Small may be beautiful, but compact is a more achievable goal for cities

As the human race continues to hurtle towards #climate catastrophe, the calls to shrink our consumption get louder. But while smaller #cities would help, making them more #compact seems more achievable.

Just over 50 years ago the economist and statistician EF Schumacher warned in his book Small is Beautiful that gigantic man-made organisms such as cities would lead to the ongoing and harmful depletion of natural resources. Fearing future cities of 60 million or more, he said the “finest cities in history” had been very small by twentieth-century standards.

Since then, the growth of cities and the migration towards these urban centres has increased and perhaps accelerated. Over the last half century, the number of people living in cities has almost quadrupled from 1.19 billion in 1970 to 4.53 billion in 2022, according to the United Nations. Seven out of 10 people will live in cities by 2050.

This pace of growth has led to renewed calls to follow Schumacher’s thesis, but updated to make small be seen as cool, as Mark Cliffe, a visiting fellow at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, put it.

That is a strong argument but, while tackling over-sizing of homes, transport and food  may be achievable in the short and medium term, returning city sizes to a mediaeval European dimensions is unlikely any time soon.

The idea of halting the growth of cities — let alone them reversing them — seems highly unlikely as rising populations and the impacts of climate change that are already baked in, will lead to greater demand for expanded urban settlements as people migrate from vulnerable rural areas. According to the UN, there are already 33 10 million-plus cities (and five over 20 million). One forecast has 10 cities of more than 50 million people by 2070.

So, if cities are unlikely to get smaller, then they have to become better at ensuring they are liveable places. Or as Schumacher put it, to be more compact.

Popular engagement

There seems to be a growing acceptance that city dwellers need to consume less and pollute less. Writing 25 years ago, the German British urban ecologist Herbert Girardet built on Schumacher’s thinking to plot a route towards creating sustainable cities.

Technological advances, the rise in computing power, and the pandemic-inspired growth in working-from-home culture have changed how city dwellers behave over the last quarter-century. But some of his key concepts for building the three pillars of urban sustainability — socially just, economically viable and environmentally sustainable — remain valid.

For example, the increased efforts towards recycling and the emergence of electric cars are positive signs, although critics would say they only touch the edges of climate change mitigation. One of the key ingredients for Schumacher and which still carries weight is popular engagement in how cities are developed and operate.

Policymakers must work to deliver eco-friendly urban development by ensuring public participation in efforts to reduce consumption, increase waste recycling, push for eco-friendly building design, and both improve transport systems and reduce the need for travel. One idea was to create more “convivial cities” based around smaller urban villages, a concept that has become codified as the highly contested 15 minute city.

Cities are home to immense prosperity that can fund the innovation and ingenuity needed to make them more resilient and able to combat climate change.

Meanwhile wireless networks, 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial

intelligence (AI), and digital twins may offer the digital infrastructure to deliver advances in transport, energy efficiency, decarbonising buildings and connected lighting.

Sensors and devices that can collect data that can used to deliver real-time insights into the status of city infrastructure, operations, and services offer the potential to deliver better services that residents want.

However, this raises concerns over privacy and the primacy over some, well-educated groups over others. Again, citizens and communities must be able to interact with decision makers knowledge developers to ensure that they are not excluded – in other words to make a human smart city.

A successful and human-focused combination of environmentally focused policies, technological innovation and the thinking behind 15 minute cities present the opportunity to make cities more compact so that the same number of people can carry out their personal, family and business activities while using fewer resources.

The goal has to be to reduce the space cities take up, curb the volume of journeys travelled and minimise the impact of the transport methods to do them. Girardet summed up the idea of the compact city 25 years ago as offering a model of great significance for sustainable urban living. Creating vibrant, diverse, and secure urban spaces, rather than exacerbating sprawl and traffic, will demand greater cooperation among urban planners, architects, investors, and residents in shaping new city developments. They will be bottom-up, rather than to-down urban development.