climate change and natural disasters impacts. Building urban resilience is crucial to avoid human, social and economic losses while improving the sustainability of urbanization processes is needed to protect the environment and mitigate disaster risk and climate change.

Resource efficient cities combine greater productivity and innovation with lower costs and reduced environmental impacts, while providing increased opportunities for consumer choices and sustainable lifestyles.

Data and Statistics / Facts and Figures:

• The world’s cities occupy just 3 per cent of the Earth’s land, but account for 60-80 per cent of energy consumption and 75 per cent of carbon emissions.

Targets linked to the environment:

• Target 11.2: By 2030, provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons
• Target 11.3: By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries
• Target 11.4: Strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage
• Target 11.5: By 2030, significantly reduce the number of deaths and the number of people affected and substantially decrease the direct economic losses relative to global gross domestic product caused by disasters, including water-related disasters, with a focus on protecting the poor and people in vulnerable situations
• Target 11.6: By 2030, reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality and municipal and other waste management
• Target 11.7: By 2030, provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, in particular for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities
• Target 11.a: Support positive economic, social and environmental links between urban, per-urban and rural areas by strengthening national and regional development planning
• Target 11.b: By 2020, substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans towards inclusion, resource efficiency, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, resilience to disasters, and develop and implement, in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, holistic disaster risk management at all levels

To learn more about UN Environment Programme's contributions to SDG 11:

• SDG Issue Brief on  Make Cities and Human Settlements Inclusive, Safe, Resilient and Sustainable

Related Sustainable Development Goals

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Sustainable cities and human settlements

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Publications.

• Reports from Local Authorities

Human settlements

Cities are hubs for ideas, commerce, culture, science, productivity, social, human and economic development. Urban planning, transport systems, water, sanitation, waste management, disaster risk reduction, access to information, education and capacity-building are all relevant issues to sustainable urban development.

In 2008, for the first time in history, the global urban population outnumbered the rural population. This milestone marked the advent of a new 'urban millennium' and, by 2050, it is expected that two-thirds of the world population will be living in urban areas. With more than half of humankind living in cities and the number of urban residents growing by nearly 73 million every year it is estimated that urban areas account for 70 per cent of the world's gross domestic product and has therefore generated economic growth and prosperity for many.

Given the importance of this topic to global development efforts, recent movements pushing to address sustainable development from an urban perspective have taken place throughout the world. Results from this movement can be seen in the inclusion of a stand-alone goal on cities and urban development in the 2030 Agenda, Sustainable Development Goal 11, "make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable". There is also recognition of the cross-cutting nature of urban issues, which have an impact on a number of other Sustainable Development Goals, including SDGs 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 15, and 17, among others. UN-Habitat's complementary New Urban Agenda, adopted as the outcome document from the Habitat III Conference in 2016, seeks to offer national and local guidelines on the growth and development of cities through 2036.

Prior to the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, Millennium Development Goal 7, target 11, made a call for efforts to achieve, "a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers" by 2020.

Sustainable human settlements development was also discussed at the second and third sessions of the Commission on Sustainable Development. "Promoting sustainable human settlements development" is the subject of Chapter 7 of Agenda 21, which calls for 1) providing adequate shelter for all; 2) improving human settlements management; 3) promoting sustainable land-use planning and management; 4) promoting the integrated provision of environmental infrastructure: water, sanitation, drainage and solid waste management; 5) promoting sustainable energy and transport systems in human settlements; 6) promoting human settlements planning and management in disaster-prone areas; 7) promoting sustainable construction industry activities; and 8) promoting human resource development and capacity-building for human settlements development.

Paragraph 89 of the 2030 Agenda calls on major groups and other stakeholders, including local authorities, to report on their contribution to the implementation of the Agenda. Local and regional governments have a wealth of valuable experience in the "localization" of the 2030 Agenda, where they provide leadership in the mobilization of a wide range of stakeholders, the facilitation of "bottom-up" and inclusive processes, and the formation of multi-stakeholder partnerships.

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• January 2015 SDG 11 SDG 11 aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. In particular, its targets 11.1-11.3 aim to ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums, provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, and enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanisation and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries, by 2030. This goal also calls for strengthening efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage, significantly reducing, by 2030, the number of deaths caused and the number of people affected by disasters,
• January 2002 World Urban Forum- 7 Convened by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) for the first time in 2002, the World Urban Forum (WUF) is a non-legislative technical forum, hosted in a different city every two years, responsible for examining the most pressing issues currently facing at global level in the context of human settlements, including rapid urbanization and its impact on cities, communities, economies, climate change and policies.
• January 2001 Istanbul +5 The GA held a Special Session in June 2001 to review and assess the implementation of the Habitat Agenda, five years after its adoption. In order to evaluate the progress undergone by each country to meet the commitments and strategies announced in the Habitat Agenda, all Member States were requested to draft a report focused on local and national implementation of the Habitat Agenda.
• January 1996 Habitat Agenda The UN held a second conference on cities - Habitat II- in 1996 in Istanbul, Turkey. The conference aimed at appraising two decades of progress since Habitat I and at identifying fresh goals for the new millennium. Adopted by 171 countries, the outcome political document – the Habitat Agenda – contained over 100 commitments and 600 recommendations.
• January 1992 Agenda 21 (Chap. 7) Chap. 7 of Agenda 21 is dedicated to Promoting Sustainable Human Settlement Development, whose objective is the improvement of the social, economic and environmental quality of human settlements and the living and working environments of all people, in particular the urban and rural poor.
• January 1987 Our Common Future (Chap.6) Also known as the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future was published in 1987 with the aim of reaffirming the spirit of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment - the Stockholm Conference. Chapter 6 of the Report is entitled "The Urban Challenge" and focuses on the significant increase that developing world's urban population has experienced between 1940 and 1980. It also formulates projections about its future trends and urges Third World Cities to take measures to improve capacity to produce and manage their urban infrastructure, services. Furthermore, the Report identifies the problems faced by many cities in both developing and developed countries and calls governments to design explicit settlements strategies to guide the process of urbanization.
• January 1985 World Habitat Day With the adoption of Resolution 40/202 in 1985, the first Monday of October of every year has been designated by the UN GA as World Habitat Day. The first World Habitat Day was celebrated in 1986. The World Habitat Day aims at reflecting on the state of towns and cities at global level, on the basic right of all to adequate shelter and at raising awareness of what can be done at individual level to shape a better future for these settlements.
• January 1976 Vancouver Declaration Held in Vancouver in 1976 and known as the first international UN conference to fully recognize the challenge of urbanization, Habitat I resulted in: the establishment of the precursors of UN-Habitat: the United Nations Commission on Human Settlements – an intergovernmental body – and the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (commonly referred to as “Habitat”), which served as the executive secretariat of the Commission.

Please follow this link to see a list of reports from local authorities .

Goal 11: Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

Goal 11 is about making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

Cities represent the future of global living. The world’s population reached 8 billion on 2022 over half living in urban areas. This figure is only expected to rise, with 70 per cent of people expected to live in cities by 2050. Approximately 1.1 billion people currently live in slums or slum-like conditions in cities, with 2 billion more expected in the next 30 years.

However many of these cities are not ready for this rapid urbanisation, and it outpaces the development of housing, infrastructure and services, which led to a rise in slums or slum-like conditions.

Urban sprawl, air pollution and limited open public spaces persist in cities.

Good progress has been made since the implementation of the SDGs in 2015, and now the number of countries with national and local disaster risk reduction strategies has doubled. But issues still remain and in 2022, only half of the urban population had convenient access to public transport.

Sustainable development cannot be achieved without significantly transforming the way urban spaces are built and managed.

Why are cities not future proof yet?

Most of the urban growth is taking place in small cities and intermediate towns, exacerbating inequalities and urban poverty.

In 2020, an estimated 1.1 billion urban residents lived in slums or slum-like conditions, and over the next 30 years, an additional 2 billion people are expected to live in such settlements, mostly in developing countries.

What are some of the most pressing challenges cities are facing?

Inequality and the levels of urban energy consumption and pollution are some of the challenges. Cities occupy just 3 per cent of the Earth’s land, but account for 60-80 per cent of energy consumption and 75 per cent of carbon emissions.

Many cities are also more vulnerable to climate change and natural disasters due to their high concentration of people and location so building urban resilience is crucial to avoid human, social and economic losses.

How does it affect me?

All these issues will eventually affect every citizen. Inequality can lead to unrest and insecurity, pollution deteriorates everyone’s health and affects workers’ productivity and therefore the economy, and natural disasters have the potential to disrupt everyone’s lifestyles. Air pollution caused affecting the health of millions is not only an urban problem, but is also affecting towns and rural areas.

What happens if cities are just left to grow organically?

The cost of poorly planned urbanization can be seen in some of the huge slums, tangled traffic, greenhouse gas emissions and sprawling suburbs all over the world.

By choosing to act sustainably we choose to build cities where all citizens live a decent quality of life, and form a part of the city’s productive dynamic, creating shared prosperity and social stability without harming the environment.

Is it expensive to put sustainable practices in place?

The cost is minimal in comparison with the benefits. For example, there is a cost to creating a functional public transport network, but the benefits are huge in terms of economic activity, quality of life, the environment, and the overall success of a networked city.

What can I do to help achieve this goal?

Take an active interest in the governance and management of your city. Advocate for the kind of city you believe you need.

Develop a vision for your building, street, and neighbourhood, and act on that vision. Are there enough jobs? Can your children walk to school safely? Can you walk with your family at night? How far is the nearest public transport? What’s the air quality like? What are your shared public spaces like? The better the conditions you create in your community, the greater the effect on quality of life.

Facts and figures

Goal 11 targets.

• Over half of the global population currently resides in urban areas, a rate projected to reach 70 per cent by 2050. Approximately 1.1 billion people currently live in slums or slum-like conditions in cities, with 2 billion more expected in the next 30 years.
• In 2022, only half of the world’s urban population had convenient access to public transportation. Urban sprawl, air pollution and limited open public spaces persist in cities.
• Since 2015, the number of countries with national and local disaster risk reduction strategies has doubled.
• To achieve Goal 11, efforts must focus on implementing inclusive, resilient and sustainable urban development policies and practices that prioritize access to basic services, affordable housing, efficient transportation and green spaces for all.
• Today, 85 per cent of slum dwellers are concentrated in three regions: Central and Southern Asia (359 million), Eastern and South-Eastern Asia (306 million) and sub-Saharan Africa (230 million).
• Global cities expanded physically faster than their population growth rates, with average annual land consumption rates of 2.0% compared to population growth rates of 1.6% from 2000 to 2010, and 1.5% compared to 1.2% respectively from 2010 to 2020, according to data from 681 cities between 1990 and 2020.

Source: The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023

11.1  By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums

11.2  By 2030, provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons

11.3  By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries

11.4  Strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage

11.5  By 2030, significantly reduce the number of deaths and the number of people affected and substantially decrease the direct economic losses relative to global gross domestic product caused by disasters, including water-related disasters, with a focus on protecting the poor and people in vulnerable situations

11.6  By 2030, reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality and municipal and other waste management

11.7  By 2030, provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, in particular for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities

11.A  Support positive economic, social and environmental links between urban, peri-urban and rural areas by strengthening national and regional development planning

11.B  By 2020, substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans towards inclusion, resource efficiency, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, resilience to disasters, and develop and implement, in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, holistic disaster risk management at all levels

11.C  Support least developed countries, including through financial and technical assistance, in building sustainable and resilient buildings utilizing local materials

UN Environment Programme : Cities – investing in energy and resource efficiency

UN Environment Programme   Climate Neutral Network

UN Environment Programme : Cities and Climate Change

UN Population Fund: Urbanization

ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability

Fast Facts: Sustainable Cities and Communities

Infographic: Sustainable Cities and Communities

The United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, took place in Quito, Ecuador from 17-20 October 2016, and was the first UN global summit on urbanization since the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Habitat III offered a unique opportunity to discuss the important challenges of how cities, towns, and village can be planned and managed, in order to fulfill their role as drivers of sustainable development, and how they can shape the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on climate change.

In Quito, world leaders adopted the New Urban Agenda which set global standards of achievement in sustainable urban development, rethinking the way we build, manage, and live in cities through drawing together cooperation with committed partners, relevant stakeholders, and urban actors at all levels of government as well as the civil society and private sector.

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UN forum spotlights cities, where struggle for sustainability ‘will be won or lost’

Martin 2018-09-07T14:45:05-04:00 12 Jul 2018 |

Although cities are often characterized by stark socioeconomic inequalities and poor environmental conditions, they also offer growth and development potential – making them central to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and a main focus [...]

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New technology could help cities around the world improve people’s lives while saving billions of dollars. The free, open-source software developed by the Stanford Natural Capital Project creates maps to visualize the links between nature and human wellbeing. City planners and developers can use the software to visualize where investments in nature, such as parks and marshlands, can maximize benefits to people, like protection from flooding and improved health.

By 2050, over 70 percent of the world’s people are projected to live in cities. As the global community becomes increasingly urban, cities are looking for ways to design with sustainability in mind. (Image credit: Zhang Mengyang / iStock)

“This software helps design cities that are better for both people and nature,” said Anne Guerry, Chief Strategy Officer and Lead Scientist at the Natural Capital Project. “Urban nature is a multitasking benefactor – the trees on your street can lower temperatures so your apartment is cooler on hot summer days. At the same time, they’re soaking up the carbon emissions that cause climate change, creating a free, accessible place to stay healthy through physical activity and just making your city a more pleasant place to be.”

By 2050, experts expect over 70 percent of the world’s people to live in cities – in the United States, more than 80 percent already do. As the global community becomes more urban, developers and city planners are increasingly interested in green infrastructure, such as tree-lined paths and community gardens, that provide a stream of benefits to people. But if planners don’t have detailed information about where a path might encourage the most people to exercise or how a community garden might buffer a neighborhood from flood risk while helping people recharge mentally, they can’t strategically invest in nature.

“We’re answering three crucial questions with this software: where in a city is nature providing what benefits to people, how much of each benefit is it providing and who is receiving those benefits?” said Perrine Hamel, lead author on a new paper about the software published in Urban Sustainability and Livable Cities Program Lead at the Stanford Natural Capital Project at the time of research.

The software, called Urban InVEST, is the first of its kind for cities and allows for the combination of environmental data, like temperature patterns, with social demographics and economic data, like income levels. Users can input their city’s datasets into the software or access a diversity of open global data sources, from NASA satellites to local weather stations. The new software joins the Natural Capital Project’s existing InVEST software suite, a set of tools designed for experts to map and model the benefits that nature provides to people.

To test Urban InVEST, the team applied the software in multiple cities around the world: Paris, France; Lausanne, Switzerland; Shenzhen and Guangzhou, China; and several U.S. cities, including San Francisco and Minneapolis. In many cases, they worked with local partners to understand priority questions – in Paris, candidates in a municipal election were campaigning on the need for urban greenery, while in Minneapolis, planners were deciding how to repurpose underused golf course land.

Running the numbers

In Shenzhen, China, the researchers used Urban InVEST to calculate how natural infrastructure like parks, grassland and forest would reduce damages in the event of a severe, once-in-one-hundred years storm. They found that the city’s nature would help avoid $25 billion in damages by soaking up rain and diverting floodwaters. They also showed that natural infrastructure – like trees and parks – was reducing the daily air temperature in Shenzhen by 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) during hot summer days, providing a dollar value of $71,000 per day in benefits to the city.

Targeting inequities

A map of the Paris metropolitan area of France showing neighborhoods with the lowest access to green spaces (yellow), the lowest income neighborhoods (red), and an overlap of the two (blue) where, according to the Urban InVEST software, investing in green spaces like parks would have the greatest impact on reducing inequalities. (Image credit: Perrine Hamel et al)

Nature is often distributed unevenly across cities – putting lower-income people at a disadvantage. Data show that lower-income and marginalized communities often have less access to nature in cities, meaning they are unable to reap the benefits, like improved mental and physical health, that nature provides to wealthier populations.

In Paris, the researchers looked at neighborhoods without access to natural areas and overlaid income and economic data to understand who was receiving benefits from nature. The software helped determine where investments in more greenspace – like parks and bike paths – could be most effective at boosting health and wellbeing in an equitable way.

Planning for a greener future

In the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota region, golf revenue is declining. The downturn has created an appealing opportunity for private golf courses to sell off their land for development. But should developers create a new park or build a new neighborhood? Urban InVEST showed how, compared to golf courses, new parks could increase urban cooling, keep river waters clean, support bee pollinators and sustain dwindling pockets of biodiversity. New residential development, on the other hand, would increase temperatures, pollute freshwater and decrease habitat for bees and other biodiversity.

Healthy city ecosystems

Urban InVEST is already seeing use outside of a research setting – it recently helped inform an assessment of how nature might help store carbon and lower temperatures in 775 European cities .

