Sustainability must be built into the reconstruction of Ukraine and Gaza City

The destruction inflicted on Ukraine and Gaza City is devastating, making it hard to imagine a time when they will be rebuilt and return to their roles as major urban centres. But history shows that renaissance is inevitable. This will give an opportunity to ensure they are renovated with sustainability built in.

Since 24 February 2022 Ukraine has been hit by repeated aerial attacks. The assault against Hamas in Gaza City is much more short-lived, starting on 7 October 2023, but the airstrikes have caused massive damage to the infrastructure while many residents have fled to the south of the Gaza Strip.

The history behind both conflicts and the debate over the rights and wrongs are complex and have been discussed in great detail elsewhere. This blog is about urban sustainability and will not look at the political, diplomatic or military issues. If you were expecting that, or are offended it is not covered, please click away.

Since the invention of airborne ordnance, military conflicts have often resulted in the destruction of the infrastructure of the combatants’ major cities. The most obvious example is the Second World War that saw a host of cities in the United Kingdom — London, Coventry and Bristol, for example — and Germany — Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg — suffer devastating damage from aerial bombardment.

The conflict culminated in the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Since then, conflicts have seen heavy damage to cities across the world such as Mali in Timbuktu, Mostar in Bosnia and Mosul in Iraq. But in all cases they have been rebuilt — as will happen in Ukraine and Gaza.

The way reconstruction is carried out reflects the contemporaneous thinking about architecture and planning. This partly explains why many British cities were rebuilt around cars, a practice ended by a popular rebellion against a motorway-box planned for London.

Opportunity for new thinking

This time, planners have an opportunity to ensure Ukraine and Gaza City can leapfrog cities whose structures were based on now-outdated thinking, by delivering urban sustainability, “green” transport and energy efficiency that will ensure they will find new lives as “smart” cities.

These rebuilt cities must be severed from previous dependence on fossil fuels and established as green, carbon-neutral urban economies. This will require major investment in renewable sources of energy to power households, business, industry and transport.

The transport network should also be designed to be inclusive of all areas of the city and all users, especially the elderly and disabled and particularly people with injuries from the conflict. It should also adopt smart technology such as card payment and easy-to-find navigation tools. At all costs, avoid building in a dependence on cars.

Reconstruction must embrace the digital economy — or inject that if it did not exist before — ensuring technology such as internet access, remote sensors, artificial intelligence and smart management networks are readily available and affordable.

The final ingredient for a post-war sustainable city is to improve — or more likely create — green spaces by encouraging tree coverage and natural plants to reduce pollution and improve air quality and the environment.

Get the urban political ecology right

While it is essential planners seize the opportunity to build sustainability into reconstruction, they must also realise this is not just a technical exercise but one that requires getting the urban political ecology right — in other words that citizens contribute to and so buy into the result.

This means the system of rebuilding is well governed. There can be no space for corruption, or even perceptions of it, as that will undermine people’s confidence that the rebuilding is for the greater good. A Smart City must have Smart Government.

Of course, the institutions that provide the funding are likely to have an influence on the design and the outcome, and in a post-war environment this might be contested. An example is Berlin where the divisions of the city saw the quarters under the control of the western Allies veer towards preservation while East Berlin under Soviet control was more focused on modernity.

It is therefore important that reconstruction plans both include views of various stakeholders and that their final form is the result of a public debate. This will avoid any feeling by certain groups that they have been ignored. One method of helping to deliver that is to collect maps and documents that planners can use as they get to work.

This can help demonstrate how new buildings fit in with previous patterns. It will also enable brick-by-brick reconstruction, if wanted, as took place in Warsaw’s historic centre — although nowadays that work would have incorporated more thinking on minimal impact, climate resilience and more equitable cities.

A fascinating essay on the rebuilding of Mosul in Iraq after the US-led invasion overthrew Saddam Hussein shows that key ingredients for its success were preserving heritage buildings and recreating them in their original style, swiftly linking all parts of the city via rebuilt roads and bridges, and working around the natural infrastructure of its land and waterways.

Although Ukraine and Gaza are still mired in conflict, that will end. At that point policymakers can deliver cities that can leapfrog to greener technologies, reduce dependence on fossil fuels and aim for a zero-emission economy to combat that global conflict — climate change.

