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6 Conclusions
Cities are where some of the world’s most pressing
challenges are concentrated: unsustainable resource
and energy consumption, carbon emissions, pollution,
and health hazards. But cities are also where hope is.
They are magnets attracting hundreds of millions of
rural migrants in search for economic opportunities.
The net effect of urbanisation on poverty reduction
has been effective at the global level. Although
urbanisation has been accompanied by increased
pressure on the urban environment and the
increase of the urban poor, these problems are not
insurmountable.
As the nations of the world explore more sustainable
development trajectories, this report argues that
cities can and should play a leading role in greening
economies – in both developed and developing
countries. There are clear opportunities for national
and city leaders to exploit urban areas to reduce
carbon emissions and pollution, enhance ecosystem’s
and minimise environmental risks.
Greening cities can also produce a set of wider
economic and social benefits. First, as well as lowering
per capita carbon emissions, densification as a central
green city strategy tends to enhance productivity,
promote innovation, and reduce the capital and
operating cost of infrastructure. Densification can also
raise congestion and the local cost of living, but green
city strategies and interventions to subsidise housing
costs can help to mitigate these.
Second, in most countries cities will be important sites
for the emerging green economy. Cities’ basic ‘offer’
of proximity, density and variety delivers productivity
benefits for firms, and helps stimulate innovation and
new job creation – for example in high-tech clusters,
as are already emerging in urban regions like Silicon
Valley. Much of the green economy is service-based,
and will tend to cluster in urban areas where consumer
markets are largest.
Third, social considerations can be fully integrated
into the design of green cities. An emphasis on public
transport, cycling, and “walkability”, for example,
not only contributes to road safety and community
cohesion but also works in favour of the urban low
income class who rely on these transport modes
much more than other segments of society. The
consequently improved access to jobs, education and
medical facilities, clean energy, safe drinking water,
and sanitation may hold the key to lifting the urban
poor out of poverty altogether.
Greening cities is not cost free. There are tradeoffs
and switching costs, creating both winners and losers.
Consumer preferences are not always green. Cities may
face financial, structural and technological constraints.
And fragmented governance may lead to perverse
outcomes of policy, if action is not carefully joined up
between different spatial levels. The “rebound effect”,
where energy-saving innovations actually raise total
energy consumption, illustrates how many of these
issues come together.
These factors suggest it is critical to look at both
national and urban policy levers; and at the conditions
that will enable cities in different parts of the world
to make the transition to green economy models. In
practice, green cities will require a coalition of actors
across public, private and civil society sectors – and
multilevel governance models that allow these actors
to come together effectively.
Numerous instruments for enabling green cities
are available and tested but need to be applied in
a tailored, context-specific way. In contexts with
strong local government it is possible to envisage
a range of planning, regulatory, information and
financing instruments to advance green infrastructure
investments, green economic development and a
multitrack approach to greater urban sustainability.
City governments need to coordinate policies and
decisions with other levels of the government, but
more importantly, they need to be equipped with
strategic and integrated planning capacities, including
the capacities to choose regulatory tools and economic
incentives to achieve locally appropriate green city
objectives.
In poorer cities, the building up of such capacities is
important, as is their access to financial resources for
investing in the various sectors of green cities. Here
it may be more prudent to adopt a more pragmatic
and minimalist approach, which primarily commits
municipal sectors such as water, waste, energy
and transport to a limited number of over-arching
strategic goals. These are the major areas where the
support from national governments and international
organisations is needed.
Cities
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