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.