Cities need to drive a hard bargain with the most polluting cars

Given that air pollution is one of the main factors that make city life unsustainable (as highlighted by last week’s post on Ulez), finding a way to mitigate it is vital. But since much of the pollution comes from motorists commuting into cities, they should be a target. But clamping down on that is hard — as Paris may find out.

The combatant Parisian Mayor Anne Hidalgo, fresh from her victory in a referendum to ban self-service rental e-scooters from the French capital’s streets, plans to hold a vote on hiking parking fees for sports utility vehicles (SUVs).

In a post on Twitter, now X, Hidalgo said that there were too many large polluting cars, which were “taking up more and more space in our streets, on our sidewalks or even on our cycle paths”.

To counter this, she will impose “significant increases” in non-residential parking charges. Based on the e-scooter poll that was backed by 90% of 103,000 Parisians, she will win a referendum scheduled for February.

But as the BBC’s Hugh Schofield has pointed out, ownership of SUVs is relatively low inside the capital's 20 districts or arrondissements where opposition will be minimal. The drivers who will therefore be hit by higher parking fees will those living in Paris’s suburbs and outlying towns who drive their SUVs into Paris for work or pleasure. And they, of course, cannot vote.

Meanwhile another French city, Lyon, will actually become the first city to do this. Unlike Paris, Lyon will charge all drivers, both residents and motorists. But it has imposed a charge scale linked to emissions. While low-income households and owners of electric vehicles and cars weighing less than 1,000 kg (a Renault Twingo weighs 854kg, to give some idea of scale) will pay €15 a month, those owning cars of 1,725kg or more will pay €45.

This is important as SUVs have on average 20% higher CO2 emissions than conventional cars due primarily to their greater mass, says climate campaign group Possible. And their numbers are growing.

According to the International Energy Agency, while total cars sales fell 0.5% SUV sales increased by around 3%. In 2022, a year when SUVs accounted for around 46% of global car sales, CO2 emissions from the 330 million SUVs worldwide reached almost 1 billion tonnes.

Unsurprisingly, hostility is rising especially in Europe, which makes SUVs fair political game. This has been evidenced by groups of night-time saboteurs who use a cunning trick with a lentil to deflate the tyres of these gas guzzlers in New York City, and British cities.

In the UK, The London Borough of Camden is matching Paris, with a proposal to raise the cost of parking for residents’ annual permits 5% next year to £559 verses £45 for a zero emissions car, while doubling on-street parking fees.

EVs must be cheaper to buy as well as run

But, of course, individual cities putting up financial barriers to SUVS is not enough, for two reasons. The first is that, as Possible explains, the historic link between low incomes and polluting cars has now been reversed.

The drivers of high price-tagged, heavily emitting vehicles currently come from wealthier households. One in three new cars bought in London boroughs such as Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea, and Hammersmith & Fulham are large SUVs, while sales of electric vehicles remain lower than those of super-heavy-emitting new cars.

For those owners an increase in congestion charges or parking fees will be easily absorbed.

Secondly, moves that apply to cars driving within a city’s limits may not have much impact on overall regional levels of pollution. In other words, the pollution may be displaced (assuming that some drivers stop commuting in). Unless a city can form an alliance with its neighbouring boroughs — which is unlikely if they come from different political parties — the impact will simply be to displace that total stock of pollution.

That means tougher action will be needed. Rather than base charges on the type of vehicle and its weight, commuting and parking charges should be linked to the amount of carbon emitted by the vehicle. That would make the cost of running polluting vehicles more punitive.

This will help offset the fact that EVs tend to cost more per type of vehicle than conventional models. The US Department of Energy has highlighted research showing that maintenance costs for a light-duty, battery-powered car are around 40% less per mile than for a petrol- and diesel-powered car.

Analysis by the US Environmental Defense Fund showed that EVs could provide lifetime cost savings of up to $18,440. Those savings will increase over time as battery prices continue to fall and production increases, it said.

The price of EVs will hopefully fall as demand rises and the technology behind their batteries, the most important component falls (the price of lithium-ion batteries has already fallen by 97% since 1991.

In the meantime, subsidies to cover the upfront cost would help. Again, it seems to be the French pointing the way. A year ago, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a new scheme for electric vehicle subsidies, prioritising lower-income households. Paris, Lyon and Camden have taken steps in the right direction, but to effectively reduce the impact of carbon air pollutions accelerated action is needed.