“Cities, more than any other ecosystems, are designed by people. Why not be more thoughtful about how we design the places where most of us spend our time?” said Guerry, also an author on the paper. “With Urban InVEST, city governments can bring all of nature’s benefits to residents and visitors. They can address inequities and build more resilient cities, resulting in better long-term outcomes for people and nature.”

Anne Guerry is also a senior research associate in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment . Gretchen Daily, Bing Professor of Environmental Science in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, senior fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and co-founder of the Stanford Natural Capital Project is senior author on the paper. Other Stanford Natural Capital authors at the time of research include James Douglass, Roy Remme and Richard Sharp. Remme is now at Leiden University and Sharp leads Spring Research Innovation Network Group. Perrine Hamel is now at Nanyang Technological University’s Asian School of Environment.

Other authors are from the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment, Stellenbosch University, Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, AgroParisTech, The Nature Conservancy, INRAE and CIRED.

This work was funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the LuEsther Mertz Charitable Trust, the Winslow Foundation, the United States Golf Association, the World Bank, FORMAS, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the French Ministry, Nanyang Technological University and individual donors to the Stanford Natural Capital Project and the Center for Conservation Biology.

To read all stories about Stanford science, subscribe to the biweekly  Stanford Science Digest .

Media Contacts

Anne Guerry, Stanford Natural Capital Project: [email protected]

Gretchen Daily, Stanford Natural Capital Project: [email protected]

Sarah Cafasso, Stanford Natural Capital Project: (978) 944-1946; [email protected]

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• Habitat III - The New Urban Agenda
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Cities are hubs for ideas, commerce, culture, science, productivity, social, human and economic development. Urban planning, transport systems, water, sanitation, waste management, disaster risk reduction, access to information, education and capacity-building are all relevant issues to sustainable urban development.

In 2008, for the first time in history, the global urban population outnumbered the rural population. This milestone marked the advent of a new 'urban millennium' and, by 2050, it is expected that two-thirds of the world population will be living in urban areas. With more than half of humankind living in cities and the number of urban residents growing by nearly 73 million every year it is estimated that urban areas account for 70 per cent of the world's gross domestic product and has therefore generated economic growth and prosperity for many.

Given the importance of this topic to global development efforts, recent movements pushing to address sustainable development from an urban perspective have taken place throughout the world. Results from this movement can be seen in the inclusion of a stand-alone goal on cities and urban development in the 2030 Agenda, Sustainable Development Goal 11, "make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable". There is also recognition of the cross-cutting nature of urban issues, which have an impact on a number of other Sustainable Development Goals, including SDGs 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 15, and 17, among others. UN-Habitat's complementary New Urban Agenda, adopted as the outcome document from the Habitat III Conference in 2016, seeks to offer national and local guidelines on the growth and development of cities through 2036.

Prior to the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, Millennium Development Goal 7, target 11, made a call for efforts to achieve, "a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers" by 2020.

Paragraph 89 of the 2030 Agenda calls on major groups and other stakeholders, including local authorities, to report on their contribution to the implementation of the Agenda. Local and regional governments have a wealth of valuable experience in the "localization" of the 2030 Agenda, where they provide leadership in the mobilization of a wide range of stakeholders, the facilitation of "bottom-up" and inclusive processes, and the formation of multi-stakeholder partnerships.

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Click here to see a few examples from local local authorities on their contribution to SDG implementation

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Past issues, information, privacy policy, terms & conditions, jennifer gabrys, published on, feb 11, 2014, urban and urbanization, smart cities as sustainable cities: a visual essay.

A frequently referenced forerunner of the smart city is this proposal by the British architectural collective, Archigram, for a “Plug-In City,” which supplanted fixed buildings with a moveable network of spaces and interchangeable “programs” for urban inhabitations. 

February 11, 2014

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Multiple information and digital cities emerged throughout the dot-com era. This example of the Cité Multimédia in Montreal documents the enfolding of imaginings of urban space with the capacities of computational rendering, which further inform actual development schemes. 

The diagrammatic quality of informational cities designs can be found in newer proposals for smart cities, including this sensor world by Libelium , an “internet of things provider” based in Spain. In this proposal, numerous urban services and operations, from lighting to shopping, become augmented and newly articulated through wireless sensor networks. 

The technology that is promoted as reconfiguring urban landscapes is computational sensors, relatively miniature devices connected to computational infrastructures of multiple different scales and generating an expanded array of command-and-control programs for making urban space more efficient. 

As part of the imagining and promoting of smart cities, numerous schematic designs have emerged that capture an apparently symbiotic fusing of technology and nature. This special focus on “Tomorrow’s Cities,” gathered together by the BBC , envisions “farmscrapers” and efficient infrastructures combining into a bucolic scene with delivery drones and sensor networks. 

The Connected Urban Development (CUD) initiative, formed through a partnership between Cisco and the Clinton Initiative, with MIT and the Connected Sustainable Cities project (CSC) joining the project as it progressed, is a clear example of smart cities developing into sustainable city initiatives, where sustainability–typically in the form of efficiency–becomes a guiding logic for reworking any number of urban services and operations.[vc_video title="#" link="http://vimeo.com/6145800"]

The perceived importance of reworking smart cities as sustainable cities is frequently narrated through the increasing numbers of people now living in cities, which have become dominant sites of resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This particular CUD video provides example scenarios for how smart city initiatives will realize more optimal urban functioning. Efficiency emerges here within a (gendered) logic of gamification, behavioral responsiveness and optimization. 

As discussed in the “ Programming Environments ” article, the scenarios developed by William Mitchell and Federico Casalegno as part of their Connected Sustainable Cities visioning document illustrate in graphic-novel style the ways in which everyday actions such as commuting, cooking and heating one’s home may be synchronized through ubiquitous computing to enable more efficient use of resources. 

Beyond the use of resources, smart cities might also provide new ways of understanding relationality. Here, an eco-love contest becomes the site where an increasingly competitive approach to environmental monitoring is meant to ensure optimal mating opportunities. 

Urban sensor landscapes are presented in this scenario as not just enabling more efficient transit options, but also as facilitating political participation here through making air pollution data more apparent. However, the steps from data to action remain an elusive proposition, and the more contested and conflicted practices of citizenship that might actually contribute to political change are absent in these data-to-action scenarios. 

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cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

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Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

• Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
• Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
• They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
• I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
• They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.

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Pathways to Sustainable Cities

Still Only One Earth: Lessons from 50 years of UN sustainable development policy

Most of the world’s population lives in urban areas, with the proportion projected to reach 68% by 2050. Increasing urbanization contributes to biodiversity loss, increased material consumption, and climate change. Moving forward, urban planning needs to be inclusive and responsive to the needs of local communities and build on participatory approaches that foster the engagement of marginalized actors while advancing access to basic services such as water and sanitation. Achieving sustainable cities requires overcoming barriers between different levels of government, attending to urban-rural linkages, and fostering decarbonization across the energy, transport, and building sectors. ( Download PDF ) ( See all policy briefs ) ( Subscribe to ENB )

Urban sustainability initiatives regularly make headlines. Paris, France, for example has received much attention for new bike lanes and a generalized speed limit of 30 km/h for motorized traffic. Havana, Cuba, is famous for its urban agriculture ; Curitiba, Brazil, is a pioneer in bus rapid transit systems ; and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is referred to as the world’s cycling capital.

Yet, often enough, when cities are featured in the news, headlines sound the alarm on the detrimental impacts of unsustainable urban development: Jakarta, Indonesia, is sinking ; New Delhi, India, shut down schools amid high levels of air pollution; and residential buildings are collapsing due to lack of maintenance in Marseille, France. Recent reports highlight key figures, including:

• the proportion of the world’s population living in urban areas grew from 30% in 1950 to 55% in 2018 and is projected to reach 68% in 2050, with almost 90% of the projected increase to take place in Asia and Africa (UNDESA, 2019)
• in 2018, 24% of the global urban population lived in slums, often with limited access to basic services and with the proportion being as high as 56% in Sub-Saharan Africa (UNDESA, 2021)
• urban areas have more than doubled between 1992 and 2018, contributing to biodiversity loss (IPBES, 2019)
• cities are powerhouses of economic growth—contributing about 60% of global gross domestic product (GDP), but also account for a high percentage of global carbon emissions and natural resource use (UN, 2019)
• urbanization has exacerbated the impacts of global warming, with urban centres being warmer than their surrounding areas due to the urban heat island effect (IPCC, 2021)

Although sustainable urban development is receiving increased attention, the topic is not new. In fact, it was on the agenda of the very first multilateral environmental conference, the landmark 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden. At the time of the conference, which convened in the context of the decolonization process, urbanization was much lower, though growing. Policymakers nevertheless recognized urban sprawl has destructive impacts on the environment and that, while people move to urban areas with hopes of better employment opportunities and living conditions, cities often struggle to meet the increased demand for housing, mass transit, and other infrastructure. The question of how to ensure sustainable urban development has been on the global agenda ever since.

Planning must be applied to human settlements and urbanization with a view to avoiding adverse effects on the environment and obtaining maximum social economic and environmental benefits for all. In this respect, projects which are designed for colonialist and racist domination must be abandoned. 1972 STOCKHOLM DECLARATION, PRINCIPLE 15

Selected Sustainable Urban Development Milestones

Multi-dimensional Issue

As set forth in the Vancouver Declaration adopted at the 1976 UN Human Settlements Conference (Habitat I), the most important objective of urban development policy is the improvement of the quality of life for all people, beginning with satisfying basic needs such as food, shelter, clean water, employment, health, and education. This objective has been reconfirmed throughout the years, including in the 2016 New Urban Agenda.

This underscores a fundamental reality: the starting line is not the same for all. Whereas fulfilling fundamental needs—such as through improving access to clean piped water and sanitation—remains an important part of urban planning in many cities of the Global South, discussions on sustainable cities in the Global North mainly centre on how to make existing infrastructure more efficient and less wasteful. In the latter, the aim is for a “transformation” of building, energy, transport, and other systems toward enhanced environmental sustainability—for example, promoting better building insulation for reduced heat waste or fostering waste recycling. As Youba Sokona, South Centre, and Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), recently noted, “In Africa the question is less about transformation and more about ‘jump starting’ their development in a sustainable manner.”

Beyond this stark global divide, there are significant differences within individual cities: higher-income neighborhoods are typically better serviced than low-income areas and some communities face discrimination that hampers the fulfillment of their fundamental needs. Life in Banana Island, one of Lagos, Nigeria’s gated communities, with wellmaintained roads and a central sewerage system, is vastly different from that in the nearby Makoko slum, where residents live under the threat of eviction and lack access to basic services (Ajayi et al., 2019). Roma people, Europe’s largest ethnic minority, continue to struggle with precarious housing and the US city of Flint, Michigan, whose African-American inhabitants suffered years of lead-poisoned water before a court confirmed wrongdoing, became the poster child of environmental racism. Today, discussions on ensuring access to basic services for all stand side-by-side with futuristic reflections on urban air mobility and drone-based delivery systems.

Sustainable urban development also spans various sectors, key among them housing, transportation, energy, water, waste, food, and health. But that’s not all. As multilateral declarations adopted over the past fifty years highlight, sustainable urban development also touches on heritage preservation, disaster planning, urban-rural linkages, and much more. Striving for sustainable cities requires a holistic vision for how to accommodate increasingly large urban populations, ensuring sustainable livelihoods, quality of life, and social cohesion, while minimizing cities’ and city dwellers’ immediate and long-term impact on the environment. Consequently, all challenges associated with the very notion of sustainability come to the fore in urban areas.

Finally, sustainable urban development is multi-dimensional because it spans a wide array of urban realities. Cities vary in size, with metropolises such as Manila, Philippines, or Beijing, China, having populations ten times larger than entire countries, such as Slovenia and Lesotho. These cities, which would rank among the top 60 most populous countries of the world, must deal with sustainable urban development challenges on a different scale than cities of little more than 50,000 inhabitants. And differences do not only relate to cities’ sizes, but also to factors such as their historical development and geographic location. Coastal cities must plan for sea level rise, while other cities might face water scarcity or must deal with an industrial downturn. There is no single recipe for sustainable urban development. It materializes differently, depending on cities’ specific contexts.

Urban Sustainability is Shaped by Many Actors

Local governments are the key players for fostering of urban sustainability as they can take measures within their own jurisdiction. They are also increasingly engaged in transnational networks, such as ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. These networks provide space for peer-learning among local governments from different countries and serve to feed urban perspectives directly into regional and global sustainability debates. But fostering sustainable cities is not only a matter for local governments. Other actors have power to steer cities toward sustainability.

For one, while the concrete allocation of authority differs between countries, actors at varying government levels have a role to play. National governments might set up an overall housing strategy with tax incentives for the development of new rental housing or pass legislation on insulation or energy efficiency, while cities can develop specific building codes and measures to support social housing. Others can also influence urban sustainability by adopting specific policies and standards, such as influencing norms or opening funding opportunities. This includes state, provincial, or regional governments in federally structured countries, supranational entities, where relevant, and multilateral fora.

Further, non-governmental actors—including businesses, civil society organizations, schools, research institutions, and faith-based organizations—are also sustainability agents. They can self-govern toward sustainability, such as by adjusting diets in canteen menus or switching to renewable energy . At a larger scale, they can take outward-facing initiatives, such as hosting a repair café to help people fix broken household items and sharing information on grant programs for home retrofits, and pressure governments by lobbying for cities to phase out fossil fuels . Corporate initiatives toward enhanced urban sustainability can help develop new technologies and business models, with many leveraging big data and sharing economy approaches. Actors engage in sustainability initiatives for various reasons. As Westman et al. (2021) show, small- and medium-sized enterprises notably aim to improve their reputation in the local community, increase efficiency, or align with personal values. Some initiatives—such as when exasperated citizens build their own bike lanes —are disruptive and constitute a push for change from the bottom, while at other times windows of opportunity are opened from the top. Change often relies on the interplay between different kinds of actors, both governmental and non-governmental. Fostering urban sustainability nevertheless remains a protracted undertaking. Key challenges include that local governments at times lack the autonomy or fiscal and human capacity to undertake sustainability measures and that powerful actors—such as central governments or large businesses—might stand in the way of change (Beermann et al., 2016).

Key Trends in Sustainable Urban Development

Many new approaches to sustainable urban development are breaking with the long predominant mindset of “taming nature” and are bringing back greenery into the infamous concrete jungle. Think of urban agriculture, which is gaining ground in the collective imagery of sustainable cities.

More broadly, there is a strong move toward what is increasingly termed “ nature-based solutions .” A look at urban water management provides many examples: New York City is restoring oyster reefs , cities like Seoul are daylighting water streams buried under concrete for many decades, and China is supporting the development of so-called sponge cities . Rather than relying only on hard engineering, these cities leverage natural infrastructure to achieve multiple benefits, not only enhancing flood management but also providing recreational opportunities and supporting biodiversity, among other benefits. Many such measures are designed to address climate change, especially from an adaptation and resilience standpoint. They can mitigate the urban heat island effect and flooding—both from increased precipitation events and, where relevant, storm surges. Plants are not only used on the ground and on roofs but also on facades, with architects and urban residents increasingly experimenting with vertical gardens. Similarly, urban wastelands and unused industrial infrastructure are being renatured to provide habitat for urban biodiversity and recreational spaces for city dwellers, with New York City’s High Line and Atlanta’s BeltLine in the US as flagship projects.

Cities are also grappling with the detrimental effects of decades of car-centred urban planning, which fostered urban sprawl, placed a barrier on other forms of transportation, contributed to a large share of cities’ greenhouse gas emissions, and lead to local air pollution (OECD, 2018). Multimodal transportation initiatives are sprouting up around the world in various forms, including: establishing toll roads (Singapore; London, UK), enabling free public transportation for residents (Aubagne, France; Tallinn, Estonia), installing cable cars (Medellín, Colombia; Constantine, Algeria), and giving priority traffic lights to cyclists as a default or when it rains (Odense, Denmark; Rotterdam, the Netherlands). Additionally, there are corporate initiatives such as bicycle and scooter rentals, and civil society actions, such as the collective bike rides of the Critical Mass movement. Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a reckoning about the immense amount of urban space allocated to cars. In many cities, residents have become fond of newly extended sidewalks and parking spaces converted for outdoor dining. Whether this will truly bring about permanent change remains to be seen.

More fundamentally, equity considerations are increasingly coming to the fore, as people grapple with the fact that urban development has failed to make cities liveable for all. Building on the work of feminist and disability studies scholars, the World Bank (2020) provides a toolkit for redressing the fact that “In general, cities work better for heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender men than they do for women, girls, sexual and gender minorities, and people with disabilities” (p. 8). Meehan et al. (2020) draw attention to intersecting social and racialized inequalities that curtail access to basic services, even in some of the most affluent cities in the world. This reckoning not only pertains to the detrimental effects of past urban planning, but also relates to more recent developments. For example, hostile architecture that has flourished in many places with the aim of banishing homeless people is increasingly decried as a manifestation of failures to address the root causes of homelessness and for rendering public spaces unwelcoming to urban dwellers at large. This critical reflection also relates to the potential negative effects of some sustainability measures, where green gentrification can increase local property values and displace existing residents who can no longer afford to live in the neighbourhood (Anguelovski, 2016).

