Whether good or bad, sustainable cities agenda is finally driving the news

This week saw a dire warning from #city mayors about the threat from #climatechange and a report proclaiming five European cities as the most #sustainable in the world.  Both contains elements of their own truth but, more importantly, show that the focus is firmly on the need for cities to be viable — and must remain so.

An annual survey of leaders of the world’s largest cities delivered a gloomy warning.  More than four fifths (83 per cent) of the 1,131 cities reporting their environmental data through CDP-ICLEI Track in 2023 said they faced significant climate hazards. Over half of them (56 per cent) said they were already significantly impacted by these threats.

More than half of the reporting cities (58 per cent) said flooding was a hazard for their jurisdiction, making it the most widely reported danger affecting the world’s cities. This was followed by extreme heat (54 per cent of cities), drought (38 per cent), heavy rain (35 per cent) and the risk of wildfires (22 per cent).

Looking at the risk of flooding, the regions that saw this as most of a concern were North America and Europe where four out of five cities saw it as a hazard. Even larger numbers in those two regions also saw extreme heat as a hazard. Coming in the same week that saw flash floods in southern China, New Mexico and Kansas City, it seemed to echo the fear that the effects of the climate breakdown are devastating for cities and their residents.

It might seem incongruous to see in the same week that the annual Arcadis Index of Sustainable Cities had found that European cities dominate its overall ranking. Amsterdam topped the poll, following by its Dutch neighbour Rotterdam, with Copenhagen in Denmark and the German cities of Frankfurt and Munich taking third, fourth and fifth places, respectively.

This is, of course, a wholly different exercise from CDP’s, using measures under three categories of planet, people and profit that correspond to the pillars of environment, society and economy that the United Nations’ Habitat body set out some three decades ago. Its focus can be seen as being on liveability for certain classes of citizens with subcategories such as access to broadband and Wi-Fi and business infrastructure and ease of doing business. There is less attention on universal access to the services and to issue such as quality and availability of housing.

Nevertheless, the highly ranked cities have taken great strides to mitigate and adapt to climate change. For the first time, Arcadis included a new pillar of “progress” that measures cities’ evolution over the past decade that the survey has covered. The top five are all in the Global South, led by Jakarta in Indonesia, Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Chinese megacities of Chengdu, Wuhan and Guangzhou.

It also highlights cities with what it calls “sustained momentum” such as Rotterdam which came 10th in the Progress category thanks to its work on reducing air pollution and CO2 emissions, and handling waste management, and Amsterdam (11th) in light of its increase in the share of sustainable energy sources. It also calls out cities with “falling” momentum such as New York and Hong Kong where progress has slowed over the last decade and those “lacking” momentum that include many US cities such as Denver and Detroit.

North and South

This focus on the sustainability of cities is essential: more than half (56 per cent) of people live in cities, according to the World Bank — a total forecast to rise to seven out of 10 by 2020. City leaders and mayors need to both monitor and enhance their resilience against threats while at the same time focus on ensuring that the areas they govern are easy to live in.

A third survey emerged last week, an annual look by the European Commission at the quality of life in European cities including those in non-EU states such as the UK and Turkey. Perhaps unsurprisingly, especially against the backdrop of the Arcadis survey, the north-western Europe was host to the most content cities while the south-eastern quadrant was more malcontented.

While almost nine out of 10 people report to be satisfied with living in their city, levels of satisfaction have fallen compared with 2019. While much of that seems to be driven by greater levels of loneliness in the wake of the Covid-19 lockdowns, it points to work to be done in terms of increasing access to shared quality spaces such as libraries and community centres.

Of course, Europe is host to some of the most well-endowed cities when it comes to urban living and has substantial national and pan-European budgets. So the main challenge in terms of boosting urban sustainability will be in the Global South and especially in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and some Asia countries, where it will be harder to achieve.