Urban political tensions can undermine efforts to build sustainable cities

Abraham Lincoln famously said that in politics you cannot please all the people all the time. That wise maxim also applies to the task of creating a sustainable city, as the recent protests over the Ulez emissions zone in London have shown.

That ambition is certainly no easy task. Policymakers have to work hard to ensure they deliver on climate change (environmental sustainability), maintain levels of economic growth (economic sustainability) and ensure that all sections of the city share in that progress (social sustainability).

This balance between the three pillars of sustainability — that are also known within the investment community as ESG — were originally set out 35 years ago in the so-called Brundtland Report, is hard to maintain.

While Western city-dwellers tend to hold high levels of support for initiatives aimed at curbing environmental ills such as air pollution, traffic congestion, and noise — 45% of Londoners are “very concerned” by climate change versus 39% nationally — this can collide with wider economic and social goals.

This was thrown into sharp relief by the recent argument about the extension of London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s ultra low emissions zone (Ulez) to outer boroughs of the city., By reducing the number of vehicles in London that do not meet emissions standards, the policy aims to improve air quality..

Support for this type of measure was undoubtedly boosted by the death in 2013 of nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah and the historic ruling by a coroner in 2020 that air pollution was a cause of her death. She had lived within 30 metres of London’s south circular road. Her mother Rosamund has campaigned for cleaner air in UK cities since Ella’s death and is a strong supporter of the Ulez expansion.

The creation of the initial zone in central London and its expansion up to the north and south circular roads went ahead without much of a fuss. However, the extension to the outer London boroughs meant that it affected areas with fewer public transport links and whose workers tended to use vehicles for business.

POLITICAL PAIN

This came to a head in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election in outer west London caused by former prime minister Boris Johnson’s resignation as MP. The Tories put their success in retaining the seat in the face a Labour campaign down to drivers’ opposition to Ulez.

It’s hard to know how true that was and much of the heat has gone out of the debate. Three months after the by-election, Khan was able to announce the number of the most polluting vehicles driven in London had fallen by almost half since Ulez was expanded, taking almost 80,000 older cars off the roads. Environmental goal achieved, perhaps.

The impact on the social pillar??? is less clear. On the one hand, millions of Londoners will get getting better air quality as a result. This may be too late to help the Kissi-Debrah family but will benefit thousands of generations of the capital’s children.

On the other hand, it will impose a cost of people who need their car and who cannot afford to upgrade. Ms Kissi-Debrah herself has expressed concerns about the impact on poorer people, saying it is “not right” that late-shift care workers on lower wages may have to pay Ulez twice.

To be fair, the London Mayor tried to pre-empt this concern by offering a scrappage scheme of £2,000 to car drivers who receive one of a series of benefits and expanded that after the Uxbridge election to everyone in the city with a non-compliant vehicle.

The reforms also addressed the economic pillar by expanding the payments to sole traders and microbusinesses to replace up to three vans from £5,000 to £7,000 each, and for replacing a minibus from £7,000.to £9,000? It went down?

GET GOVERNANCE RIGHT

The row highlights a hidden but perhaps more important issue: governance. Academic research has shown how easy it for those pillars to get out of balance. Austin in Texas pushed through city redevelopments that delivered strong growth and helped it top a series of environmental league tables, but at the expense of vulnerable communities such as working class households, Africa-American communities, and the homeless who found themselves having to move on from their regenerated — and now gentrified — neighbourhoods.

In the German city of Freiburg, one of the most lauded sustainable cities, a programme of environmental measures pursued since the 1970s has delivered a cleaner and more prosperous city. But without much of a social housing programme, working families found themselves increasingly priced out of the city and forced to move to outlying suburbs, from which they had to commute in for the jobs that Freiburg offers.

The problem was that Freiburg put together a robust sustainability programme but, because of weak regional governance, was not able to ensure neighbouring regions signed up or indeed were prepared to cooperate over dealing with the consequences.

There are two lessons here, both of which come down to municipal governance. The first is to ensure that the views of all parts of the urban population are accommodated at the outset. To be fair, the Ulez plan did do that but not with enough oomph, this the need to improve it later.

The second is that it is hard to design a sustainability programme for a city on its own as environmental, economic and social impacts do not stop at an urban (it might not have been randomly drawn) boundary. A city’s ability to cooperate with its neighbours will depend on the powers it has been given by the national government.

While it may be impossible to please everyone all the time, city policymakers must realise that in order to delivers sustainability they should at least try to not actively displease anyone.