Against this background, it is important to pay attention to inclusive urban planning. Decisions adopted at Habitat I in 1976 already stipulated that “Public participation is a right that must be accorded to all segments of the population, including the most disadvantaged” (p. 76) and that “Citizens must be provided opportunities for direct involvement in the decisions that profoundly affect their lives” (p. 71). This can foster democratic legitimacy and adapt measures to specific local contexts, which can enhance their effectiveness. Yet, as UN-Habitat (2019) notes, ensuring public participation in practice remains a challenge and “when deliberation occurs it is often biased towards more powerful stakeholders with greater resources” (p. 23). To overcome long-standing challenges with implementing participation ideals, scholars, community organizations, and some local governments are experimenting with different approaches, including participatory budgeting and community mapping exercises (Calisto Friant, 2019; Klopp & Cavoli, 2019).

As more and more people live in urban areas, coupled with worsening impacts from climate change and natural resource loss, the magnitude of the urban sustainability challenge and the need for decisive action is bigger than ever. As the world saw with the COVID-19 pandemic, overcrowding and poverty make it difficult to follow recommended measures such as social distancing and self-isolation. This calls for a holistic rethinking about how to make cities liveable for all while minimizing adverse impacts on the environment.

Striving for sustainable cities requires overcoming barriers between different levels of government as well as vested interests in preserving the status quo. It requires looking beyond the sphere of the urban to attend to urban-rural linkages, foster circular resource use, and decarbonize the energy, transport, and building sectors. Urban sustainability requires cross-sectoral planning and attention to the differentiated needs of all urban dwellers so as to leave no one behind in the necessary transformation. Sustainability pathways should be tailored to specific urban contexts. As such, there will never be one single model for what a sustainable city looks like.

Works Consulted

Ajayi, O., Soyinka-Airewele, P., & Samuel, O. (2019). Gentrification and the challenge of development in Makoko, Lagos State, Nigeria: A rights-based perspective. Environmental Justice, 12(2), 41-47. doi.org/10.1089/env.2018.0020

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Klopp, J. M., & Cavoli, C. (2019). Mapping minibuses in Maputo and Nairobi: Engaging paratransit in transportation planning in African cities. Transport Reviews, 39(5), 657-676. doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2019.1598513

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Government of Canada, Global Affairs Canada

Government of Norway, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Government of Sweden, Ministry of Environment

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Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Reference work
• © 2020
• Walter Leal Filho 0 ,
• Anabela Marisa Azul 1 ,
• Luciana Brandli 2 ,
• Pinar Gökçin Özuyar 3 ,
• Tony Wall 4

European School of Sustainability Science and Research, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany

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Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

Faculty of engineering and architecture, passo fundo university, passo fundo, brazil, istinye university, istanbul, turkey, university of chester, chester, uk.

• Details essential research, projects and practical action
• Covers both developed and developing countries
• Fosters knowledge to support UN Sustainable Development Goal to make settlements inclusive, resilient and sustainable
• Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (ENUNSDG)

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About this book

The problems related to the process of industrialisation such as biodiversity depletion, climate change and a worsening of health and living conditions, especially but not only in developing countries, intensify. Therefore, there is an increasing need to search for integrated solutions to make development more sustainable. The United Nations has acknowledged the problem and approved the “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. On 1st January 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the Agenda officially came into force. These goals cover the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection.  

The  Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals  comprehensively addresses the SDGs in an integrated way. The Encyclopedia encompasses 17 volumes, each one devoted to one of the 17 SDGs. This volume addresses SDG 11, namely “ Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable ”  and contains the description of a range of terms, which allows a better understanding and fosters knowledge. This book presents a set of papers on the state of the art of knowledge and practices about the numerous challenges for cities, solutions and opportunities for the future.

• Ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums
• Provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons
• Enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries 
• Strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage
• Significantly reduce the number of deaths and the number of people affected and substantially decrease the direct economic losses relative to global gross domestic product caused by disasters, including water-related disasters, with a focus on protecting the poor and people in vulnerable situations
• Reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality and municipal and other waste management
• Provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, in particular for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities 
• Support positive economic, social and environmental links between urban, peri-urban and rural areas by strengthening national and regional development planning
• Substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans towards inclusion, resource efficiency, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, resilience to disasters, and develop and implement, in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, holistic disaster risk management at all levels 
• Support least developed countries, including through financial and technical assistance, in building sustainable and resilient buildings utilizing local materials

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Table of contents (272 entries)

Front matter, access to basic services: from public benefit practice to a sustainable development approach.

• Jairo Agustín Reyes Plata, Mateo Carlos Galindo Pérez

Accessibility

Accessible cities, accessible infrastructure, active transportation, adverse conditions, affordable houses, affordable infrastructure, building lifecycle sustainability analysis.

• Erin A. Hopkins

Built Environment Education for Sustainability and Climate Change Preparation

• Usha Iyer-Raniga

Business Continuity and Resiliency Planning (BCRP)

Business continuity management (bcm), business continuity planning.

• Markus Will, Jana Brauweiler

Carbon-Free Transportation Choices

Editors and affiliations.

Walter Leal Filho

Anabela Marisa Azul

Luciana Brandli

Pinar Gökçin Özuyar

About the editors

Walter Leal Filho (BSc, PhD, DSc, DPhil, DEd, DL, DLitt)  is a Senior Professor and Head of the Research and Transfer Centre "Sustainable Development and Climate Change Management” at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences in Germany, and Chair of Environment and Technology at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is the initiator of the Word Sustainable Development Symposia (WSSD-U) series, and chairs the Inter-University Sustainable Development Research Programme. Professor Leal Filho has written, co-written, edited or co-edited more than 400 publications, including books, book chapters and papers in refereed journals.

Anabela Marisa Azul  is a Researcher at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC) and the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Coimbra (UC, Portugal). She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences, specializing in Ecology (2002, UC), and pursued her investigation on biology and ecology of fungi to pinpoint the role of mycorrhizal symbiosis for sustainability of Mediterranean forests under different land use scenarios at the Centre for Functional Ecology (CFE-UC), where she became an Associate Researcher (from 2009 to 2014). At CFE-UC, Marisa Azul developed a holistic approach that combined innovation in food production with sustainable development and public scientific awareness to multiple actors. At CNC, from 2014 on, Marisa Azul focuses her investigation on basic research and participatory research dynamics to pinpoint links between metabolism, health/disease, and sustainability. She has broad academic experience as a researcher working in participatory research and interdisciplinary that link biomedical and life/environmental sciences, social sciences, science education, science communication, and artistic forms. Her research interests also lie in bringing together the academy and social/economical players. She has been successful in attracting national and international funding, coordinating projects, and mentoring young researchers on the topics mentioned. She has co-authored over 40 scientific publications and book chapters, co-edited 4 books on Climate Change Management Series and 1 onWorld Sustainability Series published by Springer, co-authored 4 books for children and 2 comics, and co-produced 1 animation.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Sustainable Cities and Communities

Editors : Walter Leal Filho, Anabela Marisa Azul, Luciana Brandli, Pinar Gökçin Özuyar, Tony Wall

Series Title : Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95717-3

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Earth and Environmental Science , Reference Module Physical and Materials Science , Reference Module Earth and Environmental Sciences

Copyright Information : Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-319-95716-6 Published: 09 April 2020

eBook ISBN : 978-3-319-95717-3 Published: 24 April 2020

Series ISSN : 2523-7403

Series E-ISSN : 2523-7411

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XXVI, 982

Number of Illustrations : 16 b/w illustrations, 84 illustrations in colour

Topics : Sustainable Development , Urban Geography / Urbanism (inc. megacities, cities, towns) , Transportation Technology and Traffic Engineering , Waste Management/Waste Technology , Climate Change Management and Policy

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Sustainable Cities and Communities

The world is developing at an unprecedented scale. Over the next 20 years, urban population in developing countries will double to 4 billion, while the urbanized land area will triple. Rapid growth helps create new opportunities, but it has also brought serious social, economic, and environmental challenges.

Today, 1 billion people live in urban slums, and 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by repeated cycles of violence. In the past decade, the number of people affected by natural disasters tripled to 2 billion. Low-income countries have accounted for only 9% of the disaster events but 48% of fatalities since 1980. The burden of disasters, conflict, crime, and violence falls disproportionately on the poor.

Urban and rural communities around the world increasingly feel the urge to tackle these challenges and increase their resilience to poverty and inequality, social exclusion, violence and fragility, as well as climate change and disaster risks. Building sustainable communities—whether they are villages, cities, or countries and societies at large—will be critical to eliminating poverty and boosting shared prosperity.

Specifically, the concept of “ Sustainable Cities and Communities ” of the World Bank’s Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land Global Practice (GPURL) includes four key dimensions:

• First, Sustainable Communities are environmentally sustainable in terms of cleanliness and efficiency.
• Second, Sustainable communities are resilient to social, economic, and natural shocks. They are well prepared for natural disasters, which are increasing in intensity and frequency due to climate change.
• Third, Sustainable Communities are inclusive communities. They bring all dimensions of society and all groups of people—including the marginalized and vulnerable—into their markets, their services, and their development.
• And finally, Sustainable Communities are competitive communities that can stay productive and generate jobs for members of the community.

Building inclusive, resilient, competitive and sustainable cities and communities is essential for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, and eliminating extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity at the local, regional, and national levels.

Join us in our efforts to build sustainable cities and communities worldwide! Read our blog series  and subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated .

In building Sustainable Communities, the World Bank focuses on its work in four areas, led by the Bank’s Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience and Land Global Practice (GPURL):

• Urban Development : urban planning, services, and institutions
• Disaster Risk Management : mainstreaming resilience in all dimensions of development
• Land  and Geospatial : territorial and rural development

Urban Planning, Services, and Institutions – Urban Development:

The World Bank’s work in urban development aims to  build sustainable cities and communities  through an urbanization process that is inclusive, resilient and low carbon, productive, and livable, contributing to the  Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) No.11 , implementation of the  New Urban Agenda , as well as the World Bank’s goals to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity.

The World Bank invests an average of $6 billion in urban development and resilience projects every year to help cities meet the critical demands of urbanization. The Bank’s Urban Development strategy focuses on three priorities:

• Financing the New Urban Agenda
• Promoting territorial development
• Enhancing urban resilience to climate change and disaster risks

The three priorities are translated into six business lines:

• Cities and economic growth
• Urban poverty and inclusion
• Municipal infrastructure and services
• Affordable housing and land
• Urban management, finance, and governance
• Cities and urban environment

The Bank is working in partnership with the private sector, governments, and civil society to build clean and efficient cities and communities that are resilient to natural disasters, and to create competitive economies that provide new kinds of jobs for people and ensure that everyone, especially the poorest, can benefit. 

For more information, see  www.worldbank.org/urban

Mainstreaming Resilience – Disaster Risk Management:

Disasters hurt the poor and vulnerable the most. From 1995 through 2014, 89% of storm-related fatalities were in lower-income countries, even though these countries experienced just 26% of storms. The impact of disasters will continue to grow as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.

Over the past decade, the World Bank has emerged as the global leader in disaster risk management (DRM), supporting client countries to assess exposure to hazards and address disaster risks. It provides technical and financial support for risk assessments, risk reduction, preparedness, financial protection, and resilient recovery and reconstruction. 

For more information, see www.worldbank.org/disaster

Territorial and Rural Development – Land and Geospatial:

Land is at the center of many development challenges. Estimates suggest that around 30% of land rights are registered or recorded worldwide. The World Bank is working to address land tenure insecurity through land administration projects, analytical work, and technical assistance. The World Bank actively works with countries and partners worldwide to ensure women’s equal access and secure rights to land and property. The World Bank also supports the land rights of smallholders and Indigenous Peoples, displaced people, and refugees.

The World Bank is working on land tenure as well as land and geospatial infrastructure and systems in dozens of countries across the world, with an investment of approximately $1.5 billion in commitments, impacting millions of land holders in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa. 

The World Bank is increasingly working to open land and geospatial datasets for acceleration of growth. The Bank is also preparing a “Land 2030 Global Initiative” to enhance the commitment of countries and mobilize resources to achieve ambitious targets of securing land and property rights by 2030.

For more information, see www.worldbank.org/land

Click on the links below to learn more about the World Bank’s operational and analytical work in:

• Disaster Risk Management

Urban Development

The World Bank is actively working in partnership with the governments, civil society, academia, private sector, and others to build inclusive, resilient, competitive, and sustainable communities for all.

As the partnership grows, the Sustainable Communities  newsletter serves as a platform for development practitioners at the World Bank and around the world to stay informed and exchange ideas with their partners on the most pressing issues in global development, such as social development, urban development, disaster risk management and climate change, conflict and violence, and land governance.

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• Research Article
• Open access
• Published: 28 August 2019

Generating a vision for smart sustainable cities of the future: a scholarly backcasting approach

• Simon Elias Bibri 1 , 2 &
• John Krogstie 1  

European Journal of Futures Research volume  7 , Article number:  5 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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Sustainable cities have been the leading global paradigm of urbanism. Undoubtedly, sustainable development has, since its widespread diffusion in the early 1990s, positively influenced city planning and development. This pertains to the immense opportunities that have been explored and the enormous benefits that have been realized in relation to sustainable urban forms, especially compact cities and eco-cities. However, such forms are still associated with a number of problems, issues, and challenges. This mainly involves the question of how they should be monitored, understood, analyzed, and planned to improve, advance, and maintain their contribution to sustainability and thus to overcome the kind of wicked problems, unsettled issues, and complex challenges they embody. This in turn brings us to the current question related to the weak connection between and the extreme fragmentation of sustainable cities and smart cities as approaches and landscapes, respectively, despite the proven role of advanced ICT, coupled with the untapped potential of big data technology and its novel applications, in supporting sustainable cities as to enhancing and optimizing their performance under what is labeled “smart sustainable cities.” In this respect, there has recently been a conscious push for sustainable cities to become smart and thus more sustainable by particularly embracing what big data technology and its novel applications has to offer in the hopes of reaching the optimal level of sustainability. In the meantime, we are in the midst of an expansion of time horizons in city planning and development. In this context, sustainable cities across the globe have adopted ambitious smart goals that extend far into the future. Essentially, there are multiple visions of, and pathways to achieving, smart sustainable cities based on how they can be conceptualized and operationalized. The aim of this paper is to generate a vision for smart sustainable cities of the future by answering the 6 guiding questions for step 3 of the futures study being conducted. This study aims to analyze, investigate, and develop a novel model for smart sustainable cities of the future using backcasting as a scholarly approach. It involves a series of papers of which this paper is the second one, following the earlier papers with steps 1 and 2. Visionary images of a long-term future can stimulate an accelerated movement towards achieving the long-term goals of sustainability. The proposed model is believed to be the first of its kind and thus has not been, to the best of one’s knowledge, produced, nor is it being currently investigated, elsewhere.

Introduction

Contemporary cities have a pivotal role in strategic sustainable development; therefore, they have gained a central position in operationalizing this notion and applying this discourse. This is clearly reflected in the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SGD 11) of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda, which seek to make cities more sustainable, resilient, inclusive, and safe [ 73 ]. Sustainable cities have long been the leading global paradigm of urbanism [ 19 , 74 , 77 , 78 , 79 ] for more than three decades or so. The subject of “sustainable cities” remains endlessly fascinating and enticing, as there are numerous actors involved in the academic and practical aspects of the endeavor, including engineers and architects, green technologists, built and natural environment specialists, and environmental and social scientists, and, more recently, computer scientists, data scientists, and urban scientists. All these actors are undertaking research and developing strategies and programs to tackle the challenging elements of sustainable urbanism. This adds to the work of policymakers and political decision-makers in terms of formulating and implementing regulatory policies and devising and applying political mechanisms and governance arrangements to promote and spur innovation and monitor and maintain progress in sustainable cities.

Since its widespread diffusion in the early 1990s, sustainable development has had significant positive impacts on the planning and development of cities in terms of the different dimensions of sustainability. It has also revived the discussion about the form of cities [ 40 ]. In this regard, it has inspired a whole generation of urban scholars and practitioners into a quest for the immense opportunities and fascinating possibilities that could be enabled and created by, and the enormous benefits that could be realized from, the planning and development of sustainable urban forms (especially compact cities and eco-cities), That is to say, forms for human settlements that can meet the required level of sustainability and enable the built environment to function in a constructive way. This can be accomplished through continuously improving their contribution to the goals of sustainable development in terms of reducing material use, lowering energy consumption, mitigating pollution, and minimizing waste, as well as in terms of improving equity, inclusion, the quality of life, and well-being.

