A new urban paradigm pathways to sustainable development

“
Both devolution
and global urban
empowerment are
fact rather than theory,
although the pace of
change needs to be
accelerated.
Photo: Breno Pataro/PBH. Work realised through participatory budgeting, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2008
.
The evidence is already in, as seen in
the work being achieved by such urban
networks as ICLEI and the C40 Climate
Cities. Indeed, cities will be the key to the
success or failure of the Paris agreement.
Unless its modest goals are exceeded
by the hard cooperative work of cities,
humanity will face a devastating rise in
sea levels of up to 6 metres by the end
of the century, inundating many great
coastal cities around the world, including
New York, Miami, New Orleans, London,
Venice, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Sydney,
among many others. As always, wealthy
people will move, while poor people will
be forced, by way of no viable alternative
options, to stay in place and suffer
the consequences.
Both devolution and global urban
empowerment are fact rather than theory,
although the pace of change needs to be
accelerated. The leadership of mayors in
addressing the real problems of citizens
from climate change, education and
inequality to transportation, pandemic
diseases and security has inspired trust
by citizens in local governments that is
more than double that of their trust in
national politicians. On average, only a
third of citizens around the world say
they trust their national governments,
while two thirds or more trust mayors
and other local officials. And cities are not
only cooperating within nations through
associations such as the National League
of Cities and the US Conference of Mayors
in the USA, the Mexican Association
of Mayors, the Austrian Municipal
Association or the National Confederation
of Municipalities (Confederação Nacional
de Municípios—CNM) in Brazil, but they
are also collaborating across borders in
successful global urban networks which
go far beyond the beguiling but modest
sister cities programme. These global
networks embrace not only the climate
networks noted above (the environmental
collective ICLEI and the C40 Climate Cities
founded by former Mayors Livingstone of
London and Bloomberg of New York) but
also institutions such as United Cities and
Local Government (UCLG), the Hiroshimabased
Mayors for Peace, the European
Forum on Urban Security (EFUS), Strong
Cities, EuroCities, Metropolis, the Compact
of Mayors and the cities collective offering
refuge to artists called ICORN. The UN-
Habitat programme convened its third
world meeting of cities this year (Habitat
III). In other words, it is not just that cities
can collaborate, they do.
Moreover, even as citizens have grown
cynical and resentful towards national
governments, as democratic participation
erodes, democracy remains relatively robust
at the municipal level. Even larger cities such
as New York and Paris have borrowed the
innovations of ‘participatory budgeting’ and
‘participatory zoning’ from Latin America,
where experiments that brought citizens into
budget decisions and gave them authority
to expend funds and pass on zoning
regulations were pioneered in the era of the
Porto Alegre anti-globalisation meetings
at the beginning of the past decade. More
than 300 cities around the world now invite
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