Defining a sustainable city is tricky…but important

Although it is a simple question, to ask “what is a sustainable city” will likely prompt a response reminiscent of Bill Clinton. What do you mean by sustainable? And what do you mean by city? Frustrating as it is, these definitions are vital to delivering on the agenda of progressive urban development.

It seems that everything is “sustainable” these days. Clothing, furniture, jobs, electronics, energy —and of course cities —can be dropped into the sustainable basket as if that gives it a premier aroma. But what does it mean?

My admittedly ageing Chambers Dictionary from 1998 gives the definition as “involving the long-term use of resources that do not damage the environment”, which gives it both a green tinge and a pointer towards future-facing obligations.

But how does one apply that to cities? Some 35 years ago, the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development that was brough together amid a growing “concern for the environment”, issues a decent first version,

The document, also known as the Brundtland report after its chairman, then Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, defined it as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Thos focus on need reflecting a concern primarily about poverty in what was then known as the “third world”.

Given that the focus of the report was the integration of economic, social, and environmental concerns together with the awareness that urbanisation was set to accelerate particularly in the Global South, that cities would and should become the focus of sustainable development initiatives.

After much debate in academic the Rio Declaration of 1992 which was part of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, that integrated the three pillars of sustainability, economic, social, environmental, with the idea of governability.

This effectively means fostering urban planning and environmental management, which includes the reduction of ecological footprint, and the decentralization of decision-making and resource allocation, as well as enhanced policy coordination between local and national authorities. In other words, goals for what should be achieved but also how to go about it.

The next challenge is to decide what a city is. For people in the UK, there is an easy — albeit odd — definition, which is any city with a cathedral or university and any town bestowed with city status by the Crown. This means Ely (population 19,189) is a city, but Dudley in the West Midlands (320,320) is not.

In the US anything can be a city, as Tina Turner’s song Nutbush City Limits about an incorporated community in Tennessee with a population of 259 people shows. In Zambia, urban areas refer to the calendar of 5,000 people, while India’s 2011 census showed that the rural population counts for 69% and the urban population 31%.

Clearly administrative boundaries will not help. That is also true for another reason, that the environmental impact of a city does not stop at its edge. As Hugo Lefebvre, the French sociologist said in his book The Urban Revolution, the city is an inappropriate scale to think about urbanization because the urban fabric and the urban logic expands beyond the boundaries of the city as a kind of administrative entity.

One obvious example is that a city will effectively import environmentally harmful activities through the amount of goods produced from elsewhere in the country or from other countries.

This concept has become codified by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol that defines corporate emissions as Scope, 1,2 and 3 with the last of those covering their entire value chain both upstream and downstream. According to carboncityfootprints.info, for large and high-income cities, their total Scope 3 footprint is much larger than the city's direct emissions.

Decades of academic research and input from conferences coordinated by the United Nations means that we have working definitions for sustainability and how cities should be seen in that debate. But that is just the starting point for a wider debate about what policies should be put in place to foster urban sustainability, who will pay for those investments, and how we can measure the results. All subjects for future blogs.