However, new circumstances require new responses. This pertains to the spread of urbanization and the rise of ICT and how they are drastically changing sustainable urbanism. The transformative force of urbanization and ICT and the role that cities can play have far-reaching implications. By all indicators, the urban world will become largely technologized and computerized within just a few decades, and ICT as an enabling, integrative, and constitutive technology of the twenty-first century will accordingly be instrumental, if not determining, in addressing many of the conundrums posed, the issues raised, and the challenges presented by urbanization. It is therefore of strategic value to start directing the use of emerging ICT into understanding and proactively mitigating the potential effects of urbanization, with the primary aim of tackling the many intractable and wicked problems involved in urban operational functioning, management, planning, development, and governance, especially in the context of sustainability. Indeed, the rapid urbanization of the world poses significant and unprecedented challenges associated with sustainability (e.g., [ 26 , 31 , 34 ]) due to the issues engendered by urban growth. In short, the multidimensional effects of unsustainability are most likely to exacerbate with urbanization. Urban growth will jeopardize the sustainability of cities [ 53 ]. Therefore, ICT has come to the fore and become of crucial importance for containing the effects of urbanization and facing the challenges of sustainability, including in the context of sustainable cities which are striving to improve, advance, and maintain their contribution to the goals of sustainable development. The use of advanced ICT in sustainable cities constitutes an effective approach to decoupling the health of the city and the quality of life of citizens from the energy and material consumption and concomitant environmental risks associated with urban operations, functions, services, strategies, and policies [ 13 ].

Smart sustainable cities as an integrated and holistic approach to urbanism represent an instance of sustainable urban planning and development, a strategic approach to achieving the long-term goals of urban sustainability—with support of advanced technologies and their novel applications. Accordingly, achieving the status of smart sustainable cities epitomizes an instance of urban sustainability. This notion refers to a desired (normative) state in which a city strives to retain a balance of the socio-ecological systems through adopting and executing sustainable development strategies as a desired (normative) trajectory [ 19 ]. This balance entails enhancing the physical, environmental, social, and economic systems of the city in line with sustainability over the long run—given their interdependence, synergy, and equal importance. This long-term strategic goal requires, as noted by [ 7 ], p. 601), “fostering linkages between scientific research, technological innovations, institutional practices, and policy design and planning in relevance to sustainability. It also requires a long-term vision, a trans-disciplinary approach, and a system-oriented perspective on addressing environmental, economic, social, and physical issues.” All these requirements are at the core of backcasting as a scholarly and planning approach to futures studies. This approach facilitates and contributes to the development, implementation, evaluation, and improvement of models for smart sustainable cities, with a particular focus on practical interventions for integrating and improving urban systems and coordinating and coupling urban domains using cutting-edge technologies in line with the vision of sustainability. One of the most appealing strands of research in the domain of smart sustainable urbanism is that which is concerned with futures studies. The relevance and rationale behind futures research approach are linked to the strategic planning and development associated with long-term sustainability endeavors, initiatives, or solutions. And backcasting is well suited to any multifaceted kind of planning and development process (e.g., [ 38 ]), as well as to dealing with urban sustainability problems and challenges [ 19 , 23 , 29 , 52 , 59 ].

The aim of this paper is to generate a vision for smart sustainable cities of the future by answering the 6 guiding questions for step 3 of the futures study being conducted, namely:

What are the terms of reference for the future vision?

How does the future sustainable socio-technical system and need fulfillment look like?

How is the future vision different from the existing socio-technical systems?

What is the rationale for developing the future vision?

Which sustainability problems, issues, and challenges have been dealt with by meeting the stated objectives and thus achieving the specified goals?

Which advanced technologies and their novel applications have been used in the future vision?

This futures study aims to analyze, investigate, and develop a novel model for smart sustainable cities of the future using backcasting as a scholarly approach. It consists of 6 steps in total and a number of guiding questions for each step to answer. Accordingly, it involves a series of papers of which this paper is the second one, following the earlier papers with steps 1 and 2: strategic problem orientation [ 19 ]. This paper as a sequel leads through the whole of the backcasting study: step 4 with 2 papers, step 5 with 1 paper, and step 6 with 1 paper. All in all, as this is an extensive scholarly project involving description, investigation, synthesis, design, analysis, and compilation, it is deemed more appropriate to divide it into a series of papers.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a background of the futures study, including a review of the area being researched, the issue of the current situation, and studies and relevant history on the issue. Section 3 focuses on the backcasting methodology, with an emphasis on step 3. Section 4 delves into step 3 of the futures study by answering the 6 guiding questions in more detail following the applied backcasting approach. This paper ends, in Section 5 , with discussion and conclusion.

Background of the futures study

Sustainable cities are associated with a number of problems, issues, and challenges (i.e., deficiencies, Limitations difficulties, fallacies, and uncertainties) when it comes to their management, planning, design, development, and governance in the context of sustainability (e.g., [ 16 , 17 , 19 , 27 , 28 , 54 ]). This mainly involves the question of how sustainable urban forms should be monitored, understood, and analyzed in order to be effectively planned, designed, developed, managed, and governed in terms of enhancing and maintaining their sustainability performance [ 13 ]. The underlying argument is that more innovative solutions and sophisticated approaches are needed to overcome the kind of wicked problems, unsettled issues, and complex challenges pertaining to sustainable urban forms. This brings us to the current question related to the weak connection of and extreme fragmentation between sustainable cities and smart cities as approaches and landscapes, respectively (e.g., [ 3 , 7 , 13 , 16 , 19 , 20 , 49 ]), despite the great potential of advanced ICT for, and its proven role in, supporting sustainable cities in improving their performance under what is labeled “smart sustainable cities” (e.g., see, [ 7 , 8 , 17 , 49 , 68 ]). In particular, tremendous opportunities are available for utilizing big data computing and the underpinning technologies and their novel applications in sustainable cities to improve, advance, and maintain their contribution to the goals of sustainable development. The main strength of the big data technology is the high influence it will have on many facets of smart sustainable cities and their citizens’ lives (see, e.g., [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 6 , 8 , 13 , 58 , 71 ]).

In light of the above, recent research endeavors have started to focus on smartening up sustainable cities through enhancing and optimizing their operational functioning, management, planning, design, development, and governance in line with the long-term vision of sustainability under what is labeled “smart sustainable cities”([ 7 , 8 , 9 , 12 , 16 , 17 , 19 ], Bibri and Krogstie 2017c). This wave of research revolves around integrating the landscapes of, and the approaches to, sustainable cities and smart cities in a variety of ways in the hopes of reaching the required level of sustainability and improving the living standard of citizens [ 13 ]. This integrated approach tends to take several forms in terms of combining the strengths of sustainable cities and smart cities based on how the concept of smart sustainable cities can be conceptualized and operationalized, just as it has been the case for sustainable cities. Indeed, several topical studies (e.g., [ 3 , 7 , 8 , 13 , 17 , 49 , 50 , 62 , 68 , 81 ]) have addressed the merger of the sustainable city and smart city approaches from a variety of perspectives. Accordingly, there is a host of opportunities yet to explore towards new approaches to smart sustainable urbanism. The focus in this paper is on integrating the design principles and planning practices of sustainable urban forms with big data computing and the underpinning technologies and their novel applications being offered by smart cities of the future. The underlying assumption is that the evolving big data deluge with its extensive sources hides in itself the answers to the most challenging analytical questions as well as the solutions to the most complex challenges pertaining to sustainability in the face of urbanization. It also plays a key role in understanding urban constituents as data agents.

In recent years, there has been a marked intensification of datafication. This is manifested in a radical expansion in the volume, range, variety, and granularity of the data being generated about urban environments and citizens (e.g., [ 46 , 47 , 48 ]), with the primary aim of quantifying the whole of the city, putting it in a data format so it can be organized and analyzed [ 13 ]. We are currently experiencing the accelerated datafication of the city in a rapidly urbanizing world and witnessing the dawn of the big data era not out of the window, but in everyday life. Our urban everydayness is entangled with data sensing, data processing, and communication networking, and our wired world generates and analyzes overwhelming and incredible amounts of data. The modern city is turning into constellations of instruments and computers across many scales and morphing into a haze of software instructions, which are becoming essential to the operational functioning, planning, design, development, and governance of the city. The datafication of spatiotemporal citywide events has become a salient factor for the practice of smart sustainable urbanism.

As a consequence of datafication, a new era is presently unfolding wherein smart sustainable urbanism is increasingly becoming data-driven. At the heart of such urbanism is a computational understanding of urban systems and processes that renders urban life a form of logical rules and algorithmic procedures—which is underpinned and informed by data-intensive scientific approaches to urban science and urban sustainability, while also harnessing urban big data to provide a more holistic and integrated view and synoptic intelligence of the city [ 13 ]. This is increasingly directed towards improving, advancing, and maintaining the contribution of sustainable cities to the goals of sustainable development in an increasingly urbanized world.

We are living at the dawn of what has been termed as “the fourth paradigm of science,” a scientific revolution that is marked by the recent emergence of big data science and analytics as well as the increasing adoption and use of the underlying technologies in scientific and scholarly research practices. Everything about science development and knowledge production is fundamentally changing thanks to the unfolding and soaring data deluge. The upcoming data avalanche is thus the primary fuel of this new age, which powerful computational processes or analytics algorithms are using to generate useful knowledge and deep insights pertaining to a wide variety of practical uses.

As a new area of science and technology, “big data science and analytics embodies an unprecedentedly transformative power—which is manifested not only in the form of revolutionizing science and transforming knowledge, but also in advancing social practices, catalyzing major shifts, and fostering societal transitions. Of particular relevance, it is instigating a massive change in the way both sustainable cities and smart cities are understood, studied, planned, operated, and managed to improve and maintain sustainability in the face of expanding urbanization” ([ 14 ], p. 79). To put it differently, these practices are becoming highly responsive to a form of data-driven urbanism that is the key mode of production for what have been termed smart sustainable cities whose monitoring, understanding, and analysis are increasingly relying on big data technologies.

In a nutshell, the Fourth Scientific Revolution is set to erupt in cities, break out suddenly and dramatically, throughout the world. This is manifested in bits meeting bricks on a vast scale as instrumentation, datafication, and computerization are permeating the spaces we live in. The outcome will impact most aspects of urban life, raising questions and issues of urgent concern, especially those related to sustainability and urbanization. This pertains to what dimensions of cities will be most affected; how urban planning, design, development, and governance should change and evolve; and, most importantly, how cities can embrace and prepare for looming technological disruptions and opportunities.

In light of the above, at the beginning of a new decade, we have the opportunity to look forward and consider what we could achieve in the coming years in the era of big data revolution. Again, we have the chance to consider the desired future of data-driven smart sustainable cities. This will motivate many urban scholars, scientists, and practitioners to think about how the subject of “data-driven smart sustainable cities” might develop, as well as inspire them into a quest for the immense opportunities and fascinating possibilities that can be created by the development and implementation of such cities. In this respect, we are in the midst of an expansion of time horizons in city planning. Sustainable cities look further into the future when forming scenarios and strategies to achieve them. The movement towards a long-term vision arises from three major mega trends or macro-shifts that shape our societies at a growing pace: sustainability, ICT, and urbanization. Recognizing a link between such trends, sustainable cities across the globe have adopted ambitious goals that extend far into the future and developed different pathways to achieve them.

Backcasting as a scholarly approach to strategic smart sustainable city planning and development

As a special kind of scenario methodology, backcasting is applied here to build a future model for smart sustainable cities as a planning tool for facilitating urban sustainability. Backcasting scenarios are used to explore future uncertainties, create opportunities, build capabilities, and improve decision-making processes. Their primary aim is to discover alternative pathways through which a desirable future can be reached. Following Rotmans et al.’s [ 65 ] taxonomy, scenarios can be classified into different categories, including projective and prospective scenarios, qualitative and quantitative scenarios, participatory and expert scenarios, and descriptive and normative scenarios. This futures study is concerned with a normative scenario, which takes values and interests (sustainability and big data technology) into account and involves reasoning from specific long-term goals that have to be achieved.

In general, the backcasting approach is applicable in futures studies dealing with the fundamental question of backcasting, which involves the kind of actions that must be taken to achieve a long-term goal. In this context, if we want to attain a smart sustainable city, what actions must be taken to get there? Here backcasting means to look at the current situation from a future perspective. As an analytical and deliberative process (Fig.  1 ), backcasting entails articulating an end vision and then developing a pathway to get from the present to that endpoint. In more detail, the backcasting scenario is constructed from the distant future towards the present by defining a desirable future and then moving step-by-step backwards towards the present to identify the strategic steps that need to be taken to attain that specified future. This involves identifying the stumbling blocks on the way and the key stakeholders that should be involved to drive change, as well as developing and assessing the policy pathway in terms of planning practices and development strategies necessary to achieve the future outcome. The use of backcasting in futures studies assumes a vision of an evolutionary process of policy with a time frame of a generation or so, which is a basic principle to allow the policy actions to pursue the path towards, and potentially achieve, a sustainable future. Moreover, in urban sustainability, planning is about figuring out the ‘next steps’ which are quite literally the next concrete actions to undertake. Next steps are usually based on reacting to present circumstances, creativity, intuition, and common sense, but also (conceivably) are still aligned with the future vision and direction. Therefore, researchers in backcasting should not get obsessed with the next steps without considering how aligned they are with what they ultimately aim to achieve.

The backcasting process from the natural step. Source: Holmberg [ 37 ]

Figure  1 illustrates the backcasting process in which the future desired conditions are envisioned and steps are then defined to attain those conditions. In this regard, envisioning the smart sustainable city as a future vision has a normative side: what future is desired? Backcasting this preferred vision has an analytical side: how can this desirable future be attained? Backcasting is about analyzing possible ways of attaining certain futures as well as their feasibility and potential [ 56 ]. Specifically, in the quest for the answer to how to reach specified outcomes in the future, backcasting involves finding ways of linking goals that may lie far ahead in the future to a set of steps to be taken now and designed to achieve that end, and also facilitates discovery [ 29 ].

Backcasting is viewed as a natural step in operationalizing sustainable development [ 38 ] within different societal spheres. In terms of its practical application, backcasting is increasingly used in futures studies in the fields related to sustainable urban planning as a formal element of future strategic initiatives. It is the most applied approach in futures studies when it comes to sustainability problems and the identification and exploration of their solutions. This involves a wide variety of areas, including strategic city planning (e.g., [ 59 ]), sustainable city design [ 23 ]. transportation and mobility (Banister et al. 2000), sustainable transportation systems (Akerman and Höjer 2006; [ 39 , 66 ]), sustainable technologies and sustainable system innovation [ 76 ], sustainable household (Green and Vergragt 2002; [ 57 ]), and sustainable transformation of organizations [ 37 ]. Backcasting studies must reflect solutions to a specified social problem in the broader sense [ 29 ]. Bibri [ 10 ] concludes that the backcasting approach is found to be well-suited for long-term urban sustainability problems and solutions due to its normative, goal-oriented, and problem-solving character. Generally, as argued by Dreborg [ 29 ], backcasting is particularly useful when:

The problem to be studied is complex and there is a need for major change

The dominant trends are part of the problem

The problem to a great extent is a matter of externalities

The scope is wide enough and time horizon is long enough to leave considerable room for deliberate and different choices and directions of development.

Bibri [ 10 ] has recently conducted a comprehensive study on futures studies and related approaches. Its main focus is on backcasting as a scholarly and planning approach to strategic smart sustainable city development. Its main objectives are to review the existing backcasting methodologies and to discuss the relevance of their use in terms of their steps and guiding questions for analyzing, investigating, and developing smart sustainable cities, as well as to synthesize a backcasting approach based on a number of notable future studies. Later, Bibri and Krogstie [ 19 ] adapted the approach, i.e., made minor changes so as to improve and clarify it in accordance with the overall aim of this futures study as well as the specificity of the proposed model. Indeed, a commonly held view is that the researchers’ worldview and purpose remain the most important criteria for determining how futures studies can be developed and conducted in terms of the details concerning the questions guiding the steps involved in a particular backcasting approach. This helps to identify and implement strategic decisions associated with urban sustainability. However, the outcome of the adapted synthesized approach is illustrated in Table  1 .

As the focus in this paper is on step 3, it is important to point out that the backcasting approach is traditionally based on one normative vision, but multiple visions can also be used to explore different future alternatives (e.g., [ 72 ]). In this futures study, step 3 of backcasting constructs only one future vision based on the objectives, goals, and targets specified in step 1, indicating an integrated solution to a set of problems and challenges associated with existing sustainable urban forms, with support of advanced technologies. In addition, the development of the future vision is typically performed after the stage of analyzing the current situation and assessing the external factors (steps 1 and 2 of the backcasting study). While some views defend that a prior evaluation grounds the vision in realism, others argue that it curtails the ability to think of “ideal states” by putting the current circumstances and capabilities at the center of attention. However, this prescribed vision of the future is based on a sequential progression into the future of the current trends and the expected developments and the way they intertwine with and affect one another in relation to smart sustainable cities, without sharp transformation. It is also based on a combination of technological innovations and sustainability advancements, or on the co-evolutionary pathways of social and ecological systems.