Power to the (city) people: a post-election agenda for Britain

Despite all the rhetoric about cities being the economic unit of the future, many in the UK struggle to deliver #urban #sustainability because of a lack of money and power. City leaders should push for change under a new government.

When the concept of urban sustainability was being defined and refined four decades ago, the idea of effective governance was seen as essential to help politicians and citizens find the balance between the pillars of economic growth, environmental balance and social justice.

While 55% of the world's population lives in urban areas, that proportion is expected to increase to seven out of 10 people by 2050, making cities the main arena for delivering economic growth, mitigating climate change and ensuring higher standards of wellbeing.

The UK has taken some hesitant steps towards giving more powers to the leaders of major urban areas. Its recent model began with the creation of the London mayoralty in 2000 and extended under subsequent governments so that, in 2024, voting took place for 10 metro mayors across England, who would collectively control some £25 billion of public spending.

But beneath the surface, many urban local authorities are under intense financial pressures. Twelve councils have issued section 114 notices — the local government version of bankruptcy — since 2018, compared with just two in the preceding 30 years since the mechanism was created in 1988. Until the notice is lifted, the council cannot make new spending commitments or spend money on things it is not legally required to provide.

The political control of the affected councils is split with Slough run by the Conservatives, Woking by the LibDems and Nottingham by Labour, for example, making claims of political mismanagement highly tenuous. The pressure derives from the position of relative impotence that councils hold in the British system.

When the Conservative-led coalition came into power during the global financial crisis in 2020, the austerity programme it imposed fell most heavily on local government. Westminster cut its funding for councils by 46% with councils in the North and London relatively hard hit.

Some councils attempted to offset the impact by investing in projects that would aim to deliver returns over the long term, but which failed. Nottingham was hit when its council-owned energy firm, Robin Hood Energy, collapsed. Woking and Thurrock invested in commercial property schemes. The exception is Birmingham whose financial crisis is primarily due to a £760 million claim for pay discrimination.

New urban agenda

Leaving aside financial mishaps, city leaders that want to raise money to spend to improve sustainability are very limited. Outside central government grants and investment income, their main source of revenue is from the council tax.

Councils can only raise council tax bills by up to 4.99 per cent without triggering the need for a referendum. And since the council tax bands that determine the level of tax within a council area have not changed since 1991, the burden is often shared inequitably.

Any hope that this week’s General Election might lead to major reform were dashed at the BBC’s televised debate between the two main party leaders, Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer. Sunak mentioned his offer of family hubs and £500 million in additional funding for councils for financial year 2024/25 — something a majority of council leaders said would still require savings to be made. Starmer said that under his watch councils would receive three-year rather than annual settlements but conceded that the gain was to be able to manage the existing funds over a long-term period rather than receive higher levels of cash.

The calls for urgent reform are getting shriller. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that the outgoing government’s plans for 2025–26 onwards imply that “unprotected” spending that includes councils could see cuts averaging 2 per cent to 3.5 per cent in real terms per year.

A committee of MPs in February called for “fundamental review” of the systems of local authority funding, local taxation and delivery of services. Options included land value taxes and wider fiscal devolution, neither of which are on the agenda.

One of the more far-reaching proposals came from the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown who chaired the Commission on the UK’s Future. Billed as offering a “fresh start”, it highlighted some structural reforms that future governments should take rather than focusing on the minutiae of grant allocations within the current system.

Two recommendations stand out from an urban perspective. One is to set a legal requirement that decisions be taken “as close as meaningfully and practicably possible” to the people affected by them, which it says will put power and opportunity closer to each citizen. The second is to a constitutional requirement that the political, administrative and financial autonomy of local government should be “respected” by central government.

Moving powers closer to where policy is made is undoubtedly critical to getting city and regional policy right in Britain, as the Institute for Government said in its assessment. Wider and more imaginative thinking will be needed to ensure that city and urban regional leaders have the power and resources to take the decisions rather than having them imposed from an often distant and sometimes hostile central government.

