Cities and sustainable development
Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals
Tacloban in the Philippines has now joined the growing list of
cities - including New Orleans, Bangkok, Moscow, New York, Beijing,
Rio de Janeiro, and Port-au-Prince, to name just a few - pummeled
in recent years by climate catastrophes. Many of the world's
largest cities, built on seacoasts and rivers, face the threat of
rising sea levels and intensifying storms. So the new global
development agenda now taking shape should empower cities to help
lead the way to sustainable development in the twenty-first
century.
The importance of cities in today's world economy is unprecedented.
Until the Industrial Revolution, human history was overwhelmingly
rural. Only around 10% of people lived in cities. Today, the share
of urbanites is around 53% and is likely to rise to around 67% by
2050.
Because per capita incomes are higher in cities than in rural
areas, the world's cities today are estimated to account for more
than 80% of global income, with the largest 600 accounting for
around half. Most of the new jobs over the next few decades will be
created in cities, offering livelihoods to hundreds of millions of
young people and, as China and Brazil have demonstrated, helping to
slash extreme poverty.
Cities are also the innovation hubs for public policy. Every day,
mayors are called on to get the job done for residents. They are
the ones responsible for providing safe water, garbage collection,
safe housing, infrastructure, upgraded slums, protection from
disasters, and emergency services when catastrophes hit. So it is
not surprising that while national governments often are paralyzed
by partisan politics, city governments foster action and
innovation.
In the United States, for example, Martin O'Malley, Baltimore's
former mayor and now Maryland's popular governor, pioneered the use
of advanced information systems for urban management. New York
City's outgoing mayor, Michael Bloomberg, worked relentlessly to
implement a new sustainability plan (called PlaNYC). And the city's
incoming mayor, Bill de Blasio, is championing a bold program of
educational innovations to narrow the vast gaps in income, wealth,
and opportunity that divide the city.
Sustainable development offers a new concept for the world economy
in the twenty-first century. Rather than focusing solely on income,
sustainable development encourages cities, countries, and the world
to focus simultaneously on three goals: economic prosperity, social
inclusion, and environmental sustainability.
Economic prosperity speaks for itself. Social inclusion means that
all members of society - rich and poor, men and women, majority and
minority groups - should have equal rights and equal opportunities
to benefit from rising prosperity. And environmental sustainability
means that we must reorient our economies and technologies to
provide basic services like safe water and sanitation, combat
human-induced climate change, and protect biodiversity. Achieving
these three goals will require good governance, public finance, and
effective institutions.
Cities will be in the front lines of the battle for sustainable
development. Not only do they face direct threats; they also have
the best opportunities to identify and deliver solutions. As
high-density, high-productivity settlements, cities can provide
greater access to services of all kinds - including energy, water,
health, education, finance, media, transport, recycling, and
research - than can most rural areas. The great challenge for
cities is to provide this access inclusively and sustainably.
A significant part of the solution will come through advanced
technologies, including information systems and materials science.
The information and communications revolution has spawned the idea
of the "smart city," which places the relevant technologies at the
heart of systems that collect and respond to information: smart
power grids, smart transport networks (potentially including
self-driving vehicles), and smart buildings and zoning.
The advances in materials science open the possibility of much more
energy-efficient residences and commercial buildings. Cities also
give rise to the opportunity to combine public utilities, as when
urban power plants use the steam released in electricity generation
to provide hot water and heating to residents.
Yet technology will be only part of the story. Cities need to
upgrade their governance, to allow for a greater role for poorer
and more marginalized communities, and to enable much more
effective coordination across city lines when a metropolitan area
is home to many individual cities. Metropolitan governance is
therefore crucial, as smart cities require networks that operate at
the metropolitan scale.
When the metropolitan scale is recognized, the importance of
leading urban areas is even more remarkable. New York City has
around 8.4 million people, but the NYC metropolitan area has
roughly 25 million people, with an economy estimated at about $1.4
trillion per year. If this metropolitan area were a country, it
would rank about 14th in the world in GDP terms.
A wise political doctrine known as subsidiarity holds that
public-policy challenges should be assigned to the lowest level of
government able to address them, thereby ensuring maximum
democratic participation in problem solving and the greatest
opportunity to tailor solutions to genuine local needs. While some
issues - for example, a national highway or rail system - require
national-level problem solving, many key challenges of sustainable
development are best confronted at the urban level.
The world's governments are now negotiating the Sustainable
Development Goals, which will guide the world's development agenda
from 2015 to 2030. In an important meeting on September 25, the
United Nations General Assembly agreed that the SDGs would be
adopted at a global summit in September 2015, with the next two
years used to select the priorities.
An urban SDG, promoting inclusive, productive, and resilient
cities, would greatly empower tens of thousands of cities worldwide
to take up the cause of sustainable development for their own
citizens, their countries, and the world.
Copyright: Project Syndicate