Future vision generation

Constructing the future vision entails defining and describing a desirable future in which the problems and issues identified in relation to existing sustainable urban forms have been solved by meeting the stated objectives and thus achieving the specified goals and targets described in step 1 (see [ 19 ] for a detailed account and discussion). In general, future vision construction is about identifying the desired future state, which consists of vibrant descriptions of audacious goals and targets, as well as reflective statements addressing the aspired future. It is important to note at this stage that the vision of the future and the proposed novel model tend to be used interchangeably in this paper. Indeed, this vision represents a short and concise version of this model. In other words, this model entails a desired future state that is supposed to be more detailed at the end of this scholarly backcasting endeavor.

On the visionary approach (see guiding question 1)

The future vision is a result of the concept of urban sustainability as clarified, advocated, and advanced by many scholars, academics, theorists, and practitioners in the field, and demonstrated in numerous real-world cities across the globe, especially within ecologically advanced nations. According to several rankings, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands have the highest level of sustainable development practices (e.g, [ 30 ]). However, the development of the novel model for smart sustainable cities of the future is supported by several case studies from Sweden as well as their integration in terms of the planning practices and development strategies through which sustainable urban forms can be achieved. Additionally, this model involves the way instrumentation, datafication, and computerization are opening up dramatically different forms of optimizing and enhancing the performance of such forms, thereby increasing their contribution to the goals of sustainable development. This entails the ways in which the informational landscape of smart cities as underpinned by big data technologies and their novel applications can be integrated with the physical landscape of sustainable cities, and what this implies in regard to increasing their sustainability benefits. The essence of the idea revolves around the need to harness, analyze, and leverage the deluge of urban data that has hitherto been mostly associated with smart cities but has clear synergies in the functioning, planning, and development of sustainable cities in terms of improving, advancing, and maintaining their contribution to sustainability.

The problems and issues that the sustainable city faces today will, especially if its landscape and strategy continues to be extremely fragmented from and weakly connected with those of the smart city at the technical and policy levels, increase in the future with possibly much greater compounding effects due to the rapid urbanization of the world and the mounting challenges of sustainability in a rather increasingly technologized and computerized world. As a scholarly endeavor, the development of the novel model for smart sustainable cities of the future as a holistic approach to city planning and development is primarily aimed at bringing together and interlinking the sustainable city and smart city landscapes and strategies so as to address and overcome a set of challenging problems associated with the existing sustainable urban forms. This requires finding more creative and effective ways of merging sustainability knowledge with advanced technologies to enhance the performance of such forms in the face of urbanization using cutting-edge technologies. This can be accomplished by amalgamating the compact city with the eco-city into one model of sustainable urban form in terms of the underlying typologies and design concepts as planning practices, and then augmenting this model with big data technologies and their novel applications as a set of innovative solutions and sophisticated approaches being offered by the data-driven city. In this respect, city operating system, operations centers, innovation and living labs, and strategic planning and policy offices will handle the activity of generating, processing, and analyzing the data deluge aimed at adopting those innovation solutions and sophisticated approaches in the context of the smart sustainable city. Practical uses and applications in this regard span a range of urban systems and domains in terms of operations, functions, services, designs, strategies, and policies with respect to sustainability.

The future vision has a high expectation on big data technology to deliver the needed solutions and approaches to meet the optimal level of sustainability and enable the built environment to function in a more constructive way than at present in terms of lowering energy consumption, mitigating pollution, and minimizing waste, as well as in terms of improving equity, inclusion, and the quality of life. This is to be determined by whether and the extent to which a given city is currently badging or regenerating itself as, or manifestly planning to be, sustainable or smart sustainable. And what this entails in terms of long-term targets of sustainable development as set by that city, in particular in connection with its design concepts, typologies, spatial organizations, and scale stabilizations as planning practices. In the short term, although big data technology could theoretically help meet the optimal level of sustainability and enable the instrumentation, datafication, and computerization of the built environment towards purposeful urban functioning and planning, this would be difficult and expensive. Nevertheless, the future vision can be feasible because it has to be realized over the long run.

The technological vision is based on the assumption of a full development, integration, and deployment of big data computing and the underpinning technologies which exist today and are likely to become widely available in the years ahead to achieve the sought goals. The incorporation of these advanced technologies into urban environments is supported by their untapped potential for and proven role in overcoming the problems and challenges of urbanization and sustainability. In this respect, big data computing and the underpinning technologies will be determining in the process of redesigning and restructuring urban places to achieve the optimal level of sustainability.

The future vision (see guiding question 2)

The key goal to be necessarily present in any backcasting endeavor is generating the normative alternative for the future and, as related to step 5 which is to be addressed in one of the upcoming papers, analyzing its opportunities, potentials, environmental and social benefits, and other effects.

Taking the prevailing and emerging trends to the extreme with the main expected developments (the outcome of step 2) in mind, we singled out one major societal driver for one scenario: a situation that is most likely to happen in the future:

A scenario where innovations and advancements in big data science and analytics and the underpinning technologies as a disruptive form of science and technology dramatically changes the rules by which society functions on a global scale.

Accordingly, the futures study envisions the smart sustainable city as:

A form for human settlements that will be able to improve, advance, and maintain its contribution to the goals of sustainable development by being pervaded, monitored, understood, and analyzed by advanced ICT. As such, it is to be realised by the planning practices and design strategies pertaining to the most advocated and prevalent models of sustainable urban form as integrated—as well as underpinned by big data computing and the underlying core enabling technologies in terms of the instrumentation, datafication, and analytics of the built environment. Related sophisticated approaches and novel applications will be developed, applied, and enhanced by a number of strategic urban actors, including urban operations centers, urban services agencies, strategic planning and design offices, policymaking bodies, research centers, and innovation and living labs. The main strategic goal of the future model of data–driven smart sustainable urban form is to secure and uphold environmentally sound, socially beneficial, and economically viable development towards achieving sustainability.

In light of the above, envisaging the smart sustainable city of the future focuses on the urban and technological components and how they should be integrated that make the city functions as a smart sustainable entity as well as a social organism. Central to this quest is the idea of big data computing and the underpinning technologies as an advanced form of ICT penetrating wherever and whatever it can of the built environment to improve and sustain the performance of what and how urban stakeholders can envision and enact in terms of new forms of cities with regard to sustainability. Furthermore, advanced ICT comes into play as a response to the commonly held view that cities should be conceived in terms of both urban strategies and processual outcomes of urbanization, which involves questions related to the behavior of inhabitants; the processes of living, consuming, and producing; and the processes of building urban environments—in terms of whether these are sustainable. The underlying assumption is that conceiving cities only in terms of, or accounting only for, urban strategies to make cities more sustainable remains inadequate to achieve the elusive goals of sustainable development.

The three strands of the model for smart Sustainable City of the future (see guiding question 3)

As hinted at above, the novel model for smart sustainable cities of the future, the more detailed version of the future vision, integrates two models of sustainable urban form: the compact city and the eco-city, with the data-driven city. This will result in a holistic approach to urbanism, which is different, to a great extent, from these cities taken separately as existing approaches to urbanism. Worth pointing out, to reiterate, is that the focus of this amalgamation is on the design concepts and typologies characterizing both the compact city (i.e., compactness, density, diversity, mixed-land use, and sustainable transport) and the eco-city (i.e., renewable resources, passive solar design, ecological and cultural diversity, greening, environmental management, and other key environmentally sound policies) together with the innovative solutions and sophisticated approaches being offered by big data technologies and their novel applications for sustainability, which relate to the data-driven city and its components (i.e., urban operating centers, research centers, living labs, and innovation labs). The nature and scope of this amalgamation are to be determined by how and the extent to which the characteristic features of the data-driven city would dovetail with those of the integrated model of sustainable urban form towards producing what can be described as—data-driven smart sustainable urban form. The possible steps to be taken to attain the smart sustainable city of the future as a desired end-point or future vision is rather the object of step 5 of the backcasting approach, which comes after step 4. This step is concerned with the case studies that need to be performed to strengthen the future vision and thus the novel model with empirical investigation. The guiding questions of these two steps are listed in Table  1 .

Furthermore, it must be noted that there are neither real examples of a truly smart sustainable city that have actually been delivered and thus no precedents to reference, nor future-proofing of the big data technology to ensure that it is able to be adapted, modified, and built upon in an effective way over the next 25 years or so in response to the dynamic changes of technology and fast-moving hi-tech industry. Therefore, the planned big data technology solutions must be evaluated through actual implementation and its successfulness in order to outline the actual opportunity pertaining to the improvement and advancement of urban sustainability. Indeed, big data computing and the underpinning technologies intended to support the smart sustainable city of the future are currently evolving along with those experts and professionals who are needed to support and operate them; sustainability objectives, goals, and directives are increasingly being, and should continue to be, supported and facilitated using this advanced technology as much as possible across urban domains in terms of operations, functions, services, designs, strategies, and policies; and citizens and communities must be involved and engaged with big data technology and related platforms on a far broader scale. The road ahead promises to be an exciting one as more cities become aware of the great potential and clear prospect of integrating the smart city and the sustainable city as landscapes and strategies. In the sequel, we describe the three strands that comprise the novel model for smart sustainable cities of the future as hinted at in the description of the vision of the future above.

• Sustainable cities

There are multiple views on what a sustainable city should be or look like and thus various ways of defining or conceptualizing it. Generally, a sustainable city can be understood as a set of approaches into operationalizing sustainable development in, or practically applying the knowledge about sustainability and related technologies to the planning and design of, existing and new cities or districts. It represents an instance of sustainable urban development, a strategic approach to achieving the long-term goals of urban sustainability. Accordingly, it needs to balance between the environmental, social, and economic goals of sustainability as an integrated process. Specifically, as put succinctly by [ 11 ], p. 11), a sustainable city “strives to maximize the efficiency of energy and material use, create a zero-waste system, support renewable energy production and consumption, promote carbon-neutrality and reduce pollution, decrease transport needs and encourage walking and cycling, provide efficient and sustainable transport, preserve ecosystems and green space, emphasize design scalability and spatial proximity, and promote livability and community-oriented human environments.”

There are different instances of sustainable cities as an umbrella term, which are identified as models of sustainable urban forms, including compact cities, eco-cities, sustainable urbanism, green urbanism, new urbanism, and urban containment, with the first two being often advocated as the most sustainable and environmentally sound models [ 13 ]. In addition, Jabareen [ 40 ] ranks compact cities as more sustainable than eco-cities from a conceptual perspective using a thematic analysis. However, the effects of these models are compatible with the goals of sustainable development in terms of transport provision, mobility and accessibility, travel behavior, energy conservation, pollution and waste reduction, economic viability, life quality, and social equity. Furthermore, there are multiple definitions of compact cities and eco-cities in the literature (e.g., [ 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 54 , 60 , 61 , 64 , 74 ]). These definitions tend to be based on the wider socio-cultural context in which these models of sustainable urban form are embedded in the form of projects and initiatives and related objectives, requirements, resources, and capabilities. In other words, there is a diversity underneath the various uses of the term compact city and eco-city, as well as a convergence or divergence in the way projects and initiatives conceive of what these city approaches should be.

The compact city model

The concept of the compact city became widespread in the early 1990s as a result of the near clinical separation of land uses because of suburban sprawl that had risen the need for mobility, creating an upsurge in automobile use, which in turn caused high levels of air and noise pollution, as well as decaying city centers. In the 1990s, the European Commission highlighted a number of negative trends in urban development in their Green Paper on the Urban Environment [ 24 ], and therefore argued for denser development, mixed land use, and the transformation of former brownfield sites rather than development in open green areas. Fundamentally, the compact city is characterized by high-density and mixed-land use with no sprawl [ 41 , 42 , 80 ] through the intensification of development, i.e., infill, renewal, redevelopment, and so on. It was around the mid-1990s when the research led to the advocacy of combining compactness and mixed-land use [ 40 ]. Mixed-land use should be encouraged in cities [ 21 ]. In addition, the compact city emphasizes spatial diversity, social mix, sustainable transportation (e.g., transit-rich interconnected nodes), as well as high standards of environmental and urban management systems, energy-efficient buildings, closeness to local squares, more space for bikes and pedestrians, and green areas [ 17 , 19 ]. It has been addressed and can be implemented at different levels, namely neighborhood, district, city, metropolitan, and region, and involves many strategies that can avoid all the problems of modernist design in cities by enhancing the underlying environmental, social, and economic justifications and drivers. Neuman [ 54 ] identifies and enumerates the key dimensions of the compact city in Table  2 .

The compact city is more energy efficient and less polluting because people live in close proximity to workplaces, shops, and leisure and service facilities, which enables them to walk, bike, or take transit. This is in turn anticipated to create a better quality of life by creating more social interaction, community spirit, and cultural vitality (Jenks and Jones 2010). Further, travel distances between activities are shortened due to the heterogeneous zoning that enables compatible land uses to locate in close proximity to one another—mixed-land uses. Such zoning primarily reduces the use of automobiles (car dependency) for commuting, leisure, and shopping trips [ 1 , 75 ]. Integrating land use, transport, and environmental planning is key to minimizing the need for travel and to promoting efficient modes of transport [ 67 ]. Transport systems play particularly an important role in the livability of contemporary cities [ 55 ]. The interrelationship between transport, people, and amenities are argued to be the vital elements of the micro-structure of a sustainable city [ 32 ]. Important to note is that population densities are sufficient for supporting local services and businesses [ 80 ] in terms of economic viability. In high-density development, more land is available for green and agricultural areas, public transport services are superior, and the environmental footprint of the non-renewable resource consumption is steady [ 69 ].

In sum, the compact city model has been advocated as more sustainable urban form due to several reasons: “First, compact cities are argued to be efficient for more sustainable modes of transport. Second, compact cities are seen as a sustainable use of land. By reducing sprawl, land in the countryside is preserved and land in towns can be recycled for development. Third, in social terms, compactness and mixed uses are associated with diversity, social cohesion, and cultural development. Some also argue that it is an equitable form because it offers good accessibility. Fourth, compact cities are argued to be economically viable because infrastructure, such as roads and street lighting, can be provided cost-effectively per capita.” ([ 40 ], p. 46).

The eco-city model

The idea of the eco-city is widely varied in conceptualization and operationalization, and also difficult to delineate. According to the most comprehensive survey of eco-cities to date performed by Joss [ 43 ], the diversity and plurality of the projects and initiatives reflected in the use of the term “eco-city” across the globe make it difficult to develop a meaningful definition. Therefore, the concept of the eco-city has taken on many definitions in the literature. Richard Register, an architect widely credited as the first to have coined the term, describes an eco-city as “an urban environmental system in which input (of resources) and output (of waste) are minimized” [ 61 ]. Joss [ 44 ] states that an eco-city must be, using three analytical categories, developed on a substantial scale, occurring across multiple domains, and supported by policy processes. As an umbrella metaphor, the eco-city “encompasses a wide range of urban-ecological proposals that aim to achieve urban sustainability. These approaches propose a wide range of environmental, social, and institutional policies that are directed to managing urban spaces to achieve sustainability. This type promotes the ecological agenda and emphasizes environmental management through a set of institutional and policy tools.” ([ 40 ], p. 47) This implies that realizing an eco-city requires making countless decisions about urban design, governance, sustainable technologies, and so on [ 60 ]. This in turn signifies that the relationship between sustainable development objectives and urban planning interventions is a subject of much debate [ 22 , 79 ].

Irrespective of the way the idea of the eco-city has been conceptualized and operationalized, there are still some criteria that have been proposed to identify what a desirable or ideal “eco-city” is or looks like, comprising the environmental, social and economic goals of sustainable development. Roseland [ 64 ] and Harvey [ 35 ] describe an ideal “eco-city” as a city that fulfills the following requirements:

Operates on a self-contained local economy that obtains resources locally

Maximizes energy and water efficiency, thereby promoting conservation of resources

Manages an ecologically beneficial waste management system that promotes recycling and reuse to create a zero-waste system

Promotes the use and production of renewable energy, thereby being entirely carbon-neutral

Has a well-designed urban city layout that promotes walkability, biking, and the use of public transportation systems

Ensures decent and affordable housing for all socio-economic and ethnic groups and improves jobs opportunities for disadvantaged groups

Supports urban and local farming

Supports future progress and expansion over time.