Electoral backlash against ‘green’ cities is a reminder to do good, but do it better

Green political parties got a hammering in the European elections in June and may suffer the same fate in the 4 July UK poll. Lessons need to be learned to ensure it does not become a setback for the wider #sustainable #cities agenda.

Former Irish Green MEP Ciarán Cuffe lost his seat in the European Parliament in the June elections after his first five-year stint. “I didn't make it through so I'm still kind of reeling from the shock of that,” he told an event at the LSE’s power and politics festival.

From that perspective the election can rightly be classed as a disaster with the outcome showing green parties losing 21 seats to be left with 51 out of 720 seats, making it the sixth largest of the nine main blocs in the parliament (down for fourth previously). The question for supporters of measures to mitigate the climate emergency across Europe is whether that is a verdict on that agenda or is driven by other factors.

Parties of both the centre-left and centre-right have pushed through climate-focused urban policies across Europe. But the hit the greens took in the polling booth can be taken as a proxy for a negative verdict.

Cuffe and Jean-Louis Missika, Deputy Mayor of Paris responsible for a host of measures including urban planning, both identified three polices that had fuelled wider opposition to the urban green agenda. For Cuffe, measures to restrict cars in Dublin had led to the perception that motorists were being punished just at a time when they were feeling the impact of the cost of living crisis. The benefits were overlooked.

His other two factors were national rather than urban: the increase in fuel and energy costs due to the war in Ukraine and rises in building costs that were due to supply chain issues over Covid-19 but were seen as part of green regulations. “The facts and the benefits tend not to be talked about,” he said. “Looking at the voters, I think [they] are change averse.”

For Missaka, his triple whammy was the expansion of low emission zones (LEZ) in cities, rent caps in homes with the poorest energy efficiency ratings (known in France as "thermal sieves”), and rules limiting the urbanisation of natural, agricultural and forested areas (known as artificialisation).

Each initiative had a long phase-in period which initially made the issue abstract. But as the deadline neared, opposition coalesced. Owners of older vehicles protected the LEZs; landlords sold up rather than pay for insulation; and the real estate industry decided that the artificialisation law would undermine its market model by restricting its options for new buildings.

London does not quite fit into this pattern as Labour mayor Sadiq Khan was re-elected on 2 May for a second time with a larger majority despite an intense debate over whether the extension of the ULEZ emissions zone prevented the Labour party from retaking the Tory seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip on the capital’s northwestern edge.

Former London Deputy Mayor Shirley Rodrigues, and now vice president of the board of the C40 Cities group, echoed Missaka citing the cost of living, misinformation and disinformation, and “just a general feeling that people's incomes were being hammered and the issue of choice — you're taking away my choice, there isn't an alternative”.

With a centre-right EU legislature with a strong hard right opposition on one side of the Channel, the threat of the far right taking control of France, and an expected majority Labour government in the UK with a mandate for moderate action on climate change, the question is what advocates of urban sustainability can and should do.

Four lessons

The debate at the LSE event discussed several options, of which four stood out. First, advocates need to get better at communication, especially by engaging those likely to find themselves affected. In other words, don’t wait for the critics to find their cause.

Second, and related to the first point, is the better use of representatives of key stakeholder groups such as mothers of young children, doctors and local businesses who can highlight the benefits of change more effectively than politicians or officials.

Third, there needs to be a push not just for a transition towards greener cities but what academics call a “just transition” that ensures the benefits are shared and that any losers are supported with swift and sufficient financial payments. Fourth, focus on the measures that are being put in place rather than being distracted by debates about future plans.

Advocates of urban sustainability have been given a sharp shock, and there may be more to come depending on the outcomes of the French and British elections. The green transition has run into obstacles and the reaction must be to work out how to more effectively organise and communicate future policies better. A majority of European voters want action on climate change: politicians must do good but do it better.