As added by Graedel [ 33 ], the eco-city is scalable and evolvable in design in response to urban growth and need changes. Based on these characteristic features, the eco-city and green urbanism overlap or share several concepts, ideas, and visions in terms of the role of the city and positive urbanism in shaping more sustainable places, communities, and lifestyles [ 5 ], pp. 6–8, cited in [ 40 ]) views, while arguing for the need for new approaches to urbanism to incorporate more ecologically responsible forms of living and settlement, a city exemplifying green urbanism as one that:

strives to live within its ecological limits;

is designed to function in ways analogous to nature;

strives to achieve a circular rather than a linear metabolism;

strives towards local and regional self-sufficiency;

facilitates more sustainable lifestyles; and

emphasizes a high quality of neighborhood and community life.

The eco-city approaches tend to emphasize different aspects of sustainability, namely passive solar design, greening, sustainable housing, sustainable urban living, and living machines [ 40 ]. Worth noting is that, as a general consensus, the eco-city is eco-amorphous (formless) in terms of typologies, although it emphasizes passive solar and ecological design [ 40 ]. Indeed, it is evident that the form specificities are on less focus in eco-city development. That is to say, the built environment of the city in terms of urban design features and spatial organizations is insignificant, unlike the compact city which focuses on the spatial patterns of physical objects. Rather, what counts most is how the city as a social fabric is organized, managed, and governed. In this line of thinking, [ 70 ], p. 37), state, ‘social, economic, and cultural variables are far more important in determining the good city than any choice of spatial arrangements.’ In view of that, the focus is on the role of different environmental, social, economic, institutional, and land use policies in managing and governing the city to achieve the required level of sustainability (e.g., [ 25 , 40 , 63 ]).

The data-driven city and its smart and sustainable dimensions

“Data-driven smart sustainable cities” is a term that has recently gained traction in academia, government, and industry to describe cities that are increasingly composed and monitored by ICT of ubiquitous and pervasive computing and thus have the ability of using advanced technologies by city operations centers, strategic planning and policy offices, research centers, innovation labs, and living labs for generating, processing, and analyzing the data deluge in order to enhance decision making processes and to develop and implement innovative solutions for improving sustainability, efficiency, resilience, equity, and the quality of life [ 13 ]. It entails developing a citywide instrumented system (i.e., inter-agency control, planning, innovation, and research hubs) for creating and inventing the future. For example, a data-driven city operations center, which is designed to monitor the city as a whole, pulls or brings together real-time data streams from many different agencies spread across various urban domains and then analyze them for decision making and problem solving purposes: optimizing, regulating, and managing urban operations (e.g., traffic, transport, mobility, energy, etc.).

As cities are routinely embedded with all kinds of ICT forms, including infrastructures, platforms, systems, devices, sensors and actuators, and networks, the volume of data generated about them is growing exponentially and diversifying, providing rich, heterogenous streams of information about urban environments and citizens. This data deluge enables a real-time analysis of different urban systems and interconnects data to provide detailed views of the relationships between various forms of data that can be utilized for improving the various aspects of urbanity through new modes of operational functioning, planning, development, and governance in the context of sustainability.

On the evolving integration of data-driven, smart, and sustainable cities

Cities are becoming ever more computationally augmented and digitally instrumented and networked, their systems interlinked and integrated, their domains combined and coordinated, and their networks coupled and interconnected, and consequently, vast troves of urban data are being generated and used to regulate, control, manage, and organize urban life in real time. In other words, the increasing pervasiveness of urban systems, domains, and networks utilizing digital technologies is generating enormous amounts of digital traces capable of reflecting in real time how people make use of urban spaces and infrastructures and how urban activities and processes are performed. This informational asset is being leveraged in steering cities. Indeed, citizens leave their digital traces just about everywhere they go, both voluntarily and involuntarily, and when cross-referenced with each citizen’s spatial, temporal, and geographical contexts, the data harnessed at this scale offers a means of describing, and responding to, the dynamics of the city in real time. In addition to individual citizens, city systems, domains, and networks constitute the main source of data deluge, which is generated by various urban entities, including governmental agencies, authorities, administrators, institutions, organizations, enterprises, and communities by means of urban operations, functions, services, designs, strategies, and policies.

Smart cities are increasingly connecting the ICT infrastructure, the physical infrastructure, the social infrastructure, and the economic infrastructure to leverage their collective intelligence, thereby striving to render themselves more sustainable, efficient, functional, resilient, livable, and equitable. It follows that smart cities of the future seek to solve a fundamental conundrum of cities—ensure sustainable socio-economic development, equity, and enhanced quality-of-life at the same time as reducing costs and increasing resource efficiency and environment and infrastructure resilience. This is increasingly enabled by utilizing a fast-flowing torrent of urban data and the rapidly evolving data analytics technologies; algorithmic planning and governance; and responsive, networked urban systems. In particular, the generation of colossal amounts of data and the development of sophisticated data analytics for understanding, monitoring, probing, regulating, and planning the city are significant aspects of smart cities that are being embraced by sustainable cities to improve, advance, and maintain their contribution to the goals of sustainable development (e.g., [ 8 , 13 , 17 , 18 ]). Indeed, there has recently been much enthusiasm in the domain of smart sustainable urbanism about the immense possibilities and fascinating opportunities created by the data deluge and its extensive sources with regard to optimizing and enhancing urban operational functioning, management, planning, design, and development in line with the goals of sustainable development as a result of thinking about and understanding sustainability and urbanization and their relationships in a data-analytic fashion for the purpose of generating and applying knowledge-driven, fact-based, strategic decisions in relation to such urban domains as transport, traffic, mobility, energy, environment, education, healthcare, public safety, public services, governance, and science and innovation. For supra-national states, national governments, and city officials, smart cities offer the enticing potential of environmental and socio-economic development, and the renewal of urban centers as hubs of innovation and research (e.g., [ 2 , 4 , 13 , 19 , 46 , 51 , 71 ]). While there are several main characteristics of a smart city as evidenced by industry and government literature (e.g., [ 36 , 46 ] for an overview), the one that the futures study, and thus this paper, is concerned with focuses on environmental and social sustainability.

A framework for the data-driven smart sustainable city

The framework for the data-driven smart sustainable city illustrated in Fig.  2 entails specialized urban, technological, organizational, and institutional elements dedicated for improving, advancing, and maintaining the contribution of such city to the goals of sustainable development [ 13 ]. It is derived based on thematic analysis and technical literature. This justifies the relationship between the underlying components. Furthermore, underlying the idea of the data-driven smart sustainable city is the process of drawing all the kinds of analytics associated with urban life into a single hub, supported by the broader public and open data analytics. This involves creating a city-wide instrumented or centralized system that draws together data streams from many agencies (across city domains) for large scale analytics and then direct them to different centers, labs, and offices. Urban operating systems explicitly link together multiple urban technologies to enable greater coordination of urban systems and domains. Urban operations centers attempt to draw together and interlink urban big data to provide integrated and holistic views and synoptic city intelligence through processing, analyzing, visualizing, and monitoring the vast deluge of urban data that can be used for real-time decision-making pertaining to sustainability by means of big data ecosystems. Strategic planning and policy centers serve as a data analytic hub to weave together data from many diverse agencies to control, manage, regulate, and govern urban life more efficiently and effectively in relation to sustainability. This entails an integration that enables systemwide effects to be understood, analyzed, tracked, and built into the very designs and responses that characterize urban operations, functions, and services. As far as research centers and innovation labs are concerned, they are associated with research and innovation for the purpose of developing and disseminating urban intelligence functions. For the anatomy of the data-driven smart sustainable city in terms of digital instrumentation, datafication, computerization, as well as urban operations centers, strategic planning and policy offices, living labs, innovations labs, urban intelligence functions, and so on, the reader can be directed to Bibri [ 15 ].

A framework for the data-driven smart sustainable city. Source: Adapted from Bibri [ 15 ]

The rationale behind developing the future vision (see guiding question 4)

The arguments, a set of reasons given in support of the novel model for smart sustainable cities of the future, are compiled and distilled from the outcome of step 2 of the backcasting study conducted by Bibri and Krogstie [ 19 ]. There are many reasons for integrating the existing models of sustainable urban form as a set of practices, or many explanations of controlling the concepts and principles of these practice in the domain of urban sustainability. This applies also to the integration of the sustainable city and the data-driven city as different approaches to urbanism. Here, we identify the key reasons in relevance to the aim of the futures study. This is accordingly to justify the research pursuit of analyzing, investigating, and developing the proposed model for smart sustainable city of the future.

Amalgamating the compact city model with the eco-city model

Being one of the most significant intellectual and practical challenges for three decades, the development of a desirable model of sustainable urban form continues to motivate and inspire collaboration between researchers, academics, and practitioners to create more effective design and planning solutions based on a more integrated and holistic perspective.

Different scholars and planners may develop different combinations of design concepts to achieve the goals of sustainable development. They might come with different forms, where each form emphasizes different concepts and contributes differently to sustainability.

Sustainable urban forms have many overlaps among them in their concepts, ideas, and visions. While there is nothing wrong with such forms being different yet compatible and not mutually exclusive, it can extremely be beneficial and strategic to find innovative ways of combining their distinctive concepts and key differences towards more holistic forms for improving sustainability performance.

Compact cities have a form as they are governed by static planning and design tools, whereas eco-cities are amorphous: without a clearly defined form, thereby the feasibility and potential of their integration into one model that can eventually accelerate sustainable development towards achieving the optimal level of sustainability.

Neither real-world cities nor academics have yet developed convincing models of sustainable urban form, and the components of such form are still not yet fully specified.

More in-depth knowledge on planning practices is needed to capture the vision of sustainable urban development, so too is a deeper understanding of the multi-faceted processes of change to achieve sustainable urban forms. This entails conceptualizing multiple pathways towards attaining this vision and developing a deeper understanding of the interplay between social and technical solutions for sustainable urban forms.

Merging the integrated model of sustainable urban form with the data-driven smart city model

Smart urbanism as being predominately driven by big data computing and the underpinning technologies has recently revived the debate about sustainable cities, and promises to add a whole new dimension to sustainability by enhancing the outcome of the design principles and strategies underlying the existing models of sustainable urban form in ways that enable such form to achieve the optimal level of sustainability.

It is an urban world where the physical landscape of sustainable cities and the informational landscape of smart cities are increasingly being merged. Hence, it is high time for sustainable urban forms to embrace and leverage what data-driven smart cities have to offer in terms of innovative solutions and sophisticated approaches to overcome the complex challenges of sustainability and urbanization.

A large part of research within the emerging area of smart sustainable cities focuses on exploiting the potentials and opportunities of advanced technologies and their novel applications to mitigate or overcome the issue of sustainable cities and smart cities being extremely fragmented as landscapes and weakly connected as approaches, especially at the technical and policy levels.

There is huge potential for using big data computing and the underpinning technologies to advance sustainable urban forms through novel approaches to decision support in the form of intelligence functions enabled by the analytical power of the deluge of urban data.

Tremendous opportunities are available for utilizing big data applications in sustainable cities to optimize and enhance their operations, functions, services, designs, strategies, and policies, as well as to find answers to challenging analytical questions and thereby advance knowledge.

As an integrated and holistic approach, smart sustainable cities tend to take multiple forms of combining the strengths of sustainable cities and smart cities based on how the concept of smart sustainable cities can be conceptualized and operationalized. As a corollary of this, there is a host of unexplored opportunities towards new approaches to smart sustainable urban development.

Problems, issues, and challenges (see guiding question 5)

The issue of sustainable urban forms has always been problematic and daunting to deal with. In view of that, the intellectual challenge to produce a theoretically and practically convincing model of sustainable urban form with clear components continues to induce scholars, academics, planners, scientists, and real-world cities even to create a more successful and robust model of such form. In addition, the contribution of the existing models of sustainable urban form to sustainability has, over the last three decades or so, been subject to much debate, generating a growing level of criticism that essentially questions its practicality, intellectual foundation, and added value.

Developing the model for smart sustainable cities of the future is aimed at improving, advancing, and sustaining the contribution of sustainable urban forms to the goals of sustainable development with support of big data computing and the underpinning technologies as an advanced form of ICT. This is due to the underlying potential for enhancing and optimizing urban operations, functions, designs, services, strategies, and practices in line with the goals of sustainable development, as well as for solving a number of problems, addressing key issues, and overcoming complex challenges in the context of sustainable urban forms. These are distilled and compiled from an extensive interdisciplinary literature review and the outcome of step 2 of the backcasting study ([ 16 , 19 ]) (Table  3 ).

Key novel analytical and practical applications of big data technology for the future vision (see guiding question 6)

Big data applications are increasingly permeating the systems and domains of sustainable cities. This can be seen as a new ethos added to the era of sustainable urbanism in response to the rise of ICT and the spread of urbanization as major global shifts at play today. The characteristic spirit of this era is manifested in the behavior and aspiration of sustainable cities towards embracing what big data computing and the underpinning technologies have to offer in order to bring about sustainable development and thus achieve sustainability under what is labeled “smart sustainable cities of the future.” The range of the emerging big data applications as novel analytical and practical solutions that can be utilized for enhancing the sustainability performance of sustainable cities is potentially huge. A recent study conducted by Bibri [ 13 ] reveals that tremendous opportunities are available for utilizing big data applications to improve, advance, and maintain the contribution of sustainable cities to the goals of sustainable development. This finding is based on identifying, synthesizing, distilling, and enumerating the most common big data applications in relation to a number of urban domains or sub-domains, as well as elucidating their sustainability effects associated with the underlying functionalities pertaining to these domains or sub-domains. These specifically include transport and traffic, mobility, energy, power grid, environment, buildings, infrastructures, urban planning, urban design, governance, healthcare, education, public safety, and academic and scientific research.

The potential of big data technology lies in enabling sustainable cities to harness and leverage their informational landscape in effectively understanding, monitoring, probing, and planning their systems in ways that enable them to achieve the optimal level of sustainability. To put it differently, the use of this advanced technology is projected to play a significant role in realizing the key characteristic features of such cities, namely the efficiency of operations and functions, the efficient utilization of natural resources, the intelligent management of infrastructures and facilities, the lowering of pollution and waste, the improvement of the quality of life and well-being of citizens, and the enhancement of mobility and accessibility.

Discussion and conclusion

Long-lasting and substantive transformations such as sustainability transitions can only come about through the accumulation of several integrated smaller-scale actions associated with strategically successful initiatives and programs. The backcasting approach to futures studies can help to highlight such initiatives and programs, and also play a key role in sustaining the momentum in the quest to bring about major transformations. In the context of city planning and development, this approach can be used to illustrate what might happen to cities in order to allow them to adapt to perceived future trends and to manage uncertainty. As such, it aids in dealing with this uncertainty by clarifying what the most desirable possibilities are, what can be known, what is already known, as well as how today’s decisions may play out in each of a variety of plausible futures. Futures studies using backcasting approaches allow for a better understanding of future opportunities and exploring the implications of alternative development paths that can be relied on to avoid the impacts of the future. There is a strong belief that future-orientated planning can change development paths. The interest in the future of smart sustainable cities is driven by the aspiration to transform the continued urban development path. Therefore, it is worthy to venture some thoughts about where it might be useful to channel the efforts now and in the future in relation to smart sustainable urban planning and development. The backcasting scenario, a description of possible actions in the future, starts with constructing the vision of the future and then works backwards in time step-by-step to figure out how this future could emerge as a particular “desired end-point” through identifying the necessary steps to reach it.

This paper aimed to generate a vision for smart sustainable cities of the future by answering the 6 guiding questions for step 3 of the futures study being conducted. We described the terms of reference for the future vision under the visionary approach. These terms entail the scope and limitation of the area of knowledge to be focused on and the description of the structure and objectives of the futures study. Then, we described how the future vision look like, more specifically, the novel model for smart sustainable cities of the future and its role in achieving the optimal level of sustainability. Following this, we detailed how the proposed model is different from existing approaches to urbanism, namely compact cities, eco-cities, data-driven smart cities by describing and discussing the three strands that comprise this model, as well as how they intertwine with one another in the context of sustainability. This was justified by providing the rationale for developing the future vision, which represents the short and concise version of the respective model. Of particular importance, we provided a tabulation version of the review and discussion of the sustainability problems and issues that are supposed to be tackled by meeting the objectives stated and thus achieving the goals specified in step 1 of the backcasting study. In relation to this, we provided an account of the kind of technologies and their novel applications that are intended to be used as part of the proposed model.

Working with a long-term image of the future is meant to increase the possibilities of, and accelerate the movement towards, reaching a smart sustainable city. In this regard, the novel model for smart sustainable cities of the future will be the boost to new forms of policy analysis and planning in the era of big data revolution, and the greatest impacts of big data technology will be on the way we improve, advance, and maintain the contribution of sustainable cities to the goals of sustainable development in the future by means of integrating urban strategies and technological innovations. The main goal of big data technology is to provide intelligence functions that will make this possible in the most effective ways.

Worth pointing out is that smart sustainable cities as an integrated model take multiple forms of combining the strengths of sustainable cities and smart cities based on how the concept of smart sustainable cities can be conceptualized and operationalized. Just as it has been the case for sustainable cities: there are multiple visions of, and pathways towards achieving, sustainable urban development. As a corollary of this, there is a host of unexplored opportunities towards new approaches to smart sustainable urban planning and development. These future endeavors reflect the characteristic spirit and prevailing tendency of the ICT-sustainability-urbanization era as manifested in its aspirations for directing the advances in ICT of pervasive computing towards addressing and overcoming the challenges of sustainability and urbanization in the defining context of smart sustainable cities of the future.

Similarly, in relation to backcasting as a planning approach, multiple visions can be used to explore different future alternatives as to smart sustainable cities. It is important, though, to take into consideration that big data technologies as part of future visions seem to be de-urbanized in the sense of not being made to work within a particular urban context, or to be tailored to different urban landscapes and strategies. Besides, it is unfeasible simply to plop down advanced technologies and force them to work in a given urban space. Cities are so characterized by key specificities such that technology systems might work in one city and not be desirable in another, unless they are dramatically reworked or reshaped to be practical in those cities where they have to be implemented. Hence, there is a need for urbanizing big data technologies and in different directions, we content and advocate, when it comes to generating future visions. With that in mind, the future vision this paper is concerned with pertains to cities in ecologically and technologically advanced nations.

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Author’s information

Simon Elias Bibri is a Ph.D scholar in the area of data-driven smart sustainable cities of the future and Assistant Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of Computer Science and Department of Architecture and Planning, Trondheim, Norway. He holds the following degrees:

Bachelor of Science in computer engineering with a major in software development and computer networks

Master of Science—research focused—in computer science with a major in Ambient Intelligence

Master of Science in computer science with a major in informatics

Master of Science in computer and systems sciences with a major in decision support and risk analysis

Master of Science in entrepreneurship and innovation with a major in new venture creation

Master of Science in strategic leadership towards sustainability

Master of Science in sustainable urban development

Master of Science in environmental science with a major in ecotechnology and sustainable development

Master of Social Science with a major in business administration (MBA)

Master of Arts in communication and media for social change

Postgraduate degree (1 year of Master courses) in management and economics

PhD in computer science and urban planning with a major in data-driven smart sustainable cities

Bibri has earned all his Master’s degrees from different Swedish universities, namely Lund University, West University, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Malmö University, Stockholm University, and Mid–Sweden University.

His current research interests include smart sustainable cities, sustainable cities, smart cities, urban science, urban analytics, sustainability science, complexity science, data-intensive science, data-driven and scientific urbanism, as well as big data computing and its core enabling and driving technologies, namely sensor technologies, data processing platforms, big data applications, cloud and fog computing infrastructures, and wireless communication networks.

Bibri has authored four academic books whose titles are as follows:

The Human Face of Ambient Intelligence: Cognitive, Emotional, Affective, Behavioral and Conversational Aspects (525 pages), Springer, 07/2015.

The Shaping of Ambient Intelligence and the Internet of Things: Historico-epistemic, Socio-cultural, Politico-institutional and Eco-environmental Dimensions (301 pages), Springer, 11/2015.

Smart Sustainable Cities of the Future: The Untapped Potential of Big Data Analytics and Context-Aware Computing for Advancing Sustainability (660 pages), Springer, 03/2018.

Big Data Science and Analytics for Smart Sustainable Urbanism: Unprecedented Paradigmatic Shifts and Practical Advancements (505 pages), Springer, 06/2019.

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Bibri, S.E., Krogstie, J. Generating a vision for smart sustainable cities of the future: a scholarly backcasting approach. Eur J Futures Res 7 , 5 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-019-0157-0

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5 Cities Leading the Way in Resilience, Sustainability and Inclusivity

Cities are increasingly vulnerable to climate change and disasters, yet many are becoming the models for resilience and sustainability.

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Cities, increasingly vulnerable to climate change and disasters due to dense populations and socio-economic disparities, are crucial for sustainable development. With 70 million people moving to urban areas in the developing world annually, many cities struggle to provide adequate, sustainable infrastructure and inclusive access to services. However, through community engagement, nature-based solutions, innovative governance and digitalization, some cities are becoming models of resilience and sustainability. 

Here are five cities around the world that serve as exemplary models: 

Bonn, Germany: Raising climate ambitions by understanding and tracking knowledge and perceptions

Bonn, a city of over 300,000 inhabitants, is an international hub for sustainable urban development and climate action aiming for climate neutrality by 2035. To this end, a large number of activities are supported by funding programmes — such as construction or energy measures and green infrastructure — to mitigate natural hazards like floods and heatwaves .

Participation is key: a Climate Action Plan was developed with input from citizens, civil society and businesses. "Climate districts" are being established to involve residents and regular surveys track public knowledge and perception of climate action measures. 

Buenos Aires, Argentina: Empowering informal settlements through participatory processes 

In Argentina’s capital, 10 per cent of the urban population resides in informal settlements, which amounts to over 300,000 people. Hence, upgrading processes are needed that are both participatory and climate-friendly to ensure sustainability. Transformative Urban Coalitions (TUC), supported by UNU-EHS, established an Urban Lab in a quarter called Barrio 20, capitalizing on pre-existing community structures in which local initiatives are planned and implemented. The lab uses these structures for initiatives such as greening a schoolyard and setting up a temperature and humidity monitoring system. 

The urban lab quickly integrated into the neighbourhood’s upgrading process, fostering local commitment and ownership. Villa 20 shows how participatory local actions can create more liveable, greener and socially just communities.

Hue, Viet Nam: Strengthening resilience to rising floods through risk-informed adaptation 

Hue, a coastal city in Central Viet Nam, faces increasing flood risks. To strengthen its resilience, Hue initially focused on physical flood control infrastructure like dams, flood gates and drainage systems along with early warning systems through sirens and mobile apps. More recently, nature-based solutions, such as mangroves to reduce coastal flooding impacts, were applied and proved very beneficial. 

UNU-EHS is part of the FloodAdaptVN project , which contributes to Hue’s resilience-building efforts, for instance by assessing key flood risks and people's needs of and attitudes towards flood risks adaptation solutions. Results are discussed with local stakeholders to jointly identify and evaluate additional resilience-building options, including more nature-based solutions and improved early warning systems. 

Nairobi, Kenya: Assessing capacities and needs in support of the most vulnerable urban dwellers 

Nearly 60 per cent of Nairobi’s 4.4 million inhabitants live in informal settlements, with Kibera being the largest in Kenya and one of the largest in Africa. Inhabitants are increasingly suffering from growing climate change impacts and natural hazards.

While NGOs and state actors provide support, it is insufficient to keep pace with growing populations and risks. Community-driven initiatives and local actions are crucial for sustaining livelihoods during and after disasters. Local data collection and assessments, including mapping disaster impacts such as losses and damages of housing, health and financial security, is essential. A UNU-EHS study highlighted local needs and capacities, linking them to international debates around operationalizing the “Loss and Damage Fund” to address unavoidable climate change effects.

Visakhapatnam, India: Achieving a more sustainable city through innovation and technology

Visakhapatnam, a rapidly growing city of 2.3 million on India’s cyclone-prone eastern coast, uses technology to address complex urbanization issues and improve the quality of life while enhancing participatory urban governance.

Pluvial flooding is a major challenge, worsened by the city’s hilly terrain. The ‘sachivalyam’ system, a volunteer-based initiative, is being expanded to train volunteers as first responders and community voices. Equipped with app-based monitoring and information collection systems, these volunteers provide regular updates to Visakhapatnam Smart City’s central command and control centre, enabling swift, proactive measures. The T-CAP project led by UNU-EHS supports this approach through an urban living lab where residents and volunteers collaborate on climate actions such as vulnerability and risk clustering, action prioritization and disaster risk management. This helps to prioritize interventions based on smart city data.

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Urban Sustainability and Resilience—Why We Need to Focus on Scales

Thomas elmqvist, stockholm.  27 march 2013.

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Two of the most debated and challenging concepts in urban development are sustainability and resilience. How are they related? Do they mean approximately the same thing or are they distinctly different and can misunderstandings lead to undesired outcomes?

In this essay I will try to clarify the concepts, discuss two common misinterpretations and reflect on the many difficulties that remain in application in urban development.

Can a city be sustainable?

Most people would answer that this is not only possible but also given rapid urbanization, necessary for the planet to become sustainable. But my immediate answer is NO and here is the first common misconception we need to deal with. Cities are centers of production and consumption and urban inhabitants reliant on resources and ecosystem services, from food, water and construction materials to waste assimilation, secured from locations around the world. Although cities can optimize their resource use, increase their efficiency, and minimize waste, they can never become fully self-sufficient. Therefore, individual cities cannot be considered “sustainable” without acknowledging and accounting for their teleconnections  — that is, their long-distance dependence and impact on resources and populations in other regions around the world.

Sustainability is commonly misunderstood as being equal to self-sufficiency, but in a globalized world virtually nothing at a local scale is self-sufficient. To become meaningful, urban sustainability therefore has to address appropriate scales, which always would be larger than an individual city.

The classical definition of sustainable development ( Brundtland Report on Sustainable Development ) focuses on how to manage resources in a way that guarantees welfare and promotes equity of current and future generations, in general addressing the global scale. However, in the urban context, research and application of sustainability have so far been constrained to either single or narrowly defined issues (e.g., population, climate, energy, water) or rarely moved beyond city boundaries.

Clearly what constitutes urban sustainability needs rethinking and reformulation, taking urban teleconnections into account. We will come back to this at the end of the essay.

Can we build resilience in a single city?

Similarly, most people would answer yes to this question and that a resilient city would be highly desirable and necessary. But again, my answer is NO , at least when it comes to general resilience , and here we deal with the second common misconception.

Firstly, a narrow focus on a single city is often counterproductive and may even be destructive since building resilience in one city often may erode it somewhere else with multiple negative effects across the globe (this relates to the distinction between general and specified resilience explained below).

Secondly, from historical accounts we learn that while there are some cities that have actually failed and disappeared (e.g. Mayan cities), our modern era experience is that cities rarely if ever collapse and disappear. Rather, they may enter a spiral of decline, becoming non-competitive and losing their position in regional, national and even global systems of cities. However, through extensive financial and trading networks, cities have a high capacity to avoid abrupt change and collapse and applying the resilience concept at the local city scale is thus not particularly useful.

What is resilience?

Resilience (see Resilience Alliance ) has a long history in engineering science but the most influential ecological interpretation was developed by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973. Resilience builds on two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and co-evolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system.

The second is that the long-held assumption that systems respond to change in a linear, predictable fashion is simply wrong. Complex systems are, according to resilience thinking, rarely static and linear, instead they are often in constant flux, highly unpredictable and self-organizing, with feedbacks across time and space. A key feature of complex adaptive systems is that they can settle into a number of different stability domains. A lake, for example, will stabilize in either an oxygen-rich, clear state or algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession.

Historically, we have tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that many systems do not respond to change that way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed, at which point the water abruptly goes turbid. Resilience science focuses on these sorts of tipping points. It looks at slow variables (i.e. gradual stresses), such as climate change, as well as fast variables (i.e. chance events), such as storms, fires, even stock market crashes that can tip a system into another equilibrium state from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to recover.

Over the past decade, resilience science has expanded much beyond ecologists to include thinking among economists, political scientists, mathematicians, social scientists, and archaeologists. For a general overview see this video .

Resilience is now used widely in discussing urban development, but it is much more challenging than when applied to a lake, agricultural or a forest system. When most people think of urban resilience it is generally in the context of response to sudden impacts, such as a hazard or disaster recovery — for example Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and recently Sandy in New York City. How rapidly does the system recover and how much shock can it absorb before it transforms into something fundamentally different? This is often viewed as the essence of resilience thinking. However, the resilience concept goes far beyond recovery from single disturbances and it is here an important distinction is made between general resilience and specified resilience . General resilience refers to the resilience of a large-scale system to all kinds of shocks, including novel ones, specified resilience refers to the resilience “of what, to what” — that is, resilience of smaller scale-systems, a particular part of a system, related to a particular control variable, or to one or more identified kinds of shocks.

From an urban perspective, general resilience thus only makes sense on a much larger scale than individual cities (although specified resilience may be explored at a smaller scale). The concept of general resilience and scale lead us to another quite radical idea: change and transformation at the city level is necessary for maintaining resilience at the larger scale.

This may at first seem strongly counter-intuitive. Isn’t resilience about keeping systems as is and avoid change and transformations?

Transformation and resilience

To further explore this we need to put everything in a larger historical and global perspective, as shown below.

The relatively stable environment of the Holocene , the current interglacial period that began about 10,000 years ago, allowed agriculture and complex societies, including current urbanization to develop. This stable period is in contrast to the rather violent fluctuations in temperature in the preceding 90,000-year period. The stability induced humans, for the first time, to invest in agriculture and manage the environment rather than merely exploit it. Despite some natural environmental fluctuations over the past 10,000 years, complex feedback mechanisms involving the atmosphere, the terrestrial biosphere and the oceans have kept variation within the narrow range associated with the Holocene state. However, since the industrial revolution (the advent of the Anthropocene ), humans are believed to have effectively begun pushing the planet outside the Holocene range of variability for many key Earth System processes (for full reference see here ) including introduction of the concept of planetary boundaries). Urbanization represents one of the major processes contributing to this pushing pressure through, for example, green house gas emissions, massive land use change and increased resource consumption.

Maintaining resilience at the global scale  — that is, avoiding that the planet passes a threshold and again enter into a new period of violent climate fluctuations — is therefore believed to require massive transformations at the level of cities. But what are these transformations, and what would trigger urban regions to employ them?

Coping vs. transformation

To explore this we will return to the basic principle in resilience thinking: a slow variable (like urbanization) may invisibly push the larger system closer and closer to a threshold (beyond which there would be radical change toward a new equilibrium) and that disturbances that previously could have been absorbed become the straws that break the camel’s back. However, urbanization does not just represent a slow variable. At the same time it is a process leading to higher intensity/frequency of disturbances through, for example, its impact on both global and regional climate change. Urbanization therefore represents a double-arrowed process and complex interaction between slow and fast variables. Conventional urban responses to disturbances such as coping and adaptive strategies may not only over time be insufficient at the city scale, they may also be counterproductive when it comes to maintaining resilience at the global scale.

A coping strategy is often used to describe the ability at the local scale and often at the level of individuals (such as having savings on a bank account), to deal effectively with a single disturbance, with the understanding that a crisis is rare and temporary and that the situation will quickly normalize when the disturbance recedes. Adapting to change is defined as an adjustment at somewhat larger scales in natural and human systems, in response to actual or expected disturbances when frequencies tend to increase (e.g. building higher and higher levees in response to increasing risks of flooding) (see the image below).

Transformation strategies are employed when coping and adaptation strategies are insufficient and outcomes are perceived to be highly undesirable, A transformation is thus defined as a response that differs from both coping and adaptation strategies in that the decisions made and actions taken change the identity of the system itself, create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social structures make the existing system untenable. It also and most importantly must address the causes of the increasing intensity/frequency of disturbance, which necessarily may not be the case with coping and adaptation. There are numerous examples of urban regions already engaged in developing both coping and adaptive strategies in response to, for example, sea level rise, demographic changes, and shortage of natural resources. However, when intensities and frequencies of disturbances increase, building larger dams or higher levees may no longer protect a city from flooding or sea level rise. Instead, a transformation to, say, a floating city, may be the only viable option.

However, even if we would agree that a myriad of transformations at the local/regional scale is important for maintaining resilience at the global scale, current coping and adaptive strategies needs our attention since they may be counter-productive, lead to lock-in and prevent a transformation to be initiated. For example, this would include exploring the local-global synergies or trade-offs of different re-designing schemes of the supply and consumptions chains, evaluating different modes of re-designing urban morphology and transport and different modes of stewardships of ecosystem services within and outside city boundaries.

Resilience and sustainability — what is the difference?

So where does this take us when it comes to understanding urban resilience and sustainability?

First of all, for both concepts the local city scale is too narrow. Urban sustainability must include teleconnections and urban dependence and impacts on distal populations and ecosystems. Similarly, when building resilience at the global scale (i.e. general resilience), urban regions must take increased responsibility for implementing transformative solutions and, through collaboration across a global system of cities, provide a transformative framework to manage resource chains.

However, how do we then distinguish between the two concepts? Isn’t there still a substantial overlap? My view is that we may accept that the concepts are quite similar when addressing the global scale, but we may give them a distinctly different meaning when addressing other scales. At regional and local scales resilience could more be seen as an approach (non-normative process) to meet the challenges of sustainable development (normative goal). Treating resilience as non-normative at these scales is preferable since knowledge about the components of resilience could be used to either build or erode resilience depending on whether a transformation is desirable or not in a specific context.

I have above outlined some of the challenges with the two concepts, but there are many more. We will need a lively debate exploring even further the meaning of the concepts in an urban context and how cities may contribute to global sustainability and resilience through transformative actions redefining their role and become more of sources of ecosystem services rather than sinks and increasingly provide better stewardship of marine, terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems both inside and outside city boundaries.

It would be important to feed such a lively debate into the current efforts to develop a framework for the Sustainable Development Goals (for example, see here ):

• Can we agree that the city-scale is too narrow for both sustainability and resilience analyses and policies implementing them?
• How should SDGs become relevant for urban development? How could scales be addressed in the SDGs? For example, how do we design scalable targets and indicators that link the local and the global scale?
• How should we use the resilience concept in relation to urban development? Could and should resilience be used in both a normative and a non-normative sense depending on scale?

I invite all readers to give their view!

Thomas Elmqvist Stockholm

About the Writer: Thomas Elmqvist

Thomas Elmqvist is a professor in Natural Resource Management at Stockholm University and Theme Leader at the Stockholm Resilience Center . His research is on ecosystem services, land use change, natural disturbances and components of resilience including the role of social institutions.

6 thoughts on “ Urban Sustainability and Resilience—Why We Need to Focus on Scales ”

How to city resilient and sustainable in same time

The need for new disaster resistant cities are the need of the day as we seen the disasters happening through out the world and mostly we respond late to that so. If cities becomes resilient then we can survive future disasters to certain level

Nice essay. I like the transformation vs. coping notions as well as multiscalar considerations, I wonder where vulnerability as the opposite end of resilience fits into your conceptual model? In the US, Dr. Cutters work has looked at vulnerability from multiple systems perspectives, although I think the answers for transformation and adaptation necessarily are multiscalar – micro (individual/hh/firm/neighborhood/district) – meso (city infrastructure systems/food systems/ecological services at landscape scale), and macro scale (watersheds/airsheds/megaregions/substate systems/intermetro connections) to be truly descriptive of considerations. You need these levels in mind – because the notions of vertical and horizontal integration are a large part of sustainable cities and regions (and arguably aspects of resilience), but realizing that all urban resilience is inherently local as so much is determined by location choices, land use decisions (intensity/density) and compatibility with environmental, social and economic system considerations. I have a proposal in to US HUD to develop scenario modeling capabilities to learn about the tradeoffs at differing scales and interactions between the different dimensions of resilience, will know in next week or so if we fund. One possible thread you might explore in your work is adaptation of the logic structure of wetlands assessment in the US using the hydrogeomorphic approach (premise is ecological services but can be expanded using logic models)–this can be modified I believe- to create socially constructed resilience rating system that allows local stakeholders and experts to collaboratively define and understand key linkages and +/- feedback loops across resilience dimensions–thats where I am focused at present….cheers!

Hmmm…a system-of-systems approach with a scalar geographic dimension and disturbance/chaos component.

Great article as the other commenters have already noted. I wonder how many city managers, urban planners, disaster management officials, or social analysts take the time to identify and understand the relationships and friction points in their obviously complex systems?

I’m almost ready to start rescoping my observations of urban areas in either an “ecosystem” context or change the paradigm completely and look at them as a type of “organism” in a biological context, especially on how external influences create changes in the the ecosystem (or organism) and induce either short- or long-term change(s).

Really interesting article! I’ve been thinking about this myself but come to a somewhat different conclusion in my work with energy and resource efficiency. I think resilience needs to come from the neighborhood scale, so I found myself heading in the opposite direction from you. Our socio-cultural structure is largely a neighborhood structure, we can create self-reliant and resilient energy infrastructure most easily at neighborhood scale, food systems can be most easily built and nurtured at neighborhood scale, and so on…. Neighborhoods then form the cellular structure of a larger town or city, which then may be part of a larger regional cluster of cities. When neighborhoods are unsustainable, the city is unsustainable. I find super-dense neighborhoods (high rise downtowns) unsustainable and am leaning toward promoting a density limit (or perhaps a sweet spot) to achieve resilience. Some aspects of resilience must fall to the city at large, such as transportation infrastructure, but I feel most aspects of resilience are, and must be, achievable at the neighborhood scale.

A very interesting article, thank you! I’ve always though that resilience is a path for sustainability; we need to be resilient in order to be sustainable in a long term. My current research is on how we build resilient cities in earthquake prone environments. I’ve found – in the context of Chilean cities – that urban policies are a big problem in that concern. They are usually too tight and late; for example, land use is too specific and does not give room for aditional uses that open areas of cities have in times of crises. Beside, city master plans take too long to develop and when they are approved, the urban system is already under change. In this sense, I’ve found that social systmes and people’s behaviour in times of crises can provide a better contribution to urban resilience, mostly in environments where natural systmes are well conserved within or nearby cities.

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Culture as a resilient and sustainable strategy in small cities.

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Share and Cite

Somoza Medina, X.; Relea Fernández, C.E. Culture as a Resilient and Sustainable Strategy in Small Cities. Sustainability 2024 , 16 , 7582. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177582

Somoza Medina X, Relea Fernández CE. Culture as a Resilient and Sustainable Strategy in Small Cities. Sustainability . 2024; 16(17):7582. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177582

Somoza Medina, Xosé, and Carlos Emilio Relea Fernández. 2024. "Culture as a Resilient and Sustainable Strategy in Small Cities" Sustainability 16, no. 17: 7582. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177582

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Make Your Note

Addressing Urbanization Challenges for a Sustainable Future

• 06 Sep 2024
• 24 min read
• GS Paper - 1
• Urbanization
• Population and Associated Issues
• Poverty and Developmental Issues

This editorial is based on “ Making transit-oriented urban development work” which was published in Hindustan Times on 03/09/2024. This article highlights that the Transit-oriented development (TOD) is frequently discussed in Union budgets but struggles with implementation. Despite its promise of improving accessibility and reducing carbon emissions by concentrating urban development around transit hubs, TOD faces several challenges.

For Prelims: Urbanization , United Nations, 2011 Census, United Nations, Global Liveability Index , Slums And Unauthorized Colonies , Flood Management, Urban Planning, World Air Quality Report 2023 , Managing Solid Waste , Budget 2024-25 , AMRUT, Housing For All, Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) , Municipal Bonds.

For Mains : Significance of Planned Urbanisation for Sustainable Development.

Urbanization is a dynamic and complex process involving the transition of populations from rural to urban areas , profoundly transforming land use, economic activities, and social structures.

This phenomenon, recognized by the United Nations as one of the key demographic trends alongside population growth, aging, and migration, entails more than just a shift in numbers. It includes the expansion of city boundaries, economic diversification, cultural changes, and the evolution of governance systems.

The 2011 Census recorded India's urbanization rate at 31.2% , an increase from 27.8% in 2001. By 2030, it is projected that approximately 590 million people will reside in urban areas. With rapid urbanization underway, it is crucial to analyze the growth trends and their impact on the population.

Urbanization manifests in various forms, including planned settlements designed by government agencies to foster sustainable development and unplanned settlements that emerge spontaneously, often resulting in informal and sometimes precarious living conditions. In India, urbanization is accelerating, with significant impacts on city infrastructure, economic output, and social dynamics.

Despite the promise of urban growth projected to drive a substantial portion of GDP and job creation by 2030, challenges such as inadequate infrastructure, transit issues, safety problems, environmental degradation, and socio-economic inequalities persist . Understanding urbanization’s multifaceted nature and addressing these challenges is crucial for fostering resilient and sustainable urban environments.

What is Urbanisation?

• It encompasses demographic transformation, spatial expansion of cities, economic diversification, cultural shifts, and evolving governance systems, resulting in increased urban population density and the development of built environments.
• The United Nations identifies urbanisation as one of four major demographic trends, alongside population growth, aging, and international migration.
• With the aim to create sustainable and livable environments, such plans take into account various factors, including physical, social, and economic considerations, to ensure organized development.
• These areas typically feature a mix of permanent, semi-permanent, and temporary structures and are commonly located near city drains, railway tracks, flood-prone areas, or on agricultural land and green belts.
• This ranking reflects that Indian cities have low scores in five key parameters: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure.
• The focus has shifted from large Tier 1 cities to medium-sized towns, driven by factors like employment, education, and security.
• According to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), by 2030, urban areas are projected to contribute approximately 70% to the GDP, 85% of total tax revenue, and 70% of new jobs.
• Trade and Industry: The growth of trade and industry attracts labor, fosters infrastructure development, and creates access to markets and innovation hubs.
• Economic Opportunities: Cities offer a greater number of job opportunities compared to rural areas, hosting businesses, factories, and other institutions.
• Education: Urban areas generally provide superior educational facilities, including schools and universities, which draw people seeking to enhance their education and career prospects.
• Better Lifestyle: Cities offer improved services such as hospitals and libraries and provide a vibrant lifestyle with abundant social and cultural opportunities.
• Migrants often move to unplanned areas due to the high cost of living in more established urban regions, resulting in numerous informal settlements, such as slums and unauthorized colonies, that lack essential amenities like clean water and sanitation.

What are the Challenges Related to Urban Development?

• For instance, flooding events in Delhi (2024 & 2023), Nagpur (September 2023), Bengaluru and Ahmedabad (2022), Chennai (November 2021), and Hyderabad (2020 and 2021), revealed severe infrastructure shortcomings and highlighted the urgent need for better flood management and urban planning.
• This trend, evident in Gurugram’s expansion, often leads to socioeconomic divides, environmental strain, and challenges in maintaining balanced urban growth and sustainability.
• Coordination issues between transit and city planning agencies result in inefficiencies, while rigid planning practices and cultural resistance hinder TOD.
• For example, there is a lack of coordination between transit agencies (like the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation) and city planning authorities (like the Delhi Development Authority). This results in disputes over revenue-sharing and inefficient TOD implementation.
• Traffic Congestion and Mobility Challenges : Rapid urbanisation, lack of transit options and an increase in private vehicles have caused severe traffic congestion, extending commute times and reducing productivity.
• For instance, the World Air Quality Report 2023 reveals that nine of the ten most polluted cities globally are in India and with Delhi emerging as the world's most polluted capital city for the fourth consecutive time.
• For example, Delhi experienced an extreme heatwave in May 2024, pushing the city's power demand to over 8,000 megawatts.
• For instance, Delhi water crisis in 2024 and Chennai's water crisis in 2019, forced residents to rely on water tankers and desalination plants, and Bengaluru's recent water issues, underscore the severity of the problem.
• This situation strains infrastructure, exacerbates poverty, and hampers planned development, affecting overall livability and social cohesion.
• The Central Pollution Control Board reports that Indian cities generate approximately 62 million tons of municipal solid waste annually, with only about 20% being processed or treated adequately.

How TOD Promotes Sustainable Urban Development?

• By prioritizing public transit and walkable designs, TOD reduces the reliance on private vehicles, thereby easing traffic flow and shortening commutes. This shift not only enhances mobility but also minimizes the environmental impact associated with vehicular emissions.
• This approach promotes the efficient use of land, reduces environmental degradation, and fosters vibrant, sustainable communities.
• By creating neighborhoods where residential, commercial, and recreational spaces are in close proximity, TOD counters the spread of low-density, car-dependent developments.
• This design supports a high quality of life, allowing residents to easily access workplaces, amenities, and recreational areas . The focus on walkability and mixed-use development contributes to a more engaging and healthier urban environment.
• Economically, TOD boosts local businesses, reduces transportation costs, and attracts investment, enhancing overall economic competitiveness. T his integrated approach to urban planning supports long-term sustainable development goals.

Examples of Successful TOD Implementation

• Around 15 cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Chennai etc have operational metro systems, with many more under construction or planned in other urban centers.
• For example,in 2005, a government task force developed the Integrated Transport Plan for NCR 2032, identifying a need for a RRTS to connect major cities in the Delhi NCR. It prioritized three corridors : Delhi-Meerut, Delhi-Panipat, and Delhi-Alwar.
• Mumbai: Lower Parel i n Mumbai has evolved into a TOD hub with high-rise residential and commercial buildings around local train stations, reflecting increased integration of transit and urban spaces.
• Noida's cycle zones: It features dedicated tracks, cycle-sharing programs, and integrated urban design to promote sustainable transport. By separating bike lanes from traffic, offering rental options, and enhancing safety with signage, these initiatives aim to reduce pollution, improve public health, and support a greener, more pedestrian-friendly city.
• For example: London, UK – Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) aims to reduce air pollution by restricting access to high-emission vehicles. The zone promotes the use of electric and hybrid vehicles and integrates well with public transit, supporting TOD by enhancing the environmental quality and encouraging sustainable transportation.
• Authorities buy land development rights before rail construction, sell them post-construction at higher prices, and use the revenue to finance transit operations.
• This model generates substantial income from property, reduces urban sprawl and pollution, and enhances ridership through increased density.

What are the Steps Taken for Urban Development?

• Also, central assistance of Rs 2.2 lakh cror e for urban housing over the next five years as well as an interest subsidy scheme to facilitate loans at affordable rates for urban housing works, was announced in the budget.
• It focuses on areas like water supply, sanitation, waste management, urban mobility, and e-governance.
• It aims to improve the quality of life in these cities through better amenities and infrastructure.
• The program includes credit-linked subsidies and partnerships with private developers to increase affordable housing stock.
• It includes constructing individual and community toilets, and implementing modern waste management practices.
• It includes projects like public Wi-Fi hotspots, digital delivery of government services , and encouraging cashless transactions to create 'smart' urban ecosystems.
• Scheme for Special Assistance to States for Capital Investment 2022-23 (Rs. 6000 Cr): It focuses on urban planning reforms including Modernization of Building Bylaws, Adoption of Transferable Development Rights (TDR), Implementation of Local Area Plans (LAP) and Town Planning Schemes (TPS), Implementation of Transit-oriented Development (TOD), Creation of Sponge Cities, Removing Taxation for running the Buses for Public Transport.
• Scheme for Special Assistance to States for Capital Investment 2023-24 (Rs. 15000 Cr): It emphasizes enhancing urban planning through human resource augmentation, town planning schemes, modernization of building bylaws, in-situ slum rehabilitation, TOD, and strengthening urban ecosystems.
• Articles 243Q and 243W: Grant powers to local governments (municipalities) for urban planning and development within their regions.
• 74 th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992: Granted constitutional status to urban local bodies and introduced Part IX-A to the Constitution.
• 12 th Schedule : Outlines the powers, authority, and responsibilities of municipalities.

What Other Measures can be Taken for Sustainable & Resilient Urban Development?

• This approach not only provides immediate financial resources but also supports long-term urban modernization and resilience.
• To maximize their impact, cities should enhance investor confidence through transparent processes and effective project management, ensuring that funds are used efficiently and lead to tangible benefits for residents.
• This means engaging diverse stakeholders and ensuring that development benefits all segments of society, fostering equitable growth and addressing disparities.
• For instance, Indore’s innovative waste management system utilizes smart bins and automated segregation to enhance efficiency.
• Similarly, integrating renewable energy technologies, such as solar power and wind turbines, can reduce cities' carbon footprints and enhance sustainability.
• This approach ensures that decisions are informed by accurate data, leading to more effective and efficient urban planning outcomes.
• This involvement helps align urban policies with community needs and priorities , enhancing the quality and responsiveness of urban services.
• Effective urban development requires a unified approach across agencies to address challenges and leverage resources efficiently.
• These initiatives aim to improve environmental resilience and sustainability within urban landscapes.
• Invest in robust cybersecurity measures to protect critical digital infrastructure from emerging threats.
• This will ensure that urbanization efforts are inclusive and address the diverse needs of urban populations.

Urbanization represents a critical juncture in global and national development, offering both opportunities and challenges. As cities grow and evolve, embracing comprehensive planning and reform is essential to ensure that urbanization contributes positively to economic prosperity and quality of life.

In India, initiatives like the Smart Cities Mission and AMRUT aim to address infrastructure deficits and enhance urban livability. However, effective implementation of transit-oriented development, better coordination among agencies, and modernization of planning practices are necessary to overcome obstacles. By focusing on sustainable growth, enhancing infrastructure, and improving governance, cities can harness the benefits of urbanization while mitigating its challenges, paving the way for a more inclusive and resilient urban future.

UPSC Civil Services Examination Previous Year Question (PYQ)

Q. With reference to the role of UN-Habitat in the United Nations programme working towards a better urban future, which of the statements is/are correct? (2017)

1. UN-Habitat has been mandated by the United Nations General Assembly to promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities to provide adequate shelter for all.

2. Its partners are either governments or local urban authorities only.

3. UN-Habitat contributes to the overall objective of the United Nations system to reduce poverty and to promote access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

Select the correct answer using the code given below:

(a) 1, 2 and 3

(b) 1 and 3 only

(c) 2 and 3 only

Q . The frequency of urban floods due to high intensity rainfall is increasing over the years. Discussing the reasons for urban floods, highlight the mechanisms for preparedness to reduce the risk during such events